"Thirty-two years." Algerone spoke in a register I'd never heard from him. "He loved me for thirty-two years, and you murdered him like he was nothing."
Shaw rolled behind his desk, blood streaming from his nose. "He was nothing! Just another corporate whore who—"
Algerone's cane splintered the rosewood where Shaw's head had been. Shaw lunged for a letter opener, slashing wildly. The silver blade found flesh, tearing across Algerone's forearm, and I had to lock every muscle in my body to keep from moving.
He was hurt and bleeding, and I was lying here playing dead while the only person I'd ever loved bled onto imported marble.
The cane's silver tip opened Shaw from wrist to elbow. Shaw hissed, dropping the blade. But he fought like a rat in a corner, dirty and desperate, and his boot found Algerone's damaged leg at the exact spot where titanium pins held shattered bone together.
Algerone grunted, the sound barely audible. Anyone else would have missed it.
I didn't miss it. I never missed anything about him.
Shaw tackled him into the liquor cabinet. Crystal exploded, and amber whiskey mixed with blood as both men crashed to the floor. My fingers inched toward my Glock, but Shaw was already moving and reaching and closing his hand around the gun.
"Now then." Shaw hauled himself upright, left hand steady despite the carnage. "Let's discuss your surrender."
Algerone knelt in broken glass. Blood ran from a cut above his eyebrow, but his green eyes still burned with that terrible calm. He looked at Shaw like a man counting the seconds until death.
"You should thank me," Shaw continued, gun steady at Algerone's temple. "You've just proven everything I said about the old ways. All that legendary control, all that strategic brilliance, reduced to animal rage the moment someone hurt your favorite pet."
The insult should have stung, but it didn't. I'd been called worse by men who knew me better. What mattered was the muzzle kissing Algerone's forehead and the finger tightening on the trigger.
Shaw leaned closer. "Any last words for your dead lover?"
I rose in a movement that was smooth and automatic. My Glock was already sighted on Shaw's chest before my knees fully straightened.
I fired.
The suppressed round punched through his sternum. Shaw's gun dropped from his hand as he stared down at the spreading red across his white shirt.
"Impossible." Blood frothed at the corners of his mouth. "I killed you. I watched you die."
"Kevlar." I kept the gun trained on him as his legs buckled. "You should have aimed for the head."
Shaw hit the wall, hands pressed uselessly to the hole in his chest. His breathing turned wet and rattling.
And Algerone stared at me like he was seeing a ghost.
"Maxime." He rose slowly, carefully, glass crunching under his shoes, and looked at me like I might disappear if he blinked.
I wanted to close the distance between us and press my face against his chest and breathe him in and apologize for every second of grief I'd caused him. But Shaw was still gurgling against the wall, still aware, still watching with hatred in his fading eyes.
"You wanted to be the one," I said quietly. "He's yours."
Algerone's gaze held mine. I saw the war in his expression, the part of him that wanted to touch me fighting against the part that wanted to finish what he'd started. I knew which part would win. I'd always known.
He turned to Shaw.
The cane lay in the debris of broken crystal and splintered wood. Algerone collected it slowly, blood dripping from his forearm where the letter opener had marked him. He moved as if pain was a foreign concept, like the leg that had been screaming at him for months had simply stopped mattering.
Shaw tried to speak. Crimson bubbles formed on his lips.
"You murdered over a thousand people in Oklahoma." Algerone stood over him, the silver tip of his cane pressing into the wound I'd made. Shaw convulsed, a strangled cry escapinghis ruined chest. "You destroyed my hometown. Threatened my sons. Tried to take everything I built."
He leaned closer, and Shaw's eyes went wide with terror.
"But none of that is why you're dying tonight." Algerone spoke in something barely human, something that belonged to a boy in a trailer park with a baseball bat in his hands. "You shot him. You made me watch him fall. You made me believe, even for a moment, that I'd lost him."
