The third was a boot to my ribs, the left side, directly into the bullet graze that was still healing. The pain was so acute and so specific that my vision went gray at the edges, and I heard a sound come out of me that I couldn’t have stopped if I’d tried. Something animal and raw that didn’t belong to the person I thought I was.
I stayed on my knees. They kept hitting me. Systematic, unhurried, even with the building burning around us. Fists and boots, my face, my ribs, my kidneys. The rhythm of it was theworst part, the patience, because it meant Kindt valued this more than his own escape.
The deal. I held on to the deal. Every blow was a payment, and the currency was my body, and the price was Sera walking away from this alive. I could afford it. I could afford anything as long as she was the return.
My vision was failing. Blood ran from my nose and from a cut above my right eye and from somewhere inside my mouth where my teeth had cut the inside of my cheek. The ground tilted and spun, and I couldn’t tell which direction was up except for the hands gripping my arms, holding me in place for the next impact.
Through the wreckage of my awareness, I could hear Sera. She was screaming my name, begging Kindt to stop. Raw, desperate, her voice cracking.
The deal was holding. She was alive. That was all that mattered.
Then Kindt’s voice cut through the noise, and everything changed. “Enough.”
The blows stopped. The hands kept holding me. I hung between them, my head down, blood dripping from my face onto the floor.
I heard Kindt moving. Heard the scuffle of her feet as he dragged Sera forward. His men wrenched my head up by my hair and forced me to look at him.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Kindt said.
The words were delivered in the same tone he’d used to discuss replacement costs for stolen children. The same operational calm.
But the words themselves were a knife through everything I’d been holding together.
“Killing you quickly would be wasteful. But killing you while she watches, and then taking my time making her sufferafterward?” He paused, and I could hear the calculation in the silence, the man weighing the pleasure against the logistics. “That’s a much better return on investment.”
He looked down at me. Adjusted his glasses with his free hand.
“She’s going to die very slowly, begging for me to finish it. Just thought you should know that before you die.”
I lunged for him. Everything I had left, every shred of strength that hadn’t been beaten out of me, I threw into reaching him.
It didn’t work.
His men held me. My arms strained against their grip, and my shoulders screamed but I couldn’t close the distance. I couldn’t reach her. I couldn’t stop what was about to happen, and the helplessness of it was worse than every blow I’d taken combined because the blows had been mine to absorb, and this was Sera and I could not protect her.
Kindt laughed. A short, genuine sound. The kind of laugh that came from a man who found real pleasure in another man’s powerlessness.
He pulled his gun and pressed it against my temple. The metal was warm from his hand.
“Any last words for the woman?”
I had nothing. No plan. No weapon. No angle. I had failed her more completely than I had ever failed Naomi.
Sera made a sound I’d never heard before and drove the heel of her palm into Kindt’s throat.
The strike was fast, committed, delivered with her full body weight behind it. She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t pull it. She hit him exactly where I’d taught her, targeting the soft tissue below the larynx, and she hit him like she meant to end him.
Kindt staggered backward. The gun left my temple. His hand went to his throat, and he made a choking sound, his glasses knocked sideways.
But it wasn’t enough. She couldn’t take the guards, and Kindt held up his hand to stop one of them from coming after her.
“Enough.” He backhanded her once, the sound echoing over the flames licking at our backs. “I’m going to enjoy my time with you.” He shoved her hard into the wall then pointed his gun back at my head. “But first let me make you an actual ghost.”
I heard the gunfire and waited for that last split second of pain before everything turned to nothing.
But it didn’t happen.
Instead Kindt jerked. More shots. His men jerked. Bodies fell.
