Tone
I shoved my door open and stepped out of the car, anger hitting me fast and hot now that the adrenaline had somewhere to go.
“What the hell, Archie?”
Archie didn’t flinch. He slipped the weapon away with practiced ease, adjusting his cuffs like he’d just finished a business meeting. Which, in essence, he had.
I stared at him.
“You’re joking.”
His expression remained neutral.
“Am I?”
I took a step toward him, fury rising sharp and immediate.
“You just executed two men in the middle of the street.”
“They were following you.”
“And???” I roared. “You don’t just go around shooting people because they’re following someone.”
Archie glanced at the bodies. Then back at me. His tone didn’t change.
“Of course, Tone,” he said dryly. “They were most definitely joining you for tea.”
I clenched my jaw.
“That’s not the point.”
“It is precisely the point.”
“You don’t know who they were,” I snapped. “You don’t know what they wanted. Now we have two bodies and zero information.”
“We have two fewer problems,” he corrected.
“Problems?” I repeated incredulously. “Looks to me like you’re the only problem here.”
His gaze sharpened slightly.
“I did what had to be done.”
I laughed once, sharp and humorless.
“I don’t need a babysitter, Archie.”
“Sure doesn’t look that way to me, Tone.”
“You were following me.”
A beat of silence. There it was. My lightbulb moment. Why was Archie Popovich following me?
His gaze held mine. Unapologetic.
“Yes.”
My stomach tightened, irritation sharpening into something far less manageable.
“Why?”
In true Archie style, he didn’t answer. He had a talent for silence; he weighed words before he spent them, decided if you were worth the effort before offering anything at all.
It was infuriating. One of many things about him that got under my skin far more easily than I cared to admit.
“That is not relevant,” he said finally.
I stared at him.
“Not relevant?” I repeated. “You just killed two men and you think that isn’t relevant?”
“They were following you.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you were following me.”
His expression didn’t shift. But something in his eyes darkened. Quiet. Dangerous.
“What matters,” he said softly, “is that I got to you before anyone else could.”
I exhaled slowly, dragging a hand through my hair.
“This is insane,” I muttered.
Behind him, two dead bodies lay crumpled in the car.
Blood spread through the men's clothes, dark and glossy under the streetlight—already beginning to thicken at the edges.
I noticed the smell a second later. Metallic. Warm. Real.
My stomach turned sharply, something cold sliding through my veins as the moment caught up with me all at once.
He’d killed them. Not in a struggle. Not in self-defense. Clean. Controlled. Final. Execution style. The Pope.
I stood there, rooted to the spot, my mind scrambling to catch up with what I’d just witnessed—what he’d just done.
Part of me wanted to scream. Another part wanted to run.
And a darker, more dangerous part of me wanted to lunge at him and demand how he could stand there so calmly with two deaths on his hands.
But I didn’t move. I just stared.
Because I didn’t know what I was feeling.
Horror. Shock. Anger. All the things I didn’t want to name. And worse—what it meant about me for not being afraid of him.
“We have to deal with this now,” I said, gesturing toward them. “You can’t just leave them here.”
“I am aware.”
“Are you?” I shot back. “Because it looks a lot like you just made a mess and expected someone else to clean it up.”
A flicker of amusement passed through his expression.
“I assumed,” he said calmly, “that you would be grateful.”
I let out a sharp breath.
“You’re un-fucking-believable.”
But I was already moving. Because as much as I hated it, we couldn’t just leave them here.
I stopped beside him briefly, my voice low, edged with anger.
“Wait until Raze hears about this,” I muttered.
“I’ll take care of your brother, Tone. In fact, I’ll tell him myself.”
My jaw tightened. “Well, good fucking luck.”
His gaze dropped to me again. Steady. Unshaken. His eyes held mine, something cold and absolute settling behind them.
“Just so you know, I would do it again.”
A shiver ran down my spine despite myself. Because beneath the control, beneath the calm—there was something else. Something lethal. And that—more than the bodies only feet away from us—was what unsettled me most.
“Are you sure you don’t know who they are?” Archie asked.
His voice came low through the darkness, steady and unreadable, as if we were discussing the weather and not standing beside a car carrying two dead men.
We had driven deep into empty farmland, far enough from the city that the night felt stripped bare.
There was no traffic. No lights but ours.
No sound except the wind dragging through dry grass and the ticking engine of the old grey Mazda that now held two bodies cooling in the back seat like discarded meat.
Archie had driven the Mazda out there himself. I had followed behind in my own car, headlights cutting over rutted dirt roads and open paddocks, trying not to think too hard about what I was doing. Or who I was doing it with.
I stood with my arms folded tight across my middle, staring down at the dead men while Archie slipped his phone back into his pocket. He had taken photos of both faces—quick, efficient, clinical. Evidence, he’d called it. A way to put names to them later.
Up close, they looked even less familiar.
Mediterranean, maybe. Dark hair. Olive skin. Hard faces gone slack with death. They didn’t look local. They didn’t look Russian either, not from what little I knew. More importantly, they carried nothing. No wallets. No papers. No phones worth tracing.
Ghosts.
Men who had set out tonight planning to do harm and had instead ended up stiff in the back of a borrowed car in the middle of nowhere.
I should have felt something. Revulsion.
Pity. Shock. Maybe earlier, I had. Back on that road, when the gunshots first tore through the night and their bodies were still warm with violence, I had felt all of it at once—rage, horror, disbelief.
But now? Now all I felt was a strange, ugly numbness spreading through me.
Because the more I thought about it, the more I knew Archie had likely been right.
These weren’t good men caught in a bad moment.
Archie had already shown me the guns he’d pulled from their car. Two handguns. One knife. All tucked away neatly enough to prove their intentions.
They hadn’t been following me to ask for directions.
“Never seen them before,” I muttered.
My voice sounded flat. Hollow.
I kept my gaze on the men instead of on him. The dead no longer looked human after a while. They turned into shapes. Weight. Consequences.
Archie watched me for a second, then gave a short nod as if filing that away with everything else.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do this.”
He unscrewed the jerry can and began dousing the inside of the Mazda, the sharp chemical smell cutting through the cold night air.
It soaked into the seats, splashed over the floor, over their clothes, over the ruined upholstery and the cheap plastic trim.
The car was old and forgettable, the kind no one would mourn.
A grey Mazda that looked like it had already lived three ugly lives before tonight.
Still, watching him do it—watching how practiced he was—made something dark twist low in my stomach.
The petrol glistened briefly in the weak light before disappearing into fabric and flesh.
Archie stepped back, reached into his pocket, and struck a match.
The sound seemed absurdly small. Just a scratch. A whisper. But in the silence of that field, it felt enormous.
For one suspended second, the flame lit his face from below. And God. He looked monstrous. Beautiful in the worst possible way.
His pale skin caught the glow, his sharp features thrown into hard relief, blue eyes turned strange and bright beneath the flicker.
The dark blond of his hair looked almost bronze in the firelight, and that brutal Russian stillness of his became something older.
Colder. As if violence was not merely something he did, but something he wore well. Something born into him.
He lifted the flame closer, the orange light breathing over his mouth and jaw, then—almost mockingly—kissed it before tossing it through the open window.
The fire took instantly.
A low whoomph sounded from inside the car, followed by a rush of heat as the flames bloomed fast and hungry, feeding on petrol and cloth and skin.
Orange tongues licked up the seats, then burst higher, swallowing the interior whole.
The windshield cracked with a sharp pop.
Smoke began to curl thick and black into the sky.
I stood there, staring. Detached. Like my body had stayed behind while my mind hovered somewhere several feet above the scene, watching this impossible thing happen without fully belonging to it.
Fire consumed everything quickly. Faster than I would have thought.
The car glowed from within like a furnace. The shapes of the men blurred as the heat warped the glass. One arm shifted as the upholstery collapsed beneath it, and I felt a cold, sick pulse run through me.
Before I could think too deeply about it, Archie’s hand closed around mine. Hard. Warm. Firm enough that resistance wasn’t really an option. He dragged me backward toward my car, not roughly, but with enough purpose to make it clear he wasn’t interested in debate.
“What are you—”
“No point in sticking around,” he said, already pulling me with him across the dirt. “All you’ll get is the smell of burning flesh.”
He opened the passenger door, then paused long enough to pin me with a look.
“Not a nice smell,” he added.
The bluntness of it hit me like a slap.
I stared at him, my pulse suddenly loud in my ears again. Then I slid into the seat because I was too tired, too wrung out, too goddamn rattled to fight him on every little thing.
He rounded the hood and got in behind the steering wheel as if my car belonged to him too. A second later he started the engine, shifted into gear, and pulled us away from the blaze before I could object.
In the side mirror, the fire shrank and flared against the darkness like a signal from hell.
I turned in my seat to look at him.
His hands were steady on the wheel. His face had already smoothed back into that maddening calm, as if incinerating two men in a paddock was just another chore to be crossed off after midnight.
There was blood on him, I realized.
Not much. A smear at the cuff. A darker stain near his sleeve. Easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it.
I was. Because I couldn’t stop.
“You’re certifiably crazy, you know that?” I whispered.
The words came out quieter than I meant them to.
His mouth shifted slightly, not quite a smile.
“There are worse things to be, Antonella,” he said in that inflected English of his, each word precise and dark-edged.
I let out a breath that might have been a laugh if there had been anything funny left in me.
“Yes,” I said, my gaze still fixed on him. “I can imagine.”
The car rolled through the sleeping countryside, engine low, tires eating up the dirt road as the flames disappeared behind us.
“But crazy,” I added, “is right up there with the worst of them.”
This time he did glance at me. Only briefly.
But it was enough to feel the weight of his attention slide over my face, my mouth, the mess I was still making of breathing. Enough to make something uneasy move through me. Because I didn’t understand him. Didn’t understand how he could be so controlled with death still fresh on his hands.
Didn’t understand why part of me wanted to recoil from him—while another part leaned in.
Maybe it was the adrenaline. Maybe it was shock. Or maybe it was something worse.
Outside, the dark stretched endless and empty.
Inside the car, the air felt close. Thick. Still carrying the sting of smoke and petrol and him.
And somewhere behind us, two men burned into nothing while I sat beside the man who had killed them and tried not to think about how easily he had done it.
Or how safe I had felt the moment he did.