His Game His Rules (Last to Fall #2)

Chapter 1

The contrast is obscene. The Aventador—alien spacecraft, alien predator, alien perfection—sits gleaming against brick returning to dust. Nero Nemesis matte black against urban decay.

Rain beads on the windshield, soft and persistent. I don't turn on the wipers. Let it accumulate. Let it blur my view of this place she's been hiding.

I tap my fingers against the steering wheel, counting the twenty-three minutes I've wasted.

Twenty-three minutes I could have spent dealing with the LaRiccia fallout.

Twenty-three minutes I could have spent making arrangements to contain Rico's disappearance.

Instead, I'm parked outside a women's shelter that looks like it should have been condemned during the Reagan administration.

"Double or nothing." The memory of her voice makes my jaw clench. A throwaway line from a woman who doesn't understand that some gambles can't be taken back. Some antes are paid in blood, not cash.

I shouldn't have kept those fucking notebooks at her bedside. Shouldn't have written down every fluctuation in her breathing, every spike in her fever, every word the doctors said. Shouldn't have documented my own pathetic fear when her oxygen levels dropped.

Definitely shouldn't have stayed awake for seventy-two hours straight watching the monitors.

But I did.

What did I expect when I left them behind as evidence that I care?

That she'd just take the money, the passport, and private jet to anywhere-but-here?

That she'd just… play by the rules?

Why the hell would Emmaleen Rourke play by the rules when she can torment me with her weaponized cuteness?

I’m so fucked.

The weeds pushing through the cracks in the parking lot catch my eye. Life finding a way through concrete. Annoying. Persistent.

Like her.

Rico's face flashes in my mind—the shock in his eyes when the bullet hit him. Not fear or anger. Just... surprise. Like it never occurred to him that I'd actually pull the trigger. That his power over me wasn’t infinite. That I’d choose a woman over decades of LaRiccia-Bavga diplomacy.

He miscalculated everything.

The rain falls harder now. Summer is over.

The drizzle builds to a steady drum against the carbon-fiber roof.

October has arrived with its slate-gray skies and bitter promise of winter.

The trees around the shelter's cracked parking lot are tinged with yellow and orange—a transition I didn't notice happening until it was already done.

I check my watch—7:12 now.

Two weeks since Dom and Ricky buried Rico in the woods out in Bucks County. Two weeks of carefully constructed digital breadcrumbs leading to Bangkok, where Deepfake Rico is currently enjoying a vacation complete with Instagram stories and location tags.

Two weeks of preparing for the inevitable moment when Luca LaRiccia realizes his son isn't coming home.

The digital clock on my dash clicks to 7:20. Suddenly, the shelter door flies open and Emmaleen bursts out like she's been launched from a cannon.

She takes the concrete steps two at a time, her lips moving in frantic conversation with herself, hands gesturing wildly at nothing.

Classic Emmaleen Rourke crisis mode—all raw nerve endings and no strategy.

The woman exists in a perpetual state of last-minute panic, yet somehow survives it every time.

She has no fucking idea where she's supposed to be at 8:00 a.m.

Because I didn't tell her.

The realization settles in my chest like a warm drink on a cold night.

This little punishment—withholding the location of our meeting—was calculated.

Petty, perhaps, but necessary. Watching her scramble now confirms what I already knew: she's tangled in my game.

A fish hooked and fighting, but ultimately dragged along at my convenience and mercy.

I let my gaze catalog every detail of her outfit, an assessment as brutal as a coroner's report.

That blazer. Jesus Christ. Neon pink with shoulder pads the size of dinner plates, like she looted the wardrobe department of a canceled 1987 sitcom. The fabric puckers at the seams, shiny where it shouldn't be, the buttons mismatched as if collected from different garments over decades of neglect.

Below it, a denim skirt hangs like depressed drapery, the hem uneven and fraying. The fabric has that distinctive gray-blue fade of something that's been washed in industrial machines at church basement charity drives for longer than she's been alive.

Her sneakers—I hesitate to even dignify them with that term—appear to have been white once, in the distant past. Now they're a study in urban archaeology, layered with stains telling stories of every puddle she's misjudged.

They squeak with each step, announcing her chaotic presence like some kind of deranged metronome.

The outfit isn't just bad. It's a deliberate middle finger. A visual manifestation of "fuck you and your Italian leather shoes." Last week's farmer's market ensemble at least had accidental bohemian charm—this is just sartorial terrorism.

Me: Milan runway, tailored precision, fabrics selected by people who understand the weight and drape of textiles.

Her: whatever fell off the donation truck after being rejected by the third-tier thrift store.

The absurdity compounds as she continues her frantic monologue, completely oblivious to my presence. A $300,000 machine—Italian engineering at its apex, 6.5-liter V12 heart—sits gleaming in this depressing parking lot, and she doesn't even register it.

My jaw tightens. Teeth grinding against each other with enough force to concern a dentist. How does someone miss a Lamborghini? It's designed to be seen. It announces itself to the world through every aggressive line and curve. It's the automotive equivalent of a scream.

And she just—walks past it.

Then—a twitch. Her stride breaks. Her head turns, slowly, like her brain is buffering, processing information on a three-second delay. Her eyes find mine through the windshield.

One blink. Two. Her face squints, features scrunching in concentration. Recognition dawns across her expression in stages—confusion, realization, and finally, indignation floods her features like a rising tide of crimson.

I raise a single finger and beckon her toward the car. Just one crooked digit—the minimum expenditure of effort to command her entire trajectory.

She doesn't disappoint. Her shoulders square like a boxer entering the ring, her chin jutting forward with that signature Rourke defiance. Each footfall lands with excessive force, her ridiculous shoes slapping against wet pavement in what I assume she believes is righteous indignation.

One step. Two steps. Three.

I catalog every micro-expression crossing her face. The flaring nostrils, the pinched brow, the lower lip caught momentarily between her teeth. She's broadcasting her emotions like a kindergartener's finger painting—bold, messy, without a hint of subtlety.

This is what passes for rebellion in her world. A tantrum in thrift store clothing, marching toward the very power she's supposedly defying. Meanwhile, my index finger has summoned her across the parking lot with the gravitational pull of a black hole.

Her arms swing with exaggerated arcs, shoulders thrown back, head oscillating with each step as if her neck has forgotten its primary function. The display is almost theatrical in its excess, a one-woman show performed exclusively for an audience of one who didn't purchase a ticket.

When she finally reaches the car, she plants her hands on her hips—the universal pose of the ineffectually outraged. I let her stand there, exposed to the drizzle, watching water droplets collect on those absurd shoulder pads.

I hold my position. Ten seconds. Fifteen.

Her weight shifts from one foot to the other. A muscle in her jaw twitches.

I press the window control with deliberate languor, savoring the near-silent hydraulic descent of the glass.

Each millimeter reveals more of the parking lot's ambient noise—distant traffic, the hum of the shelter's ancient HVAC system, and most importantly, Emmaleen Rourke’s increasingly agitated breathing.

The torture of anticipation breaks her.

"You could have told me where we were meeting instead of making me look like an idiot," she blurts, words tumbling out in a breathless rush.

"And don't look at me that way! Saint Forgetful moved all my stuff to the utility closet, and Lena, the Clipboard Tyrant, wouldn't let me in until six-thirty this morning even though my clothes weren't even in there, they had been given away.

" Her arms rise up, flop back down in defeat.

"And then… some woman named Darla stole my only clean shirt, and the shower line was seven people deep, and—"

Her rant has the structural integrity of a house of cards in a wind tunnel.

Each detail more disconnected than the last, proper nouns and grievances colliding in linguistic chaos.

It's a nervous tell, this verbal hemorrhaging.

When boxed into corners, Emmaleen Rourke doesn't freeze or flee—she floods the zone with irrelevant information.

It's infuriating. This childish, undisciplined explosion of complaints that mean nothing, solve nothing.

It's also, in some inexplicable way, endearing—like watching a kitten attack its own reflection, confusing and strangely captivating.

And that's the problem. That's the crack in my armor I can't afford. This contradictory response her chaos creates in me—annoyance braided with something dangerously close to fondness—is precisely what makes her lethal to everything I've built.

"Get in."

Two words. Surgical precision. The verbal equivalent of a bullet between the eyes.

Her mouth snaps shut mid-sentence, leaving whatever inane detail about shower schedules or stolen shirts hanging in the damp air between us. Those pale green eyes widen—shock at being interrupted, at the abrupt command, at the realization that her tedious narrative holds no interest for me.