The day Lottie May Givens died dawned like any other. The sky was blue as a cornflower, the sun shining brilliant and gold. It was a beautiful day to die.

If a person knew, as Lottie did, they wouldn't see tomorrow they might wish the weather to act accordingly. For the sky to break and weep for the loss of them, that everyone who looked outside to see the grey clouds and melancholy rain would know the earth was mourning and just maybe they'd mourn too.

But Lottie stood at her window staring with a child's wide-eyed wonder at the sky. It was so blue, so very blue. And after years of suffering and pain, most of which she caused, she wondered how she could live without noticing, how she could've forgotten how beautiful it was. She didn't want rain or melancholia, she didn't want the last thing she saw to be gloom – she wanted to see beauty.

For the hundredth time she checked the phone she'd kept hidden, the phone only Boyd had the number to, waiting for him to tell her what to do. He'd either fix the problem, unlikely, or tell her to fix her own. She looked over her shoulder at the Mexican sitting on her couch, gun in hand gaze set on her waiting for his own orders, quickly growing suspicious of her idleness, of her hands out of his sight. Not that it mattered, she'd read Boyd's misgivings and hid the phone beneath the leaves of the plant on the windowsill.

"Do you like pancakes?" she asked, not having a name to go with his very serious face. She didn't know why but it felt like such an important thing to know this stranger's name, to add it to the seemingly unending list of people she killed. Cause that's what she was, all she was, the taker of lives. She used to feel like a god, the decider of fate, powerful, important - like her life meant something to the universe. Now she felt hollow, like a part of her had been taken with every life and there was nothing left inside her anymore.

She didn't mind his hovering, his useless suspicion that she'd try to find a weapon even though he'd searched the house for guns and taken the knives. This scenario had played out enough times in her life everything was a weapon if she needed it to be. "Want me to make coffee?" she asked not needing to look over her shoulder from how closely he stood at her side.

She watched him eye the glass coffeepot weighing how likely she was to use it against him. "Not much of a coffee drinker."

Her eyes were hard when he met her stare. "Orange juice it is, then," she said dryly. "I'll be sure to grab plastic cups."

She felt his stare as she finished breakfast and set the table, had to move around where he stood to get to the refrigerator and then the cups, then he painstakingly watched her pour the juice before taking the bottle and returning it to the fridge himself.

"You're not gonna tell me your name?" she asked still wanting to know, needing it cause after Boyd's text his phone was sure to go off signaling her own death.

He met her gaze at the loud pulsing of his phone, his expression unchanging as he stood from the table and answered. She could count to twenty in Spanish, that was her crowning achievement of the language, so she didn't catch a lick of what this nameless man said. His body language, though, she read clearly; he even made the mistake of turning his back on her as though to keep her from hearing the conversation. And that was all she needed, the moment of opportunity she'd been waiting for.

By the time his mind registered movement in his peripheral it was too late, she already had the chair in hand and was swinging it against his back.

The amount of pieces it shattered into surprised her, she'd only been able to hang onto one of the pegs from the back, but there were several fractured parts scattered around him. And she was struck by her own scattered mind so similar to the broken wood at her feet, with splinters so small it would never be whole again.

And then she was left with what her body had done while her mind had paused, as if her flesh wasn't ready for the end. She had his gun, her piece of wood embedded in his stomach, his phone crushed under her foot, and her finger tightening on the trigger.

"Put the gun down, Lottie."

She smiled only cause of the irony; the sun had risen and she knew it'd be her last, and it really would figure that it'd be him to ensure it. "Army Ranger here to be my knight in shinin' armor," she sneered not taking her eyes from the bleeding man at her feet. "Here to act like you gave a shit?"

"You know I did," Tim answered moving past a doorway he'd walked through several times before, and she'd smiled then too; a beautiful tempting thing, beckoning him further into her home. She didn't have a pretty smile anymore, it was a twisted slash on her face, the sight of which had his hands tightening around his sidearm.

She was barely thinking, throwing insults at him where they fit, her mouth spewing poison her mind wasn't sure she wanted to give. And he took it all like the sturdy rock he was, not bending under her fury not molding to her will, daring to inch closer.

This was his fault. He'd opened her up, bared her soul, and then left it to rot. Now she was nothing more than a carcass, and he hadn't even had the decency to pick her bones; he'd gotten a taste of how foul she was, revealed the emptiness inside her, and then he'd left her trying to put herself back together. It was Daryl Crowe that'd eaten what was left of her, that was able to stomach it. And yet there Tim stood not realizing how patranizin he sounded, not knowing he was talking to a corpse.

"You can still walk away from this," he said trying for reason, not yet realizing there was no reasoning left in her. "It doesn't have to end in prison, you just gotta put the gun down." He was almost to the kitchen now, he was thinking it might not end in him shootin her – praying to a god he wasn't sure he believed in that he wouldn't have to. He'd found himself wanting to kill many Kentucky natives but she'd never been one of them no matter that he knew she deserved it. "I can't help you if you kill him," he tried again.

Without any fear left she looked up, let him see her eyes so dark they looked bottomless and empty, let him see the wreckage. "Why's he different from any of the others?" she asked needing that answer cause she should've shot the man by now, but she still didn't know his damn name.

Months ago she'd made the mistake of lookin back, saw the bodies she left her wake, all the lives she'd ruined by being alive. And she stacked those corpses like bricks, piling their cold flesh higher until it became a wall that reached the sky and blocked out the sun. She'd always been darker than night, no light in her just what shined on her. And with it now gone, eclipsing her in a sightless darkness, she was damned enough to do what she hadn't been able to before.

In one quick motion she'd raised the gun and pulled the trigger, seeing Tim's body jerk and feeling a sick victory at having been good enough to hit him. And then she was knocked back, her grip loosening on the gun, her hold on life slipping, as a bullet hit her dead in the chest.