69. NICE

                                    

                                          
A bloodstain bloomed like a rose in the center of her chest. 
I pulled the trigger.
She coughed up thick lumps of crimson, which spilled from her lips and splattered the ground.
I shot her.
"We'll have to work on your aim," Pablo sighed, as he pat me on the shoulder and picked the gun out of my trembling, sweaty fingers. "It's easier when you shoot them in the head."
Everything was shaking. My hands, my legs, my lips, each of the painful breaths I desperately tried to suck in.
Mafer wasn't dead yet. Her eyes were glazing over, but they were still staring at my feet. She retched and choked, as blood kept on seeping through her once-pristine apron. 
She didn't beg for forgiveness, not even for her life. She just looked him right in the eye, and told him she loved him.
I didn't think. When I heard those words, my whole body seized, my finger clenched around the trigger, and as fast as I blinked, the shot had been fired.
That's how I killed her.
Without a single thought. 
I stared at the man who had caused her betrayal. He was leaning against the tiles behind him, like a vine creeping up a wall. He was the root of all evil.
"Don't look at me like that," mumbled Pablo, shrugging off my deadly glare. "I don't know why she said it."
"Are you sure?" I asked him.
"Yeah," he replied. "I didn't even know her name until yesterday."
I pinched my lips to hold back whatever was coming out – a loud sob, a slew of insults, chunks of fruit from my sangria, or that unending scream I could already feel burning through my lungs.
Her shallow breaths had stopped now, and she was nothing but a heap on the floor, face down in a pool of her own blood that was still trickling down a drain. 
Pablo nonchalantly pushed her with the tip of his boot, and she slumped over to the side. The blood had started to dry at the corner of her open lips, and her neck was bent at a strange angle. Her brown eyes looked like opaque beads, as still as glass as they stared into the emptiness.
"How are you feeling?" he asked.
Terrible, really. My chest hurt like someone had just stomped on  my ribs. My head was spinning and my heart thumping like I was stuck in a falling elevator. My cheeks were so cold it felt as if they'd been bitten by frost.
Yet, I'd accomplished what I wanted. I had gotten rid of Mafer. The scream stuck in my chest felt more like a victorious war cry than a lamenting whimper.
"I don't know," I answered.
"The first kill hits the hardest," he sighed as he wrapped an arm around my shoulder. "You'll get used to it."
I shook my head. "There won't be another."
"Never say never," he whispered in my ear. "That's just how things go here. It's not all champagne and glitter, is it."
He softly kissed my temple, but the feeling lingered like he had branded it with a hot iron. 
I stared at her body for a long minute. My feet were still set in that awkward shooting stance. I hadn't moved since I'd shot her, besides from letting my arms dangle down the sides of my chest, which swayed back and forth with every deep breath.
There was a high-pitched ring in my ears, growing louder as Mafer's face drew more pale.
I could smell her perfume meddling with the pungent stench of lead and blood, like a vanilla cupcake lost in a battlefield.