Crime of Passion

His fingers slowly crept up the cold bar, each new placement sending another searing pain straight to the bone. The bitter chill of the air was enough to ice over his eyes if he didn’t blink often enough, but it was a price he was willing to pay for the few minutes of thrill. His rapidly numbing fingers reached eagerly for the gate’s lock. He grasped the ice-like metal for a moment, then turned the combination with a smoothness that only came from years of experience. His ears were completely in tuned to the deathlike silence around him, the silence he’d heard many, many nights before, his familiar friend. A second later the reverberating click of an opened lock shattered the silence. The opened lock was dropped down carelessly to the snow below, easily lost in the shadowed white, and the dark, stocky figure slipped through the now open entrance, soon to be lost in the deep shadows himself.

The black, empty form of the intruder was all that could be seen as he pressed himself against the cold wall of the building behind him, gingerly side-stepping towards the curtained window. A soft crunch of snow underfoot was the only sound to be heard. Even the dark woods nearby didn’t dare whisper. As if on pause, not a thing moved. Even the inanimate could sense a seriousness, a desperation surrounding the situation. An eerily bright crescent moon peered down at the silent scene with contempt, though. It knew the routine and knew the results...but nothing could stop the man now.

As was learned quite a while ago, it was a crime of passion.