has romantic feelings for Alex and enjoys being with him. During the story, she is stabbed by a junkie and is taken to the hospital, where Alex comforts her. While visiting her parents in her hometown of North Carolina, Kayla decides to move back there, finding that she can do more good there and later tells Alex, who is sadden by this but supports her. By the end of the novel, Kayla tries to convince Alex to move with her, showing that she still wants a relationship with him, but Alex refuses, believing that he can never leave Washington behind. Kayla and Alex decide to end their relationship, which saddens them both, and they go their separate ways. Michael "The Butcher of Sligo" Sullivan Michael Sullivan grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He had no good childhood and often had problems with his father, who bullied him. So at the age of eighteen, he killed him before dismembering him using a scalpel and feeding him to the fish in the bay. Some time later he got connections to Mafia, especially the Maggione family, for which he worked as a killer. After one of his jobs, he got the nickname “the Butcher” due to his cruelness and often killing his victims in a brutal way. After killing his victims he would cut up their faces with a scalpel to make a point and take pictures to use a threatening devise so his next victims would keep quiet. Somewhere along the line, Michael started raping young, attractive women and would often leave them alive, showing them the same pictures to keep them quiet. He is believed to be the one who killed Maria, but is proven innocent as it was his former partner Jimmy "Hats" Galati who killed her. By the end of the novel, Michael is killed by Alex. He has a wife and three sons, and also has a home in Maryland. Jimmy "Hats" Galati Jimmy is The Butcher's partner in crime and turns out to be the killer of Maria. He is killed by Sampson and another detective named Rakeem Powell, years ago. It was never revealed to Alex that Jimmy had murdered his wife until the end of the novel, where John comes clean after they kill Michael "The Butcher" Sullivan, Jimmy's old partner. "Jimmy was known as "Jimmy the Protector" because he had the Butcher's back. Always."