"Shut up." He pulls me fully from the car, and I wrench hard sideways, breaking his grip, stumbling but staying on my feet. The cold ground, the noise of the battle on the other side of the building, the sodium light turning everything jaundiced and wrong. He has a knife. Long and flat, already in his hand, and my body registers it before my brain does, every muscle going cold and tight at once.
Run. Scream. Do something.
"You know what you took from me?" His voice is climbing, the fracture in it widening with every word. "Twenty years I waited. Twenty years I watched him build something I was going to inherit, and then you walk in, and suddenly there's a baby, suddenly he loves you, suddenly everything I was owed gets handed to a child that doesn't even exist yet—"
"It was never yours," I say. Keep his eyes. Keep him talking. "Axel never said—"
"He owed me." Raw and torn. "Elena left me to him. He owes me everything."
He lunges.
I throw myself sideways, and the knife hits my shoulder. The pain isn’t what I expected; it doesn't come on cleanly. Instead, it explodes—white, massive, and overwhelming—ripping straight through the brief moment of shock that tried to settle first. I fallto both hands and knees, and the impact shoots up through the wound. I hear a sound that’s not quite human—high and broken—and my left arm starts shaking. I can already feel warmth quickly soaking through my sleeve.
Get up. Get up right now.
I get up.
Ten feet, twelve, running aimlessly, just away, and my arm is screaming with every stride. I can hear him behind me, then his hand is in my hair, yanking me backward. The pain from my shoulder spikes so violently that my vision smears at the edges.
He spins me to face him.
"You should have stayed away from him," he breathes. Something is moving behind his eyes that I don't have a name for. Something that is completely at peace with whatever comes next, and that is more terrifying than the knife, more terrifying than anything. "You should have just stayed away."
"LEO." Viktor's voice, close now, coming fast. "Put it down—"
Leo doesn't look at Viktor. His eyes stay on mine, and he drives the knife toward my thigh.
I twist, trying to turn away from it, and it doesn't matter. It hits the outside of my thigh, and this pain is entirely different from the shoulder — deeper, hotter, with a wrongness that runs allthe way down to a spot I can't pinpoint, a tearing feeling that doesn't stop even when the blade does, echoing over and over while I still feel it. My leg just stops working. Not a choice. Just a fact. The ground rises up, and my cheek hits the cold concrete as I press both hands to my thigh. Blood immediately soaks through my fingers, slick, warm, and way too much. I think with incredible clarity—
The baby. Get up. The baby.
I try.
My arms shake. My thigh won't bear weight. I press harder against the wound, and the pain whites out my vision for two full seconds. When it clears, Leo is standing over me, and I cannot get up— I keep trying, but I just can't.
"AURORA."
The world stops.
His voice tears across the entire battle like the battle isn't there, like nothing between him and me has any substance at all. Raw and enormous and nothing, nothing like the controlled man I know, just my name ripped out of him from somewhere without walls or ceilings.
I lift my head.
He's coming from the far side of the building, still fighting, two men trying to stop him, and he's going through them like they're weather, like they're theoretical, like the concept of obstruction no longer applies to him. Blood on his face. Moving with something beyond rage, beyond fear, something that has collapsed all the way down to a single point, and that point is me.
Leo spins toward the sound.
Axel raises the gun.
The shot rings out.
35
AXEL
The shot misses.
Leo drops, and the bullet sparks off the concrete behind him, and something in me goes completely quiet. Not calm. The opposite of calm. The kind of quiet that exists on the other side of every feeling, where the only thing left is what needs to happen next.