No one has ever stood in my crosshairs and laughed. Not even Nico dared to smile while staring down the hole thatdecides who lives. But she did. She looked at me like she already knew I wouldn’t pull the trigger, like she’d measured the exact width of my restraint and danced on the line.
And the worst part?
She was right.
I wanted to punish her. I wanted to drag her beneath me and make her feel every ounce of the chaos she just poured into my blood. Not just want. Need. A hunger so sharp it felt like worship.
It wasn’t only her body—though God knows the thought of pinning her wrists and watching that defiance melt into pleas has lived rent-free in my head since the moment I saw her—no, it was the way she looked at me and saw the monster and still refused to kneel. She saw the storm and stepped into it barefoot.
I've killed men for less provocation. I have buried empires for smaller insults. Yet she stands there bleeding from my world and dares me to finish what it started.
And I almost did.
The gun was steady. My finger was ready. One ounce of pressure, and the problem calling herself my wife would have been solved forever.
But I couldn’t.
Because the second I imagined a world without thatreckless, infuriating fire in her eyes, something inside me went colder than any grave I’ve ever dug.
So I holstered the bullet and gave the monitor my fist instead.
She wants to play? Fine.
But the next time she tests how far she can push a man who has nothing left to lose, she’d better be ready for what happens when the leash finally snaps.
Because next time, I won’t aim for the screen.
The nurse steps back, but I don’t take my eyes off Ana—if that’s her name—who lies against the hospital pillow like a war map with a hole in the middle. The morphine smooths the edges of pain out of her diamond-shaped face; it makes her look soft where she is not. She stares at the window like she’s reading something I can’t see.
"Nico’s alive," she says finally, not looking at me. The words drop like stones into a shallow pool; heavy, deliberate, impossible to take back. Ripples race across the silence, touching every corner, shivering the monitors, shaking the IV stand, brushing the edges of my control. Each ripple carries a memory buried three years deep: Nico laughing in the rain, Nico saying,Race you, Nico gone.
They spread wider, faster, until the surface of me fractures in a hundred quiet places. Then the ripples slow. The room holds its breath. Time stills, thick andtrembling, until the surface is glass again; too still, too perfect, like the moment before a sniper exhales.
I don’t move. I don’t speak. I just stare at the woman who just shattered the only truth I had left and wait for the next stone she’s about to throw. I expected a punch of hope. Instead, a weight slides up into my chest, feeling older and meaner. Relief and alertness braid into something that tastes bitter.
"Where did you find him?" I ask the question.
She looks at me then, and there’s a flash of guilt across her face like a bruise. "La Cueva del Jaguar in the Sierra Madre. They moved him from a safehouse in Venezuela to deeper in the mountains. I—" She pins me with a look, stubborn as bone. "I barely made it out."
She tells the rest in a clipped rush: the ambush, the fight, the way men showed up when they should have all been dead, the truck chase, the airstrip. How they jumped into the ventilation shafts, and how the night tasted like metal and diesel. And then, quietly, the part that makes the hair rise on my arms—how Nico told her,Find Stephano. Tell him: Temporale.
There it is, like a match struck in a room I’d already sealed. The old chord in me tightens.Temporale.
She meets my eyes again, and there’s no apology in the set of her jaw, only the fact of what she did. "He said there’s a palm drive," she tells me. "A safe-deposit box in Mexico City. We need to get it."
My first instincts are animal and immediate: the ownership that flared earlier reasserts itself with more ferocity; she’s mine to protect, yes, but also a live wire who brings heat into my center. When she mentions a drive, my mind shivers with the ledger and my father’s name. There’s a line connecting them now, and it goes through her.
She tries to sit up, and I put a proprietary hand flat on her sternum and force her back down, keeping my voice measured and final. "Where the hell do you think you’re going?" I demand icily.
Her mouth quirks; the defiance is absurd and infuriating. "I’m getting out of here, and then I'll find the drive," she snaps.
I can feel a dozen responses—kill her for the way she walked into my life, kiss her until she forgets herself—but they’re loud and stupid, and I don’t let them out. I lean closer instead, curious and furious and a little terrified at whatcuriousdoes to me when she’s near.
"You’ll do neither," I order. "You’ll stay. You’ll let me vet every face that looks at you. You’ll tell me everything now, and you don’t get to stand up on your feet again until I say so."
"I won't tell you, unless we go together." She bargains. Her accent is faint, but there. A memory of weathered consonants, Russian, the syllables like an exclamation point. I tuck it away the way I pocket knives: labeled and ready. Once Dre has a list of names, that should help usnarrow it down. Not that I expect it to be long. How many red-haired female assassins could there be?
Her good eye shoots fire at me, and God help me, but I like it. I like how defiant she is. Her mysteriousness I could do without, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't alluring as fuck. Just like the color of her eye. Jade green. The deepest, clearest green I've ever seen.
