this is an excerpt from the first chapter - the whole chapter exceeds the word limit so please see my "work" for the rest which is title lost and found #2 :)

1
Mystery of you - Red
Mark
Mark hurriedly shoved the gun back into his pocket and walked out of the nighttime market into the deserted streets of the city, shaken. He hadn't had to use it but the cashier was a freckle faced teenager and when he brandished the gun at her that look of innocent terror was like a stab of guilt right into the centre of his chest. She looked up at him, with eyes as wide as baseballs, as if he were a monster, even with the gun in his hand and a hat pulled low over his face it was as if he was the one under attack, he felt his face fall in chagrin. Thoughts swirled in his head like water in a sink, but he flushed them away bidding the image of the girl a somber goodbye. He flung his hat to the ground as if he were throwing his shame away, and put his sweaty hands into the deep pockets of his sweater to check if the cash was still there, he knew it hadn't moved but it gave him an excuse to touch the gun, its sleek skin imploring him, its chill contagious, tingling his hot sticky fingers.

There wasn't a soul nearby, the streets were wet and dark, reflecting the lamp posts, casting shadows on the brick walls like tall men in black, watching him, leering at him, knowing he was joining their dark army, becoming a shadow of the night. He'd been walking for over an hour, and his breath was becoming sharp and quick, his stomach cramped, but he had learned over the year that pain was easily ignored, all you had to do was stop acknowledging its presence. He thought about how this was turning into an analogy of his life, but immediately changed this trail as he had had to do countless times with these ever increasing dark thoughts, he pushed it far away, shoved roughly into a corner where he kept all his dark secrets, the merciless weights he lugged around with him. The anger, the unfairness of life, the fear- most of all the fear. It seemed he was slowly becoming isolated from life, he stopped feeling guilt when he stole cars, he stopped feeling emotions when he jumped the people who hardly had enough for themselves, walking late at night on streets that could harbor no safety, streets that offered little refuge and could not pity them. He had stopped feeling. But how could that be? He still missed her. Everyday. Realizing that he was fondly caressing the firearm he hastily began withdrawing his hand, as it left the warmth of his ratty jacket some of the money stuck to his sweaty palms and fell to the ground in a heap, snapping back into reality he quickly turned around to reach down for it only to find his nose much less than an inch away from the face of a girl. Breathing heavily, panting and blinking he looked at her in awe, she was mesmerizing. Her hair was dark brown, a shade away from black and fell heavily to the middle of her torso, not hiding the way her body swerved enticingly inwards before coming out again at the small of her back. Her hair was a river in the moonlight, the sheen blinding him, her beauty binding him. Her eyes though, were green gemstones, glimmering in the darkness in a milky white face. But those eyes, they held his gaze longer than her soft, curved, almost pouting lips or even the way her hips curved outwards from her waist. It was her eyes. He embarrassedly lowered his stare and saw that she was bleeding, a stream flowing down her arms, he couldn’t see where the source was through the dark red dripping interminably from her finger tips. She looked into his eyes, and if the cashier had looked at him with fear, she looked at him as if he were death, coming to take her soul, he realized that the gun was in his hand, her eyes darted from his face to the gun twice before she finally collapsed in a bulged heap right in front of his feet. He wiped the gun roughly with his jacket and threw it into the dark alley between two buildings on his left hand-side, ignoring the territorial grunt of a man lounging on a heap of garbage and rubbish cans. Mark ran to where the girl was lying and ignored the little voice inside his head that told him he should just take the money and bail. He picked up her frail body, trying not to notice the way her body fit between his arms and body like a jigsaw puzzle, and ran, and ran. Hours passed or maybe minutes, time seemed an odd thought when someone's life was in filthy, dishonest, thieving arms, he thought wryly. Finally, like the gates of heaven, the city hospital appeared. Funny thing, he thought, to be thinking of heaven at a time like this, how ironic.

He sat on a lumpy dark orange couch that looked far past its prime with little tufts of filling spilling out unattractively, and dark stains that looked as if scrubbing them over the years had made them more pronounced, in a full waiting room surrounded by people, weeping, nervously tapping their feet, and the most common – staring absentmindedly into space with a look of mortification painted on their faces, shocked and unwilling to accept the inevitable.