Someone else was here.
Watching, waiting.
Hewes got the blaster up, pressed it against Merrilee's temple hard enough to make her gasp.
"Got you," he panted, his face flushed with exertion and triumph. "Finally got—"
The tip of a blade emerged from his chest, punching through sternum and heart with surgical precision.
Just appeared—like the universe had simply decided Hewes needed a sword through his heart and had made it so.
He made a wet, choking sound, his eyes going wide with shock and incomprehension. The blaster fell from his hand, clattering against the concrete, and Merrilee scrambled away, putting distance between them.
Persico stood behind Hewes, his massive form blocking out the light streaming through the warehouse's broken roof, his dark eyes cold and merciless. Satisfied.
"You talk too much," the Kerzak said, his voice carrying that familiar note of disdain. Hewes mouth worked as if to argue with Persico, but only blood and foam fell from his lips.
Persico yanked the blade free with a wet sucking sound and brought it down in a single, brutal arc.
Hewes's head hit the ground and rolled, his eyes still wide with shock, mouth still open in a scream that would never come.
His body followed a moment later, crumpling like a puppet with its strings cut, blood pooling beneath it in an expanding circle that spread across the concrete like a dark mirror.
The warehouse fell silent except for the sound of our breathing—harsh and ragged and alive.
Merrilee stumbled toward me, and I caught her with my good arm, pulled her against me despite the agony in my chest and the blood still flowing from my wounds.
She was shaking. Or maybe I was.
"It's over," I managed, the words coming out wet and broken. "He's dead. It's over."
Persico cleaned his blade on Hewes's clothes, then sheathed it, the motion speaking of long experience and absolute comfort with violence.
"The ship is mine," he said calmly, as if he hadn't just decapitated a man. "I made sure Hewes found it. Easier to track him that way."
I stared at him through the haze of pain, my mind struggling to process his words. "You were tracking him?"
"From the moment he set foot on Palaydium." Persico's expression was unreadable. "I've been waiting for the right moment to end him. Waiting for clearance."
Something about the way he said it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Not the words themselves, but the tone—the casual mention of "clearance" like it was something he dealt with regularly.
Like he answered to someone.
"You're not just a crime lord," I said slowly, the pieces clicking into place even as blood loss made my thoughts swim.
Merrilee tensed against me, her head lifting to look at Persico with new wariness.
The Kerzak's expression didn't change, but something flickered in his eyes—assessment, calculation, and then what might have been approval.
"Oh, I am a crime lord. Very much so. But I'm also a lot of other things." He reached into his coat and pulled out a small object, holding it up to the light.
A Welati stone.
Just like the one I'd given Merrilee, glowing with that same inner luminescence, those same swirls of blue and gold running through deep green like captured starlight.
"Asad Intelligence," Persico said, his voice matter-of-fact. "I've been embedded here for twenty-three years, watching the power structures, tracking the flow of illegal goods and information, reporting back on potential threats to Alliance stability." He turned the stone over in his hand, the lightcatching on its polished surface. "Playing the part of a crime lord so convincingly that even the real criminals believed it."
"You're a spy." Merrilee's voice came out choked, disbelieving.
