The quiet hour

Annah Mwende stood on the rooftop of a building across the street from Kevin Langat's flat. The Nairobi night sprawled around her...dark, humid, and pulsing with distant city sounds: a dog barking, tires slicing wet asphalt, the fading echo of a late boda-boda.

She had been watching him for six nights.

She knew when he left work, where he stopped to buy his evening meal, how many steps it took him from the gate to his door. He was predictable. Stupidly so. He lived like someone with nothing to hide.

But Annah knew better.

Kevin had secrets stitched under his skin. She'd seen it in his eyes the last time they spoke,the way they slid away when she asked about Lucy. The way his hands twitched when he thought no one was looking.

He hadn't taken Lucy.

But he'd held the door open.

That was enough.

She prepared everything the seventh night.

Gloves...surgical latex. Over those, knitted fingerless gloves.

Disposable wipes, alcohol-based. Two burner phones. A bottle of succinylcholine in an unmarked vial,enough to paralyze a man. Stolen from a private clinic in Rongai months ago and stored in the back of her freezer until now.

And the mask.

Not for her face. For his.

A simple, suffocating sheet of plastic.

Annah wrapped it all in a cloth bag. No purse. No wallet. Nothing traceable. No hair left loose. No fingerprints. Not a single sliver of herself.

She became no one.

Just a shape in the night.

Kevin's flat was tucked behind a butcher's stall, beside a shuttered M-Pesa kiosk. Third floor. No guard, no cameras. The kind of forgotten place in a city too full of people with nowhere else to go.

Annah reached his door at 12:03 a.m.

She knocked once.

He opened in joggers and a t-shirt, barefoot, blinking like he had just woken up from a nap.

"Annah?"

"Can I come in?" Her voice was steady, calm.

He hesitated, then stepped aside. "Yeah. Of course."

She entered. The room was dim. A small TV screen played an old Kenyan drama. There was a plate of leftover ugali on the table, half a bottle of Coke beside it.

"I wasn't expecting..." Kevin started, but she turned and handed him a flask.

"I brought tea."

He looked surprised. "Really?"

"You always liked strong tea, right?"

A nervous chuckle. "Sure. Thanks."

He poured it, took a sip, and sat on the edge of the mattress. The paralytic would take fifteen minutes to work. Long enough to draw the truth out of him.

Annah didn't sit. She stood by the window, watching the cars pass far below.

She spoke without turning. "Lucy kept a journal. She wrote about you."

Kevin's jaw twitched. "Yeah?"

"She said you lied."

He set the cup down slowly. "I didn't. I told the police I wasn't working that night."

"You were."

"I wasn't!" he snapped, then flinched at his own voice. He looked at her, really looked. "Why are you here?"

Annah turned. Her eyes were tired but sharp. "You know why."

Kevin stood, uneasy now. "Annah… I didn't hurt her. I swear to you. But I knew. I knew something was going on in that west wing."

"Then why didn't you stop it?"

"Because..." his voice cracked. "Because I was scared."

She stepped forward. "Of who?"

He hesitated. "Wendo. The janitor. He's not just a cleaner. He knows people. He...he told me if I talked, I'd end up like her."

"And you believed him."

"I didn't want to die."

Annah looked at him for a long time. "She did."

Kevin's face crumpled. "I didn't mean for it to happen. I swear I didn't. She was nice. Kind to me. I just...if I'd known..."

"You did know," Annah whispered.

Kevin staggered back, gripping the table. Sweat slicked his forehead. The cup of tea clinked as he tried to steady it.

"What's… happening to me?"

She watched him calmly.

His knees buckled.

He dropped.

Face down.

Still conscious, but locked inside his own failing body.

"Succinylcholine," she murmured, crouching beside him. "It paralyzes the muscles. Keeps your brain awake."

His eyes rolled to meet hers, wide, terrified.

She took out the plastic sheet and smoothed it gently over his face.

"I'm not a monster," she said softly. "But you left her with monsters. You stood there and did nothing."

Kevin's breath came in short, shallow gasps beneath the plastic.

Annah's hand was steady.

"You're not the only one who was afraid," she whispered. "But fear isn't a reason to be silent. Fear didn't stop Lucy from trying to tell the truth. And now she's gone."

Tears blurred her vision. She let them fall.

Kevin jerked once, twice.

Then he stopped moving.

The apartment was quiet.

Annah stood up slowly, blinking the tears away.

She set to work.

She wiped every surface she'd touched. Door handles. The cup. The flask. The floor near his feet. She collected the plastic, gloves, and flask, sealed them in a garbage bag, and placed it in her cloth sack.

She checked again.

No fibers. No hairs.

She left through the back stairwell.

At 12:57 a.m., she was walking down the alley behind the butcher stall.

At 1:12 a.m., the garbage bag was burning in a steel drum behind a repair shop four streets away.

By 1:40 a.m., she was home,showered, her fingerprints wiped from the burner phone, and her bloody soul folded neatly beneath her ribs.

She sat on the edge of her bed, still in the towel.

Her hands trembled.

She had imagined this moment for months,what it would feel like to take something back. To make someone pay.

But there was no relief.

Only silence.

Her phone buzzed.

A message from an unknown number:

"Langat no show for shift. Anyone know his flat? -Muli"

Annah stared at it.

Then deleted it.

She lay back, curling into the blankets Lucy had once bought for her.

She cried...not loud, not messy.

Just a slow, aching weep.

For what she had done.

For what she still had to do.

For the woman Lucy should've grown into.

Down the street, a cat yowled at nothing.

The city blinked.

And in the still, clean silence of the quiet hour, the first monster was buried.

But Annah wasn't done.

Not yet.

Now the real revenge was about to begin.