I stand on the dance floor.
In the black dress. In the neon light. With the music booming and the crowd moving around me and a gun pointed at my chest from across a room full of people who don’t know what’s happening.
Our eyes remain locked.
His narrow.
And I feel it. The specific, crystalline, tequila-sharpened clarity of a woman who has looked at her own death twicethis month and is looking at it a third time and has decided something that exists below fear and beyond calculation.
You took my pack. My safety. My body. My years. My health. My nest. My right to eat a second plate of food without being mocked. My right to exist in a relationship that didn’t include alleys and rain and the word “no” being treated as a suggestion.
You took everything.
And I’m still here.
Standing. Dancing. Alive in a way you never wanted me to be.
So if this is how it ends—in a bar, in a dress someone bought me because they wanted to see me in it, on a night when I finally learned what happiness feels like—then fine.
At least I know now.
At least I got to feel it.
I smirk.
The expression settling on my lips with the calm, absolute, unbreakable certainty of a woman who has made peace with the only card she has left to play.
And in my mind, in the silence beneath the music and beneath the fear and beneath the three weeks of healing that have taught me what I’m losing, I think:
Go ahead.
Pull the trigger.
CHAPTER 28
One More Round
~ROMAN~
The moment my arm is around her waist, I pull the trigger.
The sound is a detonation.
Not the muted, range-filtered report of a weapon discharged through ear protection in a controlled environment. The raw, concussive, full-frequency blast of a firearm discharged in an enclosed space where the acoustics are designed to amplify music and have just amplified something that is not music. The sound punches through the bass line like a fist through paper—shredding the rhythm, obliterating the beat, replacing the dance floor’s sonic architecture with the singular, unmistakable frequency that every human being on the planet recognizes at a biological level.
Gunshot.
The round travels.
Twenty meters. The distance I’ve been closing for the last forty-five seconds—moving through the crowd with the precise, angle-calculating, sightline-maintaining focus of a man who hastrained for this exact scenario approximately six hundred times and never once imagined it would involve a dance floor and neon lighting and the woman he loves standing in the crosshairs wearing a black cocktail dress.
The bullet hits the target.
His arm. The right arm. The one holding the weapon. The specific, calculated point of impact that disables the threat without killing the intelligence asset, because this man has information and dead men don’t talk and I need every word that his shattered nerve endings will eventually allow him to produce.
He cries out.
The sound is guttural. Animal. The involuntary vocalization of a body that has just received a .45 caliber round through the forearm and is communicating the fact through every available channel. His hand opens—the grip on his weapon dissolving as the damaged muscles and severed tendons lose their ability to maintain the tension required to hold a firearm. The gun falls. Clatters against the dance floor with the small, metallic sound of an object that was pointed at my Omega thirty seconds ago and is now a piece of evidence.
