The blade presses closer, just enough to make Leyla whimper.
“On your left,” Alex continues calmly, nodding toward Zack, “is the man you love. He’s bleeding. A lot. You could get to him. You might even save him.”
Her gaze flicks back to Leyla without losing its hold on me.
“On your right is Leyla. If you move toward him, I finish this before you take three steps.”
My chest tightens until it feels like it might collapse entirely, my body frozen between instinct and terror, heart tearing itself in two directions at once.
Alex smiles faintly, almost regretful.
“You don’t get to save everyone,” she says. “So choose.”
The warehouse falls into a silence so complete it feels unreal.
Zack lifts his head, his eyes finding mine, panic and something deeper flashing there. “Hazel,” he rasps. “Don’t?—”
Leyla’s tears spill silently down her cheeks, her eyes locked on mine, pleading without words.
My hands tremble at my sides, my breath shallow and uneven, the weight of the choice crushing, and deliberate, and cruel. And I understand, in that horrifying moment, that this was never about killing any of us. It was about power, and we all just walked right into her trap.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
DIE WITH A SMILE
HAZEL
Time does something strange when you’re asked to destroy yourself on command. It stretches and tightens all at once, every second pulling thin as wire, humming with pressure until I can feel it in my teeth. Alex’s knife stays at Leyla’s throat, steady and patient, like she’s done this a thousand times and knows exactly how long a person can hold hope before it collapses.
Zack is still on the floor to my left, blood soaking into concrete that doesn’t care, his jaw clenched so hard I can see the muscle jumping, His eyes are locked on mine like he’s trying to say everything at once without saying anything at all, his eyes fluttering, I watch as the man I’ve fallen in love with is dying right in front of my eyes.
I don’t move, not because I can’t, but because moving wrong will kill someone, though at this rate I’m running out of time.
Alex watches me with open curiosity now, head tilted slightly, as if she’s studying a puzzle she already solved and iswaiting for me to realize it. She thinks this is the end of the equation. Choice equals loss. Loss equals silence.
She’s wrong.
What she doesn’t account for is the space between moments, the breath people forget exists when they’re too busy counting down. I see it then, an almost indistinguishable movement that goes unheard and unnoticed.
Behind her, Cameron shifts.
It’s subtle, almost nothing at all. Just a redistribution of weight, a tightening in his posture that only someone who’s lived in danger learns to recognize. I see it out of the corner of my eye, feel it more than see it, the way you sense a wave before it breaks. His wrists are still marked red where the cuffs were, his movements stiff and slow on purpose, playing into the image Alex has already decided is true: that he’s exhausted, weak, done. She doesn’t even know that he’s there.
He isn’t finished.
Leyla’s eyes flick past my shoulder for half a second, just long enough to catch Cameron’s reflection in a metal beam. Something changes in her expression—not hope, exactly, but readiness. She stills, goes quiet, and as if almost trying to play along with what’s happening in front of us, playing Alex’s stupid little game.
Alex doesn’t notice. She’s still watching me.
“Tick,” she says softly, not unkindly.
That’s when Cameron moves.
He comes up behind Alex in a burst of motion so sudden it breaks the illusion she’s been controlling, one arm looping around her shoulders, the other slamming into her wrist in a sharp practiced strike meant to disarm, not kill. The knife skitters across the concrete with a metallic shriek, Leyla crying out as she stumbles forward out of Alex’s grip.
Everything explodes into motion.
Alex snarls, twisting hard, elbowing Cameron in the ribs with brutal precision. The gun comes up in her other hand as she half-turns. The shot goes wild, slamming into a beam overhead, sparks raining down as Cameron grunts and stumbles back, but doesn’t fall.
