Aimed at my heart - Chapter #2 - by Tessa Kelwyn

POV Mara

Sunday arrived with teeth, and I let it bite. The messages from Mare Nero pulsed on my screen like a heartbeat I couldn't ignore—each task a small death of the woman I'd imagined being yesterday.

I chose the Tribeca dealer like picking a scab—something that would hurt just enough to remind me who I really was.

By late afternoon, I was sliding through his building's glass door, timing my entry with a dog-walker's exit. The familiar numbness descended like armor, my body knowing this dance: invisible until the moment I became inevitable.

The elevator rose through floors of clean lives, and I caught my reflection fractured across mirrored walls—expensive athletic wear that belonged here, that hadn't just chosen violence over the dangerous possibility of feeling something real.

The dealer's lock whispered open to my picks, and I entered his temple of unearned privilege, all that glass and stone mocking me with its false sense of security.

I found him in his kitchen, uncorking wine that cost more than my father's monthly disability check.

The domestic tranquility made something savage rise in my chest—how dare he be happy, how dare he live without the weight that pressed against my ribs every morning.

"Three days," I said, tasting copper on my tongue.

He spun, face cycling through confusion, understanding, terror. "Listen, the supply chain's been—"

I crossed the space with the efficiency of someone who'd learned to make violence look like breathing.

The Beretta hung low in my hand, an extension of everything I'd become to keep my parents alive. When I shoved him against the marble island, bottles sang their fragile song.

"The math is simple," I said, voice flat as a flatline. "Three days, or you start losing pieces. Small ones first—cartilage, things you won't miss until you try to breathe through what used to be your nose."

His whimper when I pressed the gun behind his ear was so familiar it made me sick. The sound of men breaking, of my father that night at our kitchen table when he'd suggested selling his soul to Mare Nero.

I pushed the dealer's face to the counter and held him there, feeling his rabbit-quick pulse, remembering my mother's shaking hands when she'd said no, we'll find another way, knowing there was never another way.

"Please, I just need—"

"Three days," I repeated, then released him to prowl his shrine to wasted potential.

The Patek Philippe gleamed in its crystal tray like a promise that money could buy meaning.

I lifted it, let him see me weigh its worth against his life. "Collateral."

"You fucking bitch," he spat, finding courage in his designer kitchen. "You're nothing but a thug in designer clothes, a whore with a gun—"

My fist connected with his mouth before he could finish cataloging what he thought I was. The impact split my knuckles against his teeth, and I watched him crumple, spitting blood and expensive dental work onto marble that would stain.

The pain in my hand was clean, honest—nothing like the rot his words tried to plant in my chest.

On the street, I pitched the watch into a trash can without breaking stride. The point was never the money. It was the lesson: everything you love is just waiting to be taken by someone with less to lose.

Tribeca's rich blocks swallowed me whole, and I let myself drown in memory because it hurt less than hope. This dealer with his soft hands—I'd been him once, or close enough.

Senior year of high school, watching my father's heart fail him one skipped beat at a time. Still driving his garbage truck, grinding through routes while his chest tightened with pain he'd hide until he couldn't.

My mother pulled night shifts as a nurse, coming home to find him gray-faced at our kitchen table, pressing his fist against his sternum like he could hold his heart together through will alone.

The cardiac surgery that would save him—insurance called it "partially elective."

That night at our kitchen table, my father's voice hollow with shame: "I could ask the people who protect our routes. Mare Nero. They'd want something back, but a garbage man sees things, knows things..."

My mother's terror was immediate. "No, Frank. Please. We'll find another way—"

But I'd already seen the defeat in his eyes, already known that pride was a luxury we couldn't afford when his heart was counting down.

So I'd found the number myself, walked into that back office that smelled like cigars, and Mare Nero had accepted me because Frank hauled for the routes they protected, because a garbage man's daughter had value, because I had my father's stubbornness and my mother's ability to swallow screams.

Six months of dealing to private school kids who thought tragedy was when daddy's check was late.

Every gram I measured was another day my father's heart might hold. Every envelope I collected was another lie about the "tutoring" that suddenly paid so well—"These rich kids, they'll pay anything for someone who can explain calculus."

My mother wanted to believe it so desperately that she never questioned why my tutoring only happened at parties, why I came home at 3 AM smelling like privilege and pot smoke, why my eyes had started looking through people instead of at them.

The surgery saved Frank's body but broke him in ways medicine couldn't measure.

Complications leading to disability retirement, and the knowledge that settled between us like smoke—his teenage daughter had sold pieces of herself to save him.

When my mother's cancer came—stress-induced, the oncologist said—I was nineteen and out of options. Dealing wouldn't cover chemo and radiation.

So I'd walked back into Mare Nero's offices and asked what else they needed. That's when the training started: months of turning my body into a weapon that could earn real money.

My parents thought I'd found my calling in "private security," never questioning the bruises I explained as "self-defense certification."

The money flowed easier once I became an enforcer, my conscience callusing over like scar tissue. Two years of blood and threats, and my mother's cancer finally retreated into remission last month.

They were so proud of their daughter with her professional success, never asking why I flinched when they hugged me, never questioning why I kept a gun taped under my bed.

Blood caught the light on my knuckles, and the stain felt like truth showing through.

"Fuck," I hissed, ducking into the first café that demanded a trust fund for entry. My shoulder clipped someone at the door, and I was already apologizing when the universe revealed its cruelest joke.

"Didn't think I'd see you this soon."

Adrian. Standing there in clothes that whispered money, looking at me like I was something worth seeing twice.

His eyes found my hand before I could hide it, tracking the blood with recognition that wasn't quite civilian.

Something shifted in his expression—not fear but understanding, like he could read the violence written in that small red crescent.

"I—hi—sorry," I stammered, and the humiliation was immediate and scorching.

Twenty-two years old, Mare Nero's enforcer, reduced to stuttering because a beautiful man had caught me being exactly what I was.

The careful construction of yesterday—the woman who could laugh about art, who could kiss a stranger's cheek and mean it—crumbled under the weight of this moment.

He was really seeing me now, blood and all, and I wanted to run.

I wanted to press him against the wall until he forgot what he'd seen.

I wanted to explain that the blood meant nothing, that it was just business, that I was still the woman who'd let him steady her when she fell.

But mostly, pathetically, desperately, I wanted him to look at me the way he had yesterday—like I was Mara, just Mara, not a girl with violence under her fingernails and other people's fear as her only currency.