Nico stares at me.
The hate in his eyes wavers. Confusion breaks through it. He searches my face.
“Why the fuck would I kill my own father?”
“And why would I? He raised me. He made me his heir.”
“His heir.” Nico laughs again. “That fucking will. Victor told me about it. Told me you’d forged it the night the old man went down.”
I stop breathing.
“That son of a bitch.” I say it through my teeth. “He set us up. Both of us.”
“You’re saying Victor killed him?”
“Of course he killed him. And then he framed us for it.”
The fight goes out of me.
Well, not entirely. I pick up the gun with my right hand while Nico’s still pinned under my left. But the version of me that was going to put one in his head thirty seconds ago has been replaced by a version that knows, very suddenly, that the man on the floor under me is not the man I came here to kill. Not anymore.
I take my forearm off his throat and get my weight off his chest. I don’t take the gun off him—I’m not stupid—but I do shift back onto my heels and let him have his lungs.
He rolls onto his side and coughs more blood before gingerly pushing himself up to a sitting position.
“Both of us,” he rasps. “He fucking played us both.”
“Yes.”
“That son of a bitch?—”
A gunshot.
It comes from behind Nico, close, much too close. His body jerks where he sits. His eyes go wide as he glances down.
The bloom is across his chest, just to the left of his sternum. Spreading.
He looks back up at me.
His mouth opens.
Nothing comes out.
He crumples sideways. His weight goes off my forearm and onto the floor, and he is, in the span of about two seconds, gone.
I spin.
One of Nico’s men is standing twelve feet behind me. Gun up. Smoke curling from the muzzle. He’s not looking at me. He’s looking down at Nico’s body.
“Sorry, boss,” he says, but he’s not talking to me. “New management.”
Behind him, two more of Nico’s people lower their weapons and step back from the formation they’d been holding. One of them spits on the concrete. The other one nods once at theshooter, the small nod of men confirming a decision they’d already privately agreed on.
I have time to register all of this, but no time to do anything about it.
Then the warehouse goes sideways.
Some of Nico’s men turn. Not on me. Oneach other.Two of them open up on the shooter who just killed Nico, and the shooter goes down hard. His friend fires back.
