Crimson Vows Story

The first time Elena saw Marcus Hale, he was standing under the rain with a cigarette between his fingers, watching a car burn on the side of a mountain road.

She should have kept driving.

Instead, she stopped.

"You okay?" she asked through the window.

He turned, surprised. Eyes like icewater. Calm. Too calm.

"Car caught fire," he said. "Engine failure."

She offered a ride. He accepted.

That night, they drank whiskey in her apartment and talked like old souls.

He said he was a writer. Lonely. Between lives.

She said she was a nurse. Tired of being invisible.

By the third night, they were tangled in her sheets, and she was convinced she'd found someone who saw her.

By the third week, she moved him in.

They were happy. Or, Elena thought so.

Then came the signs.

The locked drawer she wasn’t allowed to touch.

The phone calls he took outside.

The scratch on his shoulder he claimed came from a box.

The blood didn’t look like cardboard blood.

Still, she stayed.

Love made her patient. Desperate.

Until she found the envelope.

It was stuffed behind the radiator. A thick stack of cash, a foreign passport, and a photo of a man she didn’t recognize with Marcus's handwriting on the back: "Target. Pending."

Elena couldn’t sleep for three nights after that.

She pretended. Kissed him. Fed him. Laughed at his jokes.

But her hands shook when he touched her.

She began investigating.

The name on the passport was fake.

The man in the photo? A corporate whistleblower from out west. Found dead last year. Case still open.

Elena didn’t confront him. She wasn’t stupid.

She started planning.

She copied everything she found. Took photos. Saved them to an encrypted flash drive. Hid it in the base of a fake plant.

Her old friend Marco, a private investigator, helped quietly.

"He’s done this before," Marco said. "Multiple aliases. Disappears after each job."

"And me?" she asked.

"You're his next loose end."

She felt like screaming.

Instead, she smiled wider at breakfast. She made love to him harder. She learned his routines like a dance.

Until she found a plane ticket.

Two seats. One way. Rome.

Under her name and his.

"Surprise trip," he said, kissing her neck. "Honeymoon without the wedding."

She played along.

But now she had a deadline.

The night before their flight, she swapped out his painkillers with tranquilizers.

At midnight, he slumped into the couch.

She opened the locked drawer.

Inside: blueprints, burner phones, a list of names with red Xs.

Her name was last.

No X.

Not yet.

He woke up groggy.

"Where are we going?" he asked.

"Somewhere private," she said, driving him out of the city. "You said you wanted peace."

They arrived at her family’s old cabin by the lake.

He laughed. "You always had secrets."

"So did you."

She made tea.

He drank it.

He collapsed.

This time, she tied him up.

He awoke to candlelight. Her standing above him with his list in one hand and a kitchen knife in the other.

"You loved me," she said. "Didn't you?"

He blinked slowly. Smiled.

"I still do. That was never a lie."

"And this?"

She showed him the paper with her name on it.

He looked away.

"Collateral. They wanted you gone. You saw too much."

"I saw everything."

She pressed the blade to his cheek.

He didn’t flinch.

"You gonna kill me, Lena?"

"You were going to kill me."

"Not today."

She hesitated.

And that was enough.

He lunged, knocking her backward. The chair splintered. The knife clattered.

They struggled. Glass shattered. Blood spilled.

She grabbed the fireplace poker.

Swung.

Once. Twice.

Silence.

She stood over his body, shaking.

The firelight danced over his lifeless face.

She packed quickly. Burned everything.

Drove through the night.

By morning, she was on a bus to Montreal with dyed hair and a new passport.

Before crossing the border, she mailed the flash drive to a journalist friend.

She signed the note: "The dead don't lie. Check the names."

The news broke a week later.

The assassin known as "The Chameleon" was dead.

Killed by an unknown woman. Manhunt underway.

They never found her.

But in Florence, a quiet bookstore is run by a woman with kind eyes and a scar on her cheek.

She doesn’t speak of her past.

Only of love.

And of the taste of ashes it leaves behind.

Final Line:

Some vows are meant to burn.