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"Harry? Oh fuck, fuck, fuck!"

No, I was not Harry. However, the incompetent retriever in the car's driver seat did have enough intelligence to immediately reach for a weapon. Guessing instantly that it'd be a gun, I jumped forward onto the rough asphalt. Right under the passenger window.

Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang! The screeching rat-a-tat of an Uzi led to distant shouts and black dust clouds hitting the spot where I'd been earlier. A mere second between my drop and his action saved my life that night.

Three seconds to stop, it dawned on me. His eyes were closed! He's a fucking amateur!

Meanwhile, shuffling nearby led me to see a certain ocelot make a beeline across the street, his paws wrapped around a crumpled bag. He thought I'd stopped the gunfire.

The retriever muttered, "Gotcha now, you--"

My nostrils flared right as I bolted to my knees and grabbed the Uzi's short barrel. Two shots fired over my broad shoulder until I pulled the machine gun from his grip. It bounced off the blacktop and away from the struggle as I threw a punch at the other canine. My knuckles scuffed the right side of his snout as the lad hurriedly put the gear to drive. I gripped the window frame for dear life at the same time I kicked at the ground alongside the vehicle.

"Fuck off, dude!" he shouted as the car swerved left out of the parking lot.

"Shit!" My feet momentarily fell from under me.

I almost let go of the car's frame when he suddenly slammed the brakes. A minivan faster than the junk I'd been holding onto honked, its driver swearing angrily at us while my driver floored it on the gas pedal.

However, the two short seconds between were just enough time. I quickly unlocked the passenger door from the inside, then yanked it open and shoved myself in right before the vehicle flew out of the parking lot.

I barely closed it when a sharp pain erupted on my left shoulder. A knife. "Agh!"

"Just die already!" the golden retriever snarled as he kept an eye on the road. We were far beyond the normal speed limit. "Goddamn it, what'd you do to Harry!?"

I coldly laughed, "You're about to find out, boy!"

My right paw grabbed on the knife's handle and yanked out the embedded instrument. A pained mixture of a bark and a grunt erupted from my throat. The nameless retriever at the wheel tried seizing the knife away from me, only for the car to make a sharp left turn toward incoming cars, all of them honking and veering from the maniacs behind the wheel. Screams from a few pedestrians could be heard. Thankfully, the dog managed to swerve us back onto the right side of the road, then stiffened as I held the bloodied knife to his throat.

"Don't kill me, please!" he whimpered out, "I-I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I..."

Pulses of white pain engulfed my left shoulder, yet I ignored the black dots dancing in my vision. For the moment, I also disregarded the warm crimson leaking down my elbow. As the heart in my chest refused to stop bruising its protective ribcage, I already started imagining seventeen different ways I could end the young fur's life.

Our speed picked up as we passed by fewer and fewer cars, the neighborhood blurring into dark, rundown buildings and abandoned shops. Already, the twenty-something golden retriever trembling in his seat could sense it. I could see it in the forming tears in his wide, twitching eyes trying to decide between doing what I said and taking a foolish chance by fighting back. He couldn't compel himself to do the latter though. He didn't want to believe his life could end so soon.

"Slow the car down!" I bared my teeth at the terrified, wide-eyed golden retriever at the wheel. "You and your friend shot up that motel room specifically. Not the others. Why?"

"I-I-I don't know what you're talking about, dude!" 'Harry' stammered as he slowed the car down to a steady crawl, ears splayed in absolute horror. "We swear to God!"

The frown on my dark muzzle blackened further.

"Bullshit!" I pushed the edge of the knife closer against his jugular, almost coating his own blood over it. "Answer my question or I'll gut your neck into salmon; why were you two after us?"

I swiftly grazed the knife at his neck, forming a small cut. He only bit his trembling lower lip.

The impatient growl in my throat finally erupted, "Answer me!"

"T-This morning!" the retriever finally confessed between gasps. "This morning! S-Some letter came in our mail! Some rich dude paid our rent! S-Said he'd pay us $20,000 to kill that ocelot fag! He said he needed him silenced!"

Confused by the answer, I held a firmer grip on the knife handle. "Why?"

"We-We don't know!" he sobbed out in a petrified, shaking mess. The retriever inhaled and whimpered, "I don't know! I swear I don't fucking know why!"

"Swear it to me!" I snarled at him. "How do you know Cherry?"

"I don't!" he told me. "All I know's that the letter told us which motel he'd be staying at and which room! W-We didn't think it was real 'til our landlord said Dan and I were in the clear! Somehow, he even g-gave us enough cash in our accounts to buy the guns!"

Twenty-thousand dollars. The coyote and golden retriever were willing to murder a fur they didn't know, so they could live an easier life. Twenty-thousand dollars was chump change compared to what I charged on the Dark Web. The two hapless canines were no older than the ocelot, yet they saw him as just another NPC in the setting of a violent video game.

Well, I happened to be the boss battle.

"P-Please, you g-gotta believe m-me! I didn't k-know y-you'd be w-with the f-fag! Please! Please don't--"

"I believe you." No remorse filled my heart when I sliced into his neck.

There would have been no reason for me to keep him alive. By all accounts, it would have been more problematic for me to keep him alive, tied up in some empty warehouse or a dark room I didn't own. No, killing the messenger would be enough to make whoever sent him realize they fucked with the wrong contract killer.

The golden retriever gagged and choked on his own blood, like the coyote. Claws wailed around in desperate need. His upper torso and the steering wheel he had been clutching were now sprayed in a layer of warm red. He leaned forward and stepped on the gas at the same time I opened the passenger door.

Tumbling a few times across the unforgiving blacktop, I could hear my victim's car speed down the road. It swerved once or twice until a metallic impact could ultimately be heard. I groaned at the cuts and scrapes on my limbs before looking up to see a what remained of a vehicle sandwiched into a concrete barrier. It impacted so hard that I could already see and smell the smoke engulfing what was left of the front end.

The windows of a few nearby houses instantly brightened up. One featureless fur down the street even rushed out in the pajamas to see the wreckage for themselves. Rather than sleep on a road that'd no doubt be swarmed with a firetruck, some LPD squad cars and at least one ambulance, I willed myself up and staggered down a small path leading back to my apartment.

I had to ditch my clothes. Any hapless pedestrian noticing a dark-furred wolf with a blood-stained shirt would know to call 911. Still, I'd dealt with a change of clothing enough times to go through it like clockwork.

After stealing a sleeping homeless tiger's trench coat under an overpass, my first step was to roll my clothes sans underwear into a bundle, place the evidence in a trash bag I bought from a 24/7 convenience store (the college dropout leaning sleepily behind the register barely acknowledged my presence, even after I placed a twenty on the counter, telling him to keep the change), and then casually tossed it into a partially full dumpster. By the time a detective thought to look through the dumpsters, the nondescript bag would be long gone. It'd be buried or burned in a landfill outside the city limits, never to be seen again.

The trench coat had seen better economic recessions and partially reeked like rotten meat left in the middle of July, but it kept the smell of blood off me. Aside from buying a roll of bandaging tape for my shoulder wound, I ignored the other cuts and bruises on my body each step of the way to the apartment. As much as all the fatigued fibers in my being tried telling me to keel over dead, I refused to stand still. I refused to die and join my father in Hell just yet.

Haven't felt this exhausted since Colombia, I mused to myself.

Unlike Columbia though, the exhaustion wasn't mixed with confusion over who the phantom was that sent the two punks. Before, it had just been a desperate fur trying to escape.

After the pathetic maggot I used to be died the very same day I left Northern Ireland, I wandered between different names. Under various identities, my occupations ranged from place to place; construction worker, bar bouncer, corporate bodyguard and ultimately a soldier for a private military company across various regions in Latin America.

The pay kept me from starving, but my main focus during the intervening years had been towards erasing some memories from my skull. They were memories of pain, hatred, and turbulent isolation. No matter how much I tried, the burning sensation of blood on my fingers wouldn't go away. My father's disemboweled corpse sometimes haunted my dreams, but I did everything to stay distracted. I drowned myself in work to the point it became my entire life. At one point, my Irish accent all but disappeared into obscurity.

To keep myself healthy as the perfect soldier in an imperfect underworld, I avoided public vices: drinking, smoking, fast food, and STI's. Of course, a mercenary open about their same-sex attractions rarely earned paychecks, so I remained secretive about the midnight trysts with foreign males in any alley. Otherwise, I collectively leered at women alongside a coworker.

I discovered the criminal underworld (or in this case, it discovered me) in Columbia when a local drug lord required his nephew to be detained. The little fucker assumedly wanted to snitch about the locations of certain cocaine fields to Interpol in exchange for amnesty. Unluckily for him, all exits out of the region were carefully watched by the cartel, with the boss himself offering the Colombian Peso equivalent of $500,000 to the first mercenary able to capture him.

Two days, one night without sleep and a bullet wound later, I tossed the nephew--broken, bleeding, tightly bound, and sobbing for mercy from Santa Muerta of all religious figures--to his uncle's footpaws. The grin on my wolfish muzzle couldn't have been any wider in my entire life, especially when the lord let me shoot him dead right there. Ignoring the lack of sleep in my body, the blood on my paws, but it seemed to be overtaken by a familiar sensation akin to...rapture. It consumed the burning crimson embedded in my claws.

The incident basically cemented my destiny. Besides the monetary prize, the drug lord gave another offer: triple my payrate for a position as their off-the-books hitman. Their previous one happened to be the one who let the snitch originally run. I didn't ask what they did to him.

Wanting to no longer be haunted by my memories, I accepted the offer, and delved into the shadowy realm of sin and greed. The murky underworld for criminals. I was now a true wolf roaming in the so-called dark woods.

I wondered what the nephew felt while on the run. Did he feel as clueless as I did, not knowing who sent the two punks after somebody like Cherry?

Speaking of whom, my apartment complex had no life breathing in it. The front desk attendant, a thirty-something hare too fond of his phone, who took over for Ann in the morning only glanced up at me walking in. He grimaced slightly at having to pause an online video.

"Went for a late-night walk, sir?" he asked tiredly, then yawned. "Awfully dark out..."

"Errands to do." I said, then entered the elevator and let him return to his job.

Cherry forgot to lock the front door. Either he forgot to or knew he couldn't be awake the rest of the morning to open it up for me when I returned, let alone if. I got my answer after walking inside a dark apartment and discovering a certain feline lying on the couch.

He was asleep for some time, his body covered by a beautifully quilted afghan blanket gifted to me by a Middle Eastern vizier. He claimed it was a gift from a Saudi prince. Its bright magenta and white colors contrasted Cherry's golden-black fur. As I tentatively stepped over to him, I noticed the ocelot's belongings--several clothes, a backpack and box of condoms--haplessly tossed on the floor. Even his clothing from the movie theater was peeled carelessly on the coffee table, leaving him in clean boxers.

I sighed to myself, "You're more complicated than I thought."

Gently picking his light, nearly naked body up in my arms, the smell of excessive soap and shampoo in his wet fur indicated he'd taken a long shower. I could already picture Cherry standing and staring into deep space beneath the showerhead, trying to forget what he saw under the steady stream of hot water.

"Hmm?" he blinked awake, then stiffened just as I placed him in the bed. "O-Oh, it's...it's you, Ferg...Markus?"

"Yeah," I nodded in the near darkness of my bedroom. The window blinds were shut since the previous morning, leaving a digital alarm clock on my nightstand as the only light source for him to see me. "It's me. How are you feeling?"

He didn't reply, so I opted to just pull my dirtied clothes to the ground, sneak some deodorant under my armpits, and join him in the bed. Cherry did purr though when I slipped under the velvet covers and pulled him closer. Wrapping my protective arms around him, the ocelot turned around to immediately melt his warm, slender form into my larger, muscular build.

"Y-You killed them...didn't you?" he sniffled, looking up at me and sounding slightly hoarse. He likely cried by himself as he waited the previous hour or so. "Wha...What are you? Are you like a...a bodyguard or mercenary or something? You never told me what you did for a living a-and you just killed him like it was nothing..."

Well, to me, it was nothing. However, I knew a lad like him needed a straight answer after everything he just witnessed.

"I used to be a freelance mercenary, but that was a long time ago." I answered after a moment of careful thought. "I am...I'm a hitman. Just like in that dumb movie we saw tonight."

I hoped making a small jab at a franchise he apparently loved would get him to show another emotion besides fear. Something to alleviate how he felt about my actual profession. When he only stared at me with a confused expression, then pressed his nose to my shoulder, I knew then wouldn't be the right time to ask him: who wanted him dead?

"The two punks wanted to kill you, back at the motel." I murmured. "We can discuss all of this tomorrow. For now, you're going to stay here until I figure out who sent them."

The ocelot's eyes widened in the dark. "B-But I don't have enough money--"

"Forget payment." I growled, then simmered my anger for now. "Now, let's just go to sleep, Cherry. We can discuss everything in the morning. I'll even make us breakfast, alright?"

I felt his tail tickle and wag against my ankles. We were making some progress.

"...alright," he whispered, then rested his head on my chest.

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