ASHES OF AUGUST

Chapter Ten: The Other Side

They had been told it would be quick. In and out. A job like any other.

Four men, black gloves and cheap balaclavas, crowded around a scarred table in a tin-roofed safehouse on the edge of Nairobi’s industrial district. The rain hammered the corrugated metal above them, drowning out the city’s usual hum.

The man who had brought them together leaned back in his chair, smoking, his face lost in shadow. He was not one of them. He was not a street criminal scraping by on matatu fares and stolen phones. He was something colder. He called himself Kamau, though none of them believed that was his real name.

“You’re not stealing,” he said. “Not the jewels. Not the money. You’re going for the woman. In and out. She’ll be at the jewelry store. Take her down, make it look like a robbery gone wrong. No survivors. No hesitation.”

The men glanced at one another. Even for them, the instructions were strange.

“Why her?” asked Otieno, the youngest, barely twenty. His voice cracked around the question.

Kamau’s gaze flicked toward him like a blade. “Because she’s already dead. Whether you pull the trigger or not. You’re just the instrument.”

The room went still.

They didn’t ask more. They didn’t want to know. In their world, questions got you killed faster than bullets.

But when the job came, when the jewelry store shattered into screams and broken glass, they discovered something their employer hadn’t told them: the woman fought. She didn’t beg. She didn’t cry. She turned, eyes blazing with recognition, as though she had been expecting them.

And then she was on the floor, blood blooming across her dress.

Now, days later, in the safehouse, silence hung like a noose. The men sat restless, shadows under their eyes, the weight of what they had done pressing harder than they’d anticipated.

“She knew us,” muttered Kariuki, the oldest, nursing a bottle of cheap whiskey. “Not our faces. But… she looked like she knew why we were there. Like she’d seen us before.”

“That’s madness,” said Otieno quickly. “We were masked. She couldn’t have known.”

“Not our faces,” Kariuki repeated, voice low. “But the job. The setup. The way it was done. She recognized it.”

The words rattled them all.

They had pulled hundreds of jobs. None had left them shaken. But this one felt different. It felt like stepping into someone else’s war.

Otieno couldn’t sleep. He found himself walking Nairobi’s night streets, ears buzzing with the echo of her gasp, the way her body had folded to the floor. He remembered the heat in her eyes. Not fear. Recognition.

When he returned to the safehouse at dawn, Kamau was waiting, calm as a vulture.

“You did well,” Kamau said. He slid an envelope across the table. Thick. Heavy. More money than they had seen in years.

Otieno stared at it but didn’t touch. “Who was she?”

Kamau’s smile was thin. “Someone who ran too far.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“You don’t need answers. You need money. Take it and disappear.”

Otieno swallowed. His hands trembled as he shoved the envelope into his jacket. But when he glanced back, Kamau was still watching him, eyes cold and unreadable.

Kariuki drank himself into stupor, muttering half-formed theories.

“She wasn’t random,” he slurred one night, sprawled on the floor. “We weren’t sent for jewels. We were sent for her. Which means somebody’s paying to erase her. Somebody big enough to know where she’d be, what time, what store.”

“Shut up,” hissed Mwangi...another of the crew, no relation to the inspector. He pressed a pistol to Kariuki’s temple. “You talk like that and you’ll end up like her.”

But even Mwangi’s voice shook.

By the third night, one of them had vanished. Otieno’s bed lay empty, sheets cold. His envelope of cash was gone.

“Ran,” Kariuki muttered. “Couldn’t take it.”

But deep down they knew better. Running wasn’t easy in their world. Not when a man like Kamau gave you money with one hand and a death sentence with the other.

Meanwhile, Kamau sat in a hotel room downtown, dialing a number stored only in his head. The call connected across static, to an accent not Kenyan...Pacific, rolling, distant.

“It’s done,” Kamau said.

“And the girl?”

“She won’t wake.”

The voice on the other end chuckled darkly. “You think so? She’s always been slippery.”

Kamau’s jaw tightened. “She was hit. Twice. No one survives that.”

“You don’t know Helena Vasquez.”

The line went dead.

Kamau stared at the phone, his reflection fractured in the darkened window. Rain streaked the glass like veins. He had killed many for many employers. But this time, the money had come too quickly. Too clean. And the name the man had spoken-Helena...meant nothing to him.

But it lingered.

The surviving three robbers began to notice shadows where there shouldn’t be any. A car that followed too long. A man on a motorcycle lingering at a corner. Paranoia spread like fever.

Otieno, wherever he was, wasn’t calling. Kariuki muttered about curses. Mwangi polished his gun until the metal gleamed like ice.

The job had been simple. But now it felt like they had stepped into someone else’s vendetta...a vendetta that didn’t forgive witnesses.

The truth was this: they had not killed for jewels. They had not killed for greed. They had been hired to erase a woman with two names.

And somewhere, beyond their reach, the one who had paid them was watching, waiting, making sure no loose ends survived.

The robbers began to understand what Elena had known the second she saw them.

They weren’t thieves that night.

They were executioners.

End of Chapter Ten.