The guard swings his weapon toward Phoenix.
Phoenix is faster.
The shot is very loud in the enclosed space. The guard goes down and stays down and the echo of it rings off the walls and then the warehouse is quiet except for the distant sounds of the fight still happening outside. Phoenix crosses the floor toward me in long strides.
"Jade." He drops to his knees in front of me, his hands going immediately to the rope at my wrists.
"I'm okay," I say, which is not entirely true but is true enough. "Phoenix, listen to me. Dominic isn't?—"
His hands work at the knot, fingers moving fast. "My father's team is outside. We tracked him here two hours ago and I told them I'd wait and I—" He stops. "I heard the gunfire start and I couldn't."
"You were supposed to wait."
"I know."
"He predicted this. He told me you'd do exactly this."
Phoenix looks up at me, and whatever is in his eyes in that moment is not something I have words for. He has the expression of a man who knows he has made the mistake he was warned against but cannot bring himself to regret any of them.
"Are you hurt?" His voice drops. His hands have stilled on the rope.
"My ribs. My face. Nothing that won't heal." I hold his gaze. "The rope. Keep going."
He goes back to the knot.
"Drop the gun, Crawford."
The voice comes from the shadows to the left, from the gap between two stacked pallets where the warehouse light doesn't reach. It is calm and flat and utterly certain of itself. Dominic steps forward into the light with his weapon already leveled, and I understand immediately why he waited. He wanted Phoenix disarmed and distracted, hands on the rope, eyes on me. He was patient until the last possible second.
Phoenix goes completely still.
"Drop it," Dominic says again. "Or I put a bullet in your spine and you spend whatever's left of your life in a chair. Your choice."
Phoenix sets the gun on the floor. Dominic kicks it across the concrete, well out of reach, and circles around to face him, keeping the distance between them constant and controlled. He looks the same as he always looks. Dark jacket, pale eyes, the horrible cologne I can smell even from here. The only thing different is the quality of his stillness, something in it that has shifted from patience into arrival.
"You came alone." His eyes move over Phoenix with something that might be appreciation. "How romantic and stupid."
"Let her go." Phoenix's voice is level. "This is between us."
"It stopped being just between us the moment she watched you kill my brother and helped you bury him." Dominic glances at me briefly, then back to Phoenix. "She's part of this. Just as guilty as you are."
"She's innocent. Marcus attacked her. He was going to?—"
"I don't care." The flatness in his voice cracks, just slightly, just enough to show what's underneath it, something hot and damaged. "He was my brother. My blood. Whatever he did or didn't do, he was mine, and you beat him to death."
Phoenix says nothing. The warehouse breathes around us, the chain overhead, the distant sounds of the fight outside going quieter now, which could mean anything.
Dominic raises the gun until it's level with Phoenix's head.
"Any last words?"
My wrists are almost free. The rope has one loop left, pulled tight by hours of work and bleeding skin, and I need fifteen more seconds and I need Phoenix to still be standing at the end of them.
Phoenix's eyes find mine.
He sees. I watch him understand what he's looking at, the slight movement of my arms, the angle of my shoulders, and something shifts in his face so quickly that only someone who knows it as well as I do would catch it. He looks back at Dominic.
"Your brother was a rapist," he says, very clearly. "And a coward. He deserved exactly what he got.”
