A Punishment Due

There had been one condition he’d chosen for himself when picking his career. One simple rule to follow: just one. Now he’d disappointed himself, and he would pay the consequences. ‘Take one life that is not your direct target, and you shall give your own life in return.’ He’d written those words in blood ink.
         Signing in his own blood, Harley Lucass had sworn to himself that he would never come to the very moment he was in now. Evidently, the promise of an assassin was worth nothing more than a promise from a dead man.
         The cold steel of the weapon that he’d taken lives with that day began to warm in the palm of his hand as he watched the sun dipping beneath the horizon. There wasn’t a way for him to live with taking the life he had that day, and he most definitely wouldn’t. He should have swallowed the bullet the moment following the one when his trigger finger had gone happy and taken an innocent life. He didn’t deserve to see this sunset. He didn’t deserve a second chance, and he refused to allow himself to have it.
         Lifting the barrel onto his lip, Harley made one last tease for Satan in savoring the remaining taste of wine on his breath as he ran his tongue along the gunpowder. Fitting the gun between his teeth, Harley whispered into the growing night the words he knew would be his last, “Taking my own life will not save those of the ones that have already gone, but it will spare the ones I might have taken. God be with the world.”
         Not a thought of hesitation crossed his mind. The Assassin tightened his rather loose grip on the handle and wrapped his finger around the tight trigger. In one swift movement, he tugged with the uniformed yet comfortable harshness that he’d grown to live by. A single bullet exited the weapon, piercing the roof of his mouth and swimming into his system.
         The hand above his chest went limp with the rest of the body. The world would not miss Harley Lucass.