He raised his hand.
I didn’t remember deciding to move. I didn’t remember crossing the distance between us. All I knew was that his men were coming at me, and my body transformed into something that wasn’t entirely human anymore. Something built for violence. Something that knew how to break bodies with surgical precision.
The first man went down with a cracked sternum and a scream that echoed through the warehouse like a prayer to dead gods. My fist followed through like it was part of the same motion, all momentum and brutal mathematics. The second never even got his gun up before I was inside his reach, my elbow finding his throat in a strike so precise it cut off his air completely. He dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.
The third tried to circle around me, but I was already spinning, already lethal, already everywhere he wasn’t. My knee came up, and he tried to block it with his hands, but blocking wasn’t going to work. Nothing was going to work. The man was already dead—he just didn’t know it yet.
Blood painted the concrete. Maybe it was his. Maybe it was mine. Maybe it was a mix of both. It didn’t matter. The pain registered somewhere distant, as if it were happening to someone else. My knuckles split open. My ribs screamed. My shoulder wrenched from an impact I didn’t even see coming. But none of it slowed me down.
I moved through the warehouse like a ghost made of violence. Every strike was calculated. Every movement economical. I’d learned a long time ago that mercy was a luxury I couldn’t afford. That in moments like these, hesitation was death.
By the time I reached Vance, the warehouse was a graveyard. His men were scattered like broken toys. Some still breathing. Some not. He’d backed up the moment the violence started, tried to create distance, but there was no distance in a warehouse. There was nowhere to go that I couldn’t reach.
When I finally cornered him, when my hands were wrapped around his throat and I could feel his pulse trying to escape under my grip, he did something that almost broke my concentration. He smiled.
“You’re too late,” he whispered, and his voice was hoarse from the pressure of my hands. “By the time you kill me, I’ve already—”
I didn’t let him finish. My hands closed tighter, and for just a moment, I let myself imagine what it would feel like to watch the life drain from his eyes. To be the one who ended this. The one who avenged Cassandra’s suffering. The one who wiped this stain off the world.
But then something happened that made the world stop.
Vance’s hand moved, and suddenly there was a gun in it. Not in my hand where I thought I’d secured it. In his. The barrel pointed at my skull, and I saw the decision crystallize in his eyes. This was it. This was where the story ended. Not with my hands around his throat, not with me getting the satisfaction of his death. But with a bullet to the brain. A mercy I didn’t deserve.
The gun cocked.
I braced for impact. For darkness. For the mercy of not having to carry what I’d become. For a moment that stretchedlike pulled taffy, I was okay with it. Part of me welcomed it. The part that knew I’d crossed too many lines to ever go back.
Then the world exploded into thunder.
I flinched, but it was the wrong reaction. The pain I expected didn’t come. Instead, something warm and wet hit my face, and when I looked down, Vance was collapsing. The bullet didn’t go through his eyes into my brain. It went through him, and blood was pouring from the wound like he’d finally learned how to cry.
For a moment, I stood frozen. Confused. Still breathing.
Then I heard her voice.
“I told you,” Cassandra said from the darkness, and there was a gun in her hands that shouldn’t be there, “if you left me again, I would fucking follow you.”
She emerged from the shadows like she’d been born from them, and my entire world reorganized itself around her presence. Her hair was down, wild black silk with blue running through it like veins. Her hands were shaking. Her eyes were devastated and furious all at once. She was wearing the dress she’d had on this morning—the simple black one that made her look like a weapon made of grace.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I said, but what I meant wasthank you, thank you, thank you for not letting me die alone in the dark.
“Neither should you.” She stepped closer, and I could see that her body was trembling. The gun in her hands weighed heavy, and her fingers were still tight on the trigger like she might need to fire again at any moment. “You married me, Drew. You put a ring on my finger and made promises, so you don’t get to run toward death and expect me to sit at home and wait for your ghost to come haunting our child.”
I crossed the distance between us and pulled her against me, careful, so careful because she was carrying my childand I couldn’t risk anything happening to either of them. She was shaking in my arms, the gun falling from her hands and clattering against the concrete, and I realized she was crying. Cassandra, who I’d never seen cry except that one night when everything broke open, was falling apart in my arms.
“How did you—” I started to ask, but my voice broke. I was covered in blood. Not all of it mine. Some of it Vance’s. Some of it his men’s. She was seeing me like this—a monster who’d come out of the darkness to do the thing I did best.
“I called Kirill,” she said against my chest, her hands gripping my jacket as if it were the only thing keeping her from drowning. “Made him tell me where you were. He didn’t want to, but I convinced him that I’d follow you anyway, with or without his help. Better he knew where I was so he could track me. Better he knew I was coming here than have me disappear into the night with no backup.”“”“’’”
She pulled back just far enough to look at me, and her eyes were fierce as a hawk. Protective. Raw with emotion, she usually kept locked away behind that sharp exterior. “You think I’m just going to let you walk into something like this alone? You think I don’t know what that does to you? I can see it, Drew. I can see what you become when you fight for us. I can see what you’re willing to sacrifice.”
Behind us, Vance made a wet, gurgling sound. The sound of a man drowning in his own blood. The sound of a life ending in the wrong order, punctured by a bullet meant for someone else. I didn’t turn to look. I didn’t care if he was still conscious for his own death. Some men didn’t deserve the mercy of my attention.
“We need to move,” I told her, keeping her tucked against my side, one hand cradling the back of her head. “Kirill’s people will be here soon. We need to be gone before they arrive.”
She nodded like she’d already expected that. Like she’d already made peace with what it meant to pull a trigger and end someone’s life. Maybe she had. Or maybe she was just learning what I’d learned a long time ago—that survival required getting your hands dirty sometimes. That love required you to become something darker than you’d ever imagined you could be.
We moved toward the exit, stepping over bodies, stepping over the wreckage of Vance’s revenge. Outside, the Chicago air hit like a blessing. Clean air. Open sky. The warehouse behind us finally getting the silence it’d earned.
