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Kento’s lips curve in. A beautiful ghost of his trademark smirk.

You would jump off a cliff for a bet?

I’d jump off a cliff for you, prince.

“Save me one more time.” His chained hands whip around, driving a hit into Adrian’s throat.

CRACK.

Adrian chokes on a spray of blood, his finger reflexively seizing on the trigger.

BANG.

The second shot tears through the left side of Kento’s ribs.

Kento uses the man’s momentum to drive them both backward, straight toward the edge of the bluff.

“No!” I scream.

Kento locks eyes with me one last time.

In that final second, as his boots clear the edge of the limestone cliff, he smiles.

And then gravity takes them.

Kento Kazuma drags Adrian backward into the empty sky, vanishing over the precipice into the eighty-foot drop toward the black lake below.

“No!”

The scream doesn’t belong to a human being. It is the sound of a soul being ripped in half.

I spin on my heel toward Alya. She is standing there, her mouth open in a soundless gasp of shock.

She begins to turn toward me. “Ilya—”

I raise the gun.

BANG.

The first bullet punches through her right collarbone, spinning her hard to the left.

BANG.

The second tears through her sternum.

BANG.

The third catches her in the lower abdomen, folding her forward as her knees buckle.

Click. Click. Click.

Alya collapses like a puppet with its strings severed. Her blond hair spreads across the dark puddle of her own blood. Her green eyes, my eyes, stare up at the weeping clouds.

I throw the empty gun onto the rocks and break into a sprint toward the edge of the cliff.

“No, no, no, no—”

I plant my right boot on the edge of the limestone rock and throw my entire body out into the open, empty air.