Maxime saw it before I did. His body was already moving as Shaw's arm came up with the gun.
Maxime stepped in front of me.
The gunshot tore through the room.
His body jerked backward into mine, the impact driving us both stumbling. His hand clutched at his chest, and a sound escaped him that I had never heard in three decades of violence.
I caught him as his legs gave out. His weight dragged us both down, my damaged leg buckling beneath the strain. The marble floor rushed up to meet us.
"Maxime." His name came out wrong, stripped of authority, stripped of everything but the raw thing underneath.
His eyes found mine, wide with shock. He didn't speak. He didn't move again.
Getting shot hurt likehell, even when wearing a tailored bulletproof vest.
Shaw's .45 should have punched through my heart and painted the marble wall with my life story. Instead, eight thousand dollars of Swiss engineering caught his bullet and spread its fury across ballistic panels, transforming death into merely excruciating pain. The impact drove every molecule of air from my lungs, and then Algerone's arms were around me as my legs buckled and we both went down.
I let myself go limp against him. I let my eyes roll back, let my body become dead weight, let him catch me and hold me and believe he was cradling a corpse. It was the performance of a lifetime, measured in heartbeats.
His arms tightened around me as we hit the marble floor together, his damaged leg buckling beneath our combined weight. His chest heaved against my back, and his hands trembled where they gripped my shirt.
"Maxime."
I wanted to open my eyes. I wanted to tell him I was alive, that I was here, that the vest had held. But Shaw still had the gun, and he needed to believe I was dead. He needed that moment of triumph, that surge of adrenaline that would make him careless.
So I gave Algerone my death. I lay in his arms and didn't move, didn't breathe, didn't respond when his hand found my face.
I hadn't told him about the vest.
That decision would haunt me for whatever years I had left. I'd made it alone, the way I'd made every decision that hurt him for three decades, convincing myself I knew best and convincing myself the deception served him. The vest was a contingency, nothing more. Shaw was unpredictable, and I'd learned long ago that the only body I could guarantee between Algerone and a bullet was my own.
But I hadn't considered what watching me die would do to him. If I had, I might have told him, and then he would have tried to protect me instead, and I couldn't allow that. His life mattered. Mine was negotiable.
His face shattered. This wasn't the Algerone who commanded boardrooms. This wasn't even the man who'd taken me apart with a riding crop and rebuilt me with whispered confessions.
This was Jackson Wheeler, the boy from the trailer park who'd beaten his stepfather to death with a Louisville Slugger and felt nothing but calm.
He lowered me to the marble floor, and the cold seeped through my shirt where his warmth had been. My Glock lay inches from my right hand. I kept my eyes nearly closed, watching him through my lashes as he rose to face Shaw.
"You killed him."
He spoke from somewhere deeper than vocal cords, from somewhere that remembered blood on broken glass and the smell of cheap beer and fear. My chest ached, and not just from the impact of the bullet. I wanted to reach for him and tell himI was alive, that I was here, that he didn't have to become this thing.
But Jackson Wheeler was the only one who could take that gun from Shaw.
So I stayed dead. I lay on cold marble three feet from the man I loved and watched him lose his mind, and I did nothing, because doing nothing was the only way to save him.
Shaw's smile wavered. He'd expected rage and threats, not this cold and terrible certainty walking toward him wearing a dead man's face.
"Well, yes. That was rather the point."
Algerone's cane whistled through the air like a headsman's axe.
Shaw ducked, but barely. The silver tip kissed his temple, leaving a thin red line that would have been his skull cracking open. The backswing caught him across the ribs with a sound like kindling snapping.
There was a slight hitch in Algerone's stride when his damaged leg took too much weight. Shaw staggered, gasping, gun trembling. But Algerone was already moving, not with the calculated grace of a CEO, but with the ugly, efficient brutality of a boy who'd learned to fight in the dirt.
The cane found Shaw's wrist, and bone cracked. The gun skittered across the marble.
