The cane rose.
"That's why."
The silver handle came down on Shaw's skull with a sound I'd never forget, and then it came down again, and then once more. Shaw's body jerked with each impact, then went still.
Algerone stood over the corpse. His chest heaved. Blood and whiskey soaked his ruined suit. His hands trembled on the cane, the adrenaline finally catching up with him.
When he turned to face me, his eyes were wet.
"You let me think you were dead."
His accusation hit harder than Shaw's bullet.
"You watched me lose my mind, watched me nearly get myself killed, and you just lay there."
"I had to sell it." The excuse sounded hollow even to me. "Shaw needed to believe—"
"You had to?" His green eyes blazed. "Do you have any idea what that did to me? What I became when I thought I'd lost you?"
I knew. I'd watched it happen. I'd watched Jackson Wheeler claw his way out of the grave Algerone had buried him in, and I'd done nothing to stop it because stopping it would have meant revealing myself too soon, and revealing myself too soon would have meant Shaw winning, and Shaw winning would have meant Algerone dying.
I'd made a calculation. I'd weighed his momentary grief against his permanent death, and I'd chosen to hurt him.
"I'm sorry." Everything I said to him was inadequate. "I had to wait for the right moment."
He looked like he wanted to strangle me. His hands flexed at his sides, and I wouldn't have blamed him if he'd used them. I deserved worse than his anger. I deserved to spend the rest of my life making up for every wound I'd ever inflicted in the name of protection.
Then his shoulders sagged as exhaustion replaced rage.
"Don't ever do that again."
"I won't."
We both knew it was a lie. If the situation repeated itself tomorrow, I would make the same choice. I would always choose his life over his peace of mind, his survival over his trust. That was the shape of my devotion: selfish, controlling, desperate.
He knew it. And he was choosing to stay, anyway.
Alarms screamed through the building.
"You can punish me later," I said, already moving toward the door. Each breath sent spikes through my bruised ribs, but pain was just information. "Multiple teams incoming."
Algerone collected his cane and tested his weight. Blood still ran from his forehead, but his eyes had sharpened again.
Reid's voice crackled through my earpiece: "Package secured. Banshee prototype acquired. Extraction point Alpha, fifteen minutes."
"Copy. Moving now."
The elevator doors opened as we reached them. Six guards stepped out, weapons rising. I dropped two before they identified targets. Algerone's cane crushed a third guard's windpipe while his left hand grabbed a fallen sidearm.
We moved through the casino in tandem, the way we'd moved through crises for three decades, past slot machines and gamingtables, past screaming civilians and emergency strobes painting everything in pulsing red.
"Left side," he called, spotting muzzle flashes through a roulette pit.
I put three rounds through the ornate screen. Someone screamed. A rifle clattered across marble.
The stairwell gaped ahead. My ribs protested every jarring step, but I'd functioned through worse pain. I'd functioned through eighteen months of watching him not want me. This was nothing.
On the tenth floor, his leg betrayed him.
