Chapter 5
545words
I slid photos of O'Brien and Rosa toward her, along with files on their associates—a gallery of Brooklyn's finest scum.
"These men all vanished right after what happened to your daughter." I locked eyes with her, searching for any fracture in her composure. "Coincidence?"
She glanced at the photos with the casual interest of someone browsing a takeout menu.
"When you run a shop on 8th Avenue, you see all kinds coming through your door." Her voice was flat, detached, as if narrating a stranger's biography. "If you want to find a few street thugs, you don't need badges. You have your own methods."
She began to talk—not because I'd broken her, but because she wanted me to hear.
"First was Kevin. The big one." Her description painted the scene with chilling clarity. She'd donned the delivery uniform, pulled the cap low over her face, and carried a steaming pizza box to Kevin O'Brien's door.
The door had swung open, belching out the reek of stale beer and cheap weed. Kevin stood shirtless, his beer gut hanging over his jeans. Seeing the delivery logo, he'd cursed impatiently, told her to hurry the fuck up.
He never suspected the "Chinese delivery girl" he was cursing had laced his supreme pizza with enough tranquilizer to drop a rhino. As she recounted this, the corner of her mouth twitched upward—not quite a smile, more like the release of long-held tension.
She'd watched him collapse, his massive frame hitting the floor with a dull thud. She hadn't rushed, hadn't even flinched. She'd simply dragged him into the wheeled garbage bin, covered him with black plastic, and rolled him out of the building like yesterday's trash. In the small hours of a New York night, nobody looks twice at someone disposing of garbage.
"I brought him back to my shop."
My throat constricted. "What did you do to him?"
She raised her eyes to mine, each word delivered with terrifying precision: "I deboned him. Like preparing beef. To extract the prime cuts."
Every muscle in my back seized, ice crawling up my spine.
"Over the next few days, I used the same method. Invited them back to my shop, one by one. They liked hunting in packs. I preferred making them vanish individually." She recited her crimes with the detachment of someone reading a grocery list.
As she spoke, her mechanical tone finally rippled with emotion—not fear, but raw grief.
"I was too hard on Amy." Her gaze drifted past me to some invisible point. "Always pushing—top grades, piano lessons, becoming what I wanted her to be. Every day wound tight as a spring. And I believed I was doing what was best."
Her confession and her vengeance were delivered in the same clinical tone. I wasn't facing a person anymore, but a revenge mechanism precision-engineered from grief and rage.
She paused, as if accessing a specific memory file.
"After finishing the second-to-last one, I returned to my shop. The kitchen light was on—I thought I'd forgotten it. But when I entered..." She hesitated. "Something moved behind the counter."
"Tony Rosa. He'd been hiding there, waiting for me."
