The van was quiet. Perhaps too quiet. I shut my head off the window, the cool wind blowing on my skin. The rhythmic thump of tires on asphalt was the only sound, a hypnotic countdown to a future I couldn't picture.
I watched the world blur past—gas stations, strip malls, the skeletal outlines of trees against a grey sky. America.
The country I was supposedly escaping. It looked different when you weren't planning on seeing it again. Each mile marker felt like a suture closing me off from my old life.
Mr. and Mrs. Phillips hadn't spoken since we'd pulled out of Sophia's driveway. The silence in the front seat wasn't companionable; it was a dense, humming thing, full of glances exchanged in the rearview mirror I wasn't meant to catch. Mrs. Phillips's knuckles were white where they gripped her purse.
Then a song began on the radio.
A sharp, digital beat punched through the silence. Then a voice, sleek and imperious as polished steel.
"Say I'm cold hearted but I'm just getting started... got my eyes on the... the target..."
My breath caught.
Royalty!
I knew this song. I'd heard it last year, leaking from a portable speaker in the staff closet. A girl from the business office was folding her gym clothes, humming along.
I'd been emptying the trash, my hands smelling of lemon bleach and regret. The sound had sliced through the fog of my own thoughts—a declaration of intent so foreign it felt like science fiction.
It was everything I wasn't: hard, wanting, certain. It spoke of targets and taking, of a world that knelt.
It didn't fit me. My life was a quiet room where the light was dying. I was built for silence, for endurance, for taking up less and less space.
Yet, I'd loved it. Secretly, fiercely. In that fluorescent-lit closet, for three minutes and twenty-two seconds, I had borrowed its certainty.
I had stood a little straighter, the plastic bin in my hands feeling less like a burden and more like a scepter in a different, braver story.
And now, here it was. Playing in the van of my great escape.
An absurd, aching soundtrack.
The chorus broke, clear and commanding over the worn speakers.
"Best to give me your loyalty. Cause I'm taking the world you'll see, you'll be calling me, calling me, you'll be calling me royalty."
A shiver, not from the cold air, traced my spine. My fingers, limp on my knees, tightened. I felt a ridiculous, defiant heat behind my eyes.
This was the beginning of my new life. It had to be. This wasn't a random song on a random station. This was a sign, a dark and glittering permission slip. For the length of this song, I was not a fugitive, a widow, a ghost.
I was someone with a target.
I was taking a world, even if that world was just the next unknown town, the next fake name, the next empty room I could claim as my own.
I let my head fall back against the seat. I didn't sing. I let the voice fill the hollowed-out spaces inside me. I let the bass vibrate in my chest, a second, stronger heartbeat.
I closed my eyes and for the duration of the chorus, I was in control. I was the one choosing to leave. I was the one who would make them all, one distant day, whisper my name with a kind of furious, helpless respect.
The final synth note faded, replaced by the bland voice of a radio host.
The spell snapped.
The last synth note was still hanging in the air when the van's sliding door was wrenched open from the outside.
The world flooded in—not with light, but with a different, colder kind of silence. The grey dusk framed two figures in dark jackets, their postures rigid and ready.
One of them, a woman with a stern, unreadable face, leaned in. Her words were clean, practiced, and they fell into the quiet van like stones into a still pond.
"Camilla Hart. You're under arrest for the murder of Mr. Charles Granger."
The second officer, a man with tired eyes, began reciting the words I'd only ever heard on television, his voice a flat, toneless stream.
"You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law..."
The rest of the Miranda warning blurred into a distant hum. I didn't look at the officers. I looked at the back of Mr. Phillips's head. He didn't turn. He stared straight ahead, as if by not seeing me, he could erase his part in this. Mrs. Phillips had begun to cry, soft, hiccupping sobs she tried to smother with her knuckles.
You'll be calling me royalty.
The ghost of the chorus echoed, a cruel and taunting punchline. The target had been me all along.
I was actually planning on starting a new life and this?
"Please step out of the vehicle."
My body moved, obeying the command before my mind could. My legs were numb. The cool air that had felt like freedom minutes before now bit into my skin.
As I stood on the asphalt, the woman officer took my wrist. Her grip was firm, impersonal. The metallic click of the handcuff was a sound more final than any door closing. The metal was shockingly cold, a brutal bracelet that chased away the last phantom warmth of the song.
This was the new life. Not a coronation. A processing.
I hadn't noticed when Mr. Phillips stepped out. The song had been a distraction.
The cold of the cuffs was the only real thing now, a truth biting into bone. Prison. Life. Directionless. The words were formless horrors.
It didn't kill him.
A name erupted from the chaos, a dark anchor in the spinning void.
The true target. The cause.
Lucian.
The man whose touch I could still feel on my skin.
Who had raped me… because I know myself—I wouldn't have let him. I'm sure he took advantage.
I was so messed up... drunk.
That rapist!
--------------------------------
To be continued...