Chapter 37
Archie
The fucker shot me.
Twice.
Straight through the knees—because of course he did. Blood poured out of me and soaked into the dark gravel, and my first coherent thought wasn’t I might be dying, but that bastard just ruined my best suit.
Tailored. Imported. Perfectly pressed this morning.
Gone.
I made a mental note to bill him for it. Assuming I lived long enough to be petty about it.
The pain hit a second later—hot, savage, intimate. The kind of pain that didn’t just hurt, but demanded attention. My legs screamed as fire tore through my tendons. My dignity crawled off into the night and never looked back.
I lay there, flat on my back, staring up at the indifferent sky, and had to admit something.
This was not how I’d imagined my final moments.
If I was being honest—and death had a way of demanding honesty—I’d always imagined a beach.
White sand. A woman beside me who didn’t look like she wanted to escape through the nearest exit.
A drink in my hand—something with salt on the rim and too much alcohol to care about the future.
Not cold gravel. Not blood pooling beneath me. Not my knees staging a full-scale mutiny.
Life, it seemed, had a sense of humour.
And it was a mean one.
Smoke hung low over the road, stinging my eyes. Metal ticked as it cooled. Somewhere close by, one of my men made a wet, gargling sound that suggested his lungs had given up their fight.
I turned my head. Or tried to.
Most of them were down. Dead. Dying. Or doing that thing men did when they knew help wasn’t coming—lying very still and hoping someone mistook it for composure.
No one was coming for me.
That was… enlightening.
My knees hurt like a bitch.
It wasn’t a dignified pain, either. It was loud. Screaming. Every pulse of blood felt like a personal insult. I’d been shot before, but knees were a special kind of betrayal. They weren’t vital, but they were intimate. They reminded you exactly how much you depended on them.
I laughed. Softly. It came out strangled, more breath than sound.
So this was it.
I stared up at the sky, black and endless and profoundly uninterested in me, and felt something settle into place. Clarity, maybe. Or the kind of calm that showed up when denial finally packed its bags and hit the road.
Mikayla.
Of course she was there. In my head. In everything.
I’d been so sure. So convinced that if I just held on tightly enough, she’d come around. That love could be negotiated. Structured. Enforced.
Jesus Christ.
Now, with a gun pointed at my head and blood pooling beneath me, it was painfully obvious how stupid that had been.
It would’ve ended the same way it always did.
I smiled faintly, thinking of my wives.
Wives. Plural. People always forgot that part.
No one really knew what happened to them. The public narrative was delightfully tragic—dead women, lost to unfortunate circumstances. People loved a grieving husband. Loved a man marked by loss. And it did wonders for my reputation.
The truth was much less dramatic.
They hadn’t wanted me.
And once I realized that—once I accepted that love given under duress was just another form of decay—I let them go.
One lived out her days in the Caribbean, living a quiet life in a little house, where she spent her days gardening.
The other preferred France. The south of it. Lavender fields and sunsets forever.
I’d made sure they were comfortable. Safe. Forgotten.
I wasn’t cruel. Just… lonely.
That was the part no one ever understood.
I wanted what everyone wanted. To be loved. To belong to someone. To build something that stayed. I wanted a family. A legacy that wasn’t just blood and fear and money.
I’d honestly believed Mikayla could be that. That if I showed her enough of the good parts—if I convinced her—we could make it work.
What a fucking joke.
Footsteps crunched closer.
I didn’t need to look to know it was Gianni.
He stopped just within my line of sight. Calm. Controlled. Irritatingly alive.
The gun lifted. Steady. Professional.
Ah.
There it was.
I took a shallow breath and met his eyes.
“Before you do it,” I said, my voice rough but stubbornly still mine, “I need to give you a message for Mikayla.”
Gianni didn’t blink.
The gun stayed trained on my head. He had that look on his face—the one that said he’d already decided how this ended and was just being polite enough to let the universe catch up.
“I never meant to break her,” I went on. “I honestly thought if I held her close enough, she’d want to stay.”
That naturally earned me nothing but silence. Gianni Cavalho had always been infuriatingly economical with his reactions. Why waste emotion when you could store it away like ammunition?
Pain flared through my knees again—bright and ugly—and I sucked in a breath through my teeth, letting it pass before I spoke.
“You and I?” I said quietly. “We’re the same kind of monster.”
That did it.
He gave me a flicker. A tiny tightening around his eyes. Recognition, whether he liked it or not.
“The difference,” I continued, “is that you figured out when to let her go.”
He scoffed. Soft. Almost offended.
“I didn’t let her go,” he said flatly. “She left.”
I smiled despite myself. Blood loss did strange things to your sense of humour.
“See?” I murmured. “Turns out women hate being treated like hostile takeovers.”
The gun shifted slightly. Not away. Just… adjusted.
“So if you kill me,” I went on, breath hitching despite my best efforts, “you prove her right. You become exactly what she’s afraid of.”
Gianni went still.
“And if you don’t,” I added, softer now, “you give her something neither of us ever had.”
His jaw tightened.
“A choice,” I said.
The word sat between us, heavy and thick and full of possibility.
The gun hovered there, suspended, like even it wasn’t sure which way it wanted to go.
I laughed quietly—more air than sound. “You know what the truly tragic part is?”
Gianni didn’t answer.
“I think she could’ve loved me,” I said. “Not the version of me I insisted on being. But the one I never let her see.” I glanced up at him. “You ever wonder how different things would’ve been if we’d both just stopped trying to win?”
He stared down at me, eyes cold, searching.
“I don’t do ‘what ifs,’” he said.
“Pity,” I replied. “You’d be brilliant at them.”
The silence stretched again. The night seemed to lean in, curious.
“Do me a favour,” I murmured at last. “Tell her I’m sorry.”
The gun lifted a fraction higher.
This was it.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t wait for control. Or power. Or one last clever move. I waited for mercy.
And then—
Gianni’s phone rang.
Sharp. Invasive. Obnoxiously cheerful in the middle of a near-execution.
He froze.
I stared at the glowing screen like it was a miracle.
Gianni cursed under his breath, lowered the gun just enough to glance at the caller ID, then turned away from me as he answered.
“You have impeccable timing,” he said.
I lay there bleeding on the gravel, staring up at the stars, and let out a shaky laugh.
Because if I survived this, I was absolutely telling everyone I’d been saved by a ringtone.
Fate, it seemed, also had a sense of humour.
And like Gianni Cavalho—it was an absolute bastard.