Chapter 28 Twenty-Seven
Getting shot hurt like hell, even when wearing a tailored bulletproof vest.
I let myself go limp against him. I let my eyes roll back, let my body become dead weight, let him catch me and hold me and believe he was cradling a corpse. It was the performance of a lifetime, measured in heartbeats.
His arms tightened around me as we hit the marble floor together, his damaged leg buckling beneath our combined weight. His chest heaved against my back, and his hands trembled where they gripped my shirt.
"Maxime."
I wanted to open my eyes. I wanted to tell him I was alive, that I was here, that the vest had held. But Shaw still had the gun, and he needed to believe I was dead. He needed that moment of triumph, that surge of adrenaline that would make him careless.
So I gave Algerone my death. I lay in his arms and didn't move, didn't breathe, didn't respond when his hand found my face.
I hadn't told him about the vest.
That decision would haunt me for whatever years I had left.
I'd made it alone, the way I'd made every decision that hurt him for three decades, convincing myself I knew best and convincing myself the deception served him.
The vest was a contingency, nothing more.
Shaw was unpredictable, and I'd learned long ago that the only body I could guarantee between Algerone and a bullet was my own.
But I hadn't considered what watching me die would do to him. If I had, I might have told him, and then he would have tried to protect me instead, and I couldn't allow that. His life mattered. Mine was negotiable.
His face shattered. This wasn't the Algerone who commanded boardrooms. This wasn't even the man who'd taken me apart with a riding crop and rebuilt me with whispered confessions.
This was Jackson Wheeler, the boy from the trailer park who'd beaten his stepfather to death with a Louisville Slugger and felt nothing but calm.
He lowered me to the marble floor, and the cold seeped through my shirt where his warmth had been. My Glock lay inches from my right hand. I kept my eyes nearly closed, watching him through my lashes as he rose to face Shaw.
"You killed him."
He spoke from somewhere deeper than vocal cords, from somewhere that remembered blood on broken glass and the smell of cheap beer and fear.
My chest ached, and not just from the impact of the bullet.
I wanted to reach for him and tell him I was alive, that I was here, that he didn't have to become this thing.
But Jackson Wheeler was the only one who could take that gun from Shaw.
So I stayed dead. I lay on cold marble three feet from the man I loved and watched him lose his mind, and I did nothing, because doing nothing was the only way to save him.
Shaw's smile wavered. He'd expected rage and threats, not this cold and terrible certainty walking toward him wearing a dead man's face.
"Well, yes. That was rather the point."
Algerone's cane whistled through the air like a headsman's axe.
Shaw ducked, but barely. The silver tip kissed his temple, leaving a thin red line that would have been his skull cracking open. The backswing caught him across the ribs with a sound like kindling snapping.
There was a slight hitch in Algerone's stride when his damaged leg took too much weight. Shaw staggered, gasping, gun trembling. But Algerone was already moving, not with the calculated grace of a CEO, but with the ugly, efficient brutality of a boy who'd learned to fight in the dirt.
The cane found Shaw's wrist, and bone cracked. The gun skittered across the marble.
"Thirty-two years." Algerone spoke in a register I'd never heard from him. "He loved me for thirty-two years, and you murdered him like he was nothing."
Shaw rolled behind his desk, blood streaming from his nose. "He was nothing! Just another corporate whore who—"
Algerone's cane splintered the rosewood where Shaw's head had been. Shaw lunged for a letter opener, slashing wildly. The silver blade found flesh, tearing across Algerone's forearm, and I had to lock every muscle in my body to keep from moving.
He was hurt and bleeding, and I was lying here playing dead while the only person I'd ever loved bled onto imported marble.
The cane's silver tip opened Shaw from wrist to elbow. Shaw hissed, dropping the blade. But he fought like a rat in a corner, dirty and desperate, and his boot found Algerone's damaged leg at the exact spot where titanium pins held shattered bone together.
Algerone grunted, the sound barely audible. Anyone else would have missed it.
I didn't miss it. I never missed anything about him.
Shaw tackled him into the liquor cabinet. Crystal exploded, and amber whiskey mixed with blood as both men crashed to the floor. My fingers inched toward my Glock, but Shaw was already moving and reaching and closing his hand around the gun.
"Now then." Shaw hauled himself upright, left hand steady despite the carnage. "Let's discuss your surrender."
Algerone knelt in broken glass. Blood ran from a cut above his eyebrow, but his green eyes still burned with that terrible calm. He looked at Shaw like a man counting the seconds until death.
"You should thank me," Shaw continued, gun steady at Algerone's temple. "You've just proven everything I said about the old ways. All that legendary control, all that strategic brilliance, reduced to animal rage the moment someone hurt your favorite pet."
The insult should have stung, but it didn't. I'd been called worse by men who knew me better. What mattered was the muzzle kissing Algerone's forehead and the finger tightening on the trigger.
Shaw leaned closer. "Any last words for your dead lover?"
I rose in a movement that was smooth and automatic. My Glock was already sighted on Shaw's chest before my knees fully straightened.
I fired.
The suppressed round punched through his sternum. Shaw's gun dropped from his hand as he stared down at the spreading red across his white shirt.
"Impossible." Blood frothed at the corners of his mouth. "I killed you. I watched you die."
"Kevlar." I kept the gun trained on him as his legs buckled. "You should have aimed for the head."
Shaw hit the wall, hands pressed uselessly to the hole in his chest. His breathing turned wet and rattling.
And Algerone stared at me like he was seeing a ghost.
"Maxime." He rose slowly, carefully, glass crunching under his shoes, and looked at me like I might disappear if he blinked.
I wanted to close the distance between us and press my face against his chest and breathe him in and apologize for every second of grief I'd caused him. But Shaw was still gurgling against the wall, still aware, still watching with hatred in his fading eyes.
"You wanted to be the one," I said quietly. "He's yours."
Algerone's gaze held mine. I saw the war in his expression, the part of him that wanted to touch me fighting against the part that wanted to finish what he'd started. I knew which part would win. I'd always known.
He turned to Shaw.
The cane lay in the debris of broken crystal and splintered wood. Algerone collected it slowly, blood dripping from his forearm where the letter opener had marked him. He moved as if pain was a foreign concept, like the leg that had been screaming at him for months had simply stopped mattering.
Shaw tried to speak. Crimson bubbles formed on his lips.
"You murdered over a thousand people in Oklahoma." Algerone stood over him, the silver tip of his cane pressing into the wound I'd made. Shaw convulsed, a strangled cry escaping his ruined chest. "You destroyed my hometown. Threatened my sons. Tried to take everything I built."
He leaned closer, and Shaw's eyes went wide with terror.
"But none of that is why you're dying tonight." Algerone spoke in something barely human, something that belonged to a boy in a trailer park with a baseball bat in his hands. "You shot him. You made me watch him fall. You made me believe, even for a moment, that I'd lost him."
The cane rose.
"That's why."
The silver handle came down on Shaw's skull with a sound I'd never forget, and then it came down again, and then once more. Shaw's body jerked with each impact, then went still.
Algerone stood over the corpse. His chest heaved. Blood and whiskey soaked his ruined suit. His hands trembled on the cane, the adrenaline finally catching up with him.
When he turned to face me, his eyes were wet.
"You let me think you were dead."
His accusation hit harder than Shaw's bullet.
"You watched me lose my mind, watched me nearly get myself killed, and you just lay there."
"I had to sell it." The excuse sounded hollow even to me. "Shaw needed to believe—"
"You had to?" His green eyes blazed. "Do you have any idea what that did to me? What I became when I thought I'd lost you?"
I knew. I'd watched it happen. I'd watched Jackson Wheeler claw his way out of the grave Algerone had buried him in, and I'd done nothing to stop it because stopping it would have meant revealing myself too soon, and revealing myself too soon would have meant Shaw winning, and Shaw winning would have meant Algerone dying.
I'd made a calculation. I'd weighed his momentary grief against his permanent death, and I'd chosen to hurt him.
"I'm sorry." Everything I said to him was inadequate. "I had to wait for the right moment."
He looked like he wanted to strangle me. His hands flexed at his sides, and I wouldn't have blamed him if he'd used them. I deserved worse than his anger. I deserved to spend the rest of my life making up for every wound I'd ever inflicted in the name of protection.
Then his shoulders sagged as exhaustion replaced rage.
"Don't ever do that again."
"I won't."
We both knew it was a lie. If the situation repeated itself tomorrow, I would make the same choice. I would always choose his life over his peace of mind, his survival over his trust. That was the shape of my devotion: selfish, controlling, desperate.
He knew it. And he was choosing to stay, anyway.
Alarms screamed through the building.
"You can punish me later," I said, already moving toward the door. Each breath sent spikes through my bruised ribs, but pain was just information. "Multiple teams incoming."
Algerone collected his cane and tested his weight. Blood still ran from his forehead, but his eyes had sharpened again.
Reid's voice crackled through my earpiece: "Package secured. Banshee prototype acquired. Extraction point Alpha, fifteen minutes."
"Copy. Moving now."
The elevator doors opened as we reached them. Six guards stepped out, weapons rising. I dropped two before they identified targets. Algerone's cane crushed a third guard's windpipe while his left hand grabbed a fallen sidearm.
We moved through the casino in tandem, the way we'd moved through crises for three decades, past slot machines and gaming tables, past screaming civilians and emergency strobes painting everything in pulsing red.
"Left side," he called, spotting muzzle flashes through a roulette pit.
I put three rounds through the ornate screen. Someone screamed. A rifle clattered across marble.
The stairwell gaped ahead. My ribs protested every jarring step, but I'd functioned through worse pain. I'd functioned through eighteen months of watching him not want me. This was nothing.
On the tenth floor, his leg betrayed him.
He caught the wall, jaw locked against the agony I knew was radiating up his hip, into his spine, through every nerve ending that hadn't healed right after the explosion. I'd watched him fight this pain for a year and a half. I knew exactly how bad it had to be for him to show it.
"Go." He tried to wave me forward. "Complete the mission."
I slid my arm around his waist instead.
The contact sent fire through my cracked ribs, but I'd spent thirty-two years putting his needs before my own comfort. This was no different.
"Together," I said. "Always."
His eyes found mine in the emergency lighting. Something passed between us that was not forgiveness or absolution, just acknowledgment that we were both too broken to survive alone and too stubborn to stop trying.
We took the remaining floors slowly. My arm supported his weight while he leaned on his cane, and I memorized the feel of him against my side, the warmth of his body and the rhythm of his labored breathing.
The service exit opened onto an alley behind the casino. Reid's team waited in black SUVs, engines running.
"Move!" Reid called, laying suppressing fire as Shaw's remaining security poured from the building.
We reached the convoy as the pursuit cars rounded the far corner. Algerone collapsed into the passenger seat. I slid in beside him, and tires screamed against asphalt as we accelerated into Macau's maze of traffic and neon.
The ride to the harbor took twenty minutes. No one spoke. Algerone's breathing was labored, his face pale with pain and exhaustion. I wanted to touch him. I kept my hands in my lap instead, uncertain of my welcome.
The extraction boat waited at a private marina. Only when we were safely in the cabin, Macau's lights shrinking behind us, did he finally reach for me.
His hands framed my face like I might disappear, like I was something precious instead of something broken.
"When you fell." His voice cracked. "When you didn't move. I thought I'd lost you forever."
"I know." I covered his hands with mine. "I'm here."
He kissed me, tasting of copper and victory and the whiskey that had soaked into his ruined suit. When we broke apart, his forehead pressed to mine.
"Never again," he breathed. "I can't lose you."
"You won't."
It was another lie, another promise I couldn't guarantee. But he needed to hear it, and I needed to say it, and maybe that was enough. Maybe love was just two people telling each other the lies they needed to survive.
The boat cut through the dark water. His hand found mine in the shadows, fingers interlacing like they belonged there.
"I'm still angry with you," he said quietly.
"I know." I squeezed his hand. "You can stay angry as long as you need to."
His thumb traced across my knuckles in a touch that was gentle and forgiving in a way his words weren't ready to be.
"But I'm glad you're alive to be angry at."
I pressed my lips to his shoulder, breathing him in. "I'm glad too," I whispered. "More than you know."