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“Alya, no—”

“Shh,” she breathes against my ear. “Let’s make it poetic, Ilya. The Bratva prince, driven mad, shoots his lover in a fit of frantic self-defense before falling to his death. It’s practically Shakespeare.”

“No!” I scream, using every ounce of strength left in my mangled body to pull my arm downward, straining against her grip until the tendons in my wrist feel like they are tearing. “NO, ALYA, STOP! DON’T!”

Kento looks right into my eyes through the rain.

His expression is soft.

He is always so… soft with me. It is a peculiar sort of blasphemy, really, that a man with so much violence in his bones can look at me as though tenderness were the only instinct he’d ever possessed.

She throws her entire body weight behind her fingers, squeezing down on mine.

BANG.

The concussive blast blows through my eardrums, tearing the sound out of the world, and the bullet slams into Kento’s right shoulder.

The impact jerks his upper body backward, tearing a hole through his leather jacket.

I drive my head backward with everything I have, and the back of my skull slams directly into the bridge of Alya’s nose.

“Ah!” she shrieks, her grip loosening as blood erupts from her face.

I drive my left elbow into her ribs, spinning inside the circle of her arms and ripping my right hand free. My fingers clamp tight around the gun, tearing it completely out of her hands as she stumbles backward, crashing hard onto her hands and knees.

I rack the slide with a snap and bring the barrel down, aiming it directly between her eyes.

“I will fucking end you!” I snap, my entire body convulsing with such uncontrollable fury that the sights of my gun tremble against Alya’s forehead. “I will blow your head off right here!” I barely recognize my own voice. The words seem to come from somewhere beneath consciousness, dragged out of a primitive, monstrous recess of me. Alya. My Alya. I have never, not in my most depraved nightmare, imagined pointing a weapon at her, much less threatening to pull the trigger.

I love her more than I love myself. I would have torn the flesh from my own bones before allowing anyone to lay a finger on her. And yet here I stand, staring down the barrel at someone I would have died to protect, because she has hurt Kento. I can’t reconcile the two truths. I can’t comprehend how the same heart can contain such ferocious devotion to them both and still produce this homicidal impulse.

Alya wipes the sleeve of her wool sweater across her face, smearing bright red across her mouth and chin.

“Try it,” she rasps, pointing a bloody finger past my shoulder. “Try it, Ilya! He dies first!”

I glance sideways. Adrian has jammed the gun harder into Kento’s temple.

“Drop the gun!” Adrian screams. “Drop it, or I blow his brains out sooner than planned.”

Kento’s face is pale. Yet his spine is straight as iron. He keeps his dark, obsidian eyes locked entirely on me. He is strangely quiet, which is never a good sign. I can practically see the gears turning behind his eyes, and whatever he is planning, I have a very strong feeling I am not going to like it.

“Give me the gun, Ilya,” Alya says, getting to her feet, holding one hand out. “Give it to me, or Adrian puts a second bullet through his skull right now. You have three seconds.”

“Alya, please…” The venom vanishes from my voice. I look at Kento. The blood is pooling under his knees now. He is going to die right in front of me because I am too weak to protect him and too much of a coward to be honest from the start. “Don’t do this… please…”

“One,” Alya counts.

My fingers loosen on the grip.

I can’t let him die. If I give her the gun, maybe I can tackle Adrian. Maybe I can throw myself in front of the bullet. Maybe—

“Prince.”

His voice reaches me. I turn and look at him. He looks like he has decided something.

“I owe you a bet.”

My eyebrows furrow. “What…?”