Page 118 of Locked and Loaded

She longed to wipe that smug look off his face. "You ruined my life."

"I gave you a chance." He took a step toward her, and she took a step back, and the rats chittered somewhere in the dark behind her. "You were spying on people, Helen. For years. Watching them. Judging them. Collecting their secrets like trophies while you sat in your ivory tower and decided who was worthy and who wasn't."

"I was exposing the truth,” she said, indignation rising.

"You were feeding your own ego. There's a difference."

Another step. Another retreat. Her back was against the dumpster now, the metal cold even through her jacket, the smell so thick she could taste it.

Archer’s cold gaze burned into her. "You told yourself you were righteous. That you were better than the people you destroyed. But look at you now."

He gestured at the alley. The garbage. The rats. Her.

“Selling and trafficking women. Sneaking out the back door of a hotel like a thief in the night. Everything you said you hated. Everything you judged other people for. You became it. Every single thing."

"I am nothing like them. The members of your little society. Filth, all of them."

"You're worse." His eyes didn't blink. "They never pretended to be virtuous. They never told themselves they were doing the right thing while they sold people out for profit. You did. You stood on your moral high ground and looked down at everyone else, and the whole time you were just waiting for your moment. Waiting to take the money and run."

She was breathing hard now. The tablet was slick with sweat where her fingers gripped it. The stone of hatred behind her ribs had cracked open, and something darker was spilling out, something that felt a lot like the fear she'd been refusing to name.

"So much for being high and mighty," Archer said nonchalantly. "How the mighty have fallen. You’re worth millions, and you're still nothing but street slime crawling through an alley with the rats."

"You don't get to judge me." Her voice cracked on the last word. She gulped hard. "You don't get to stand there and pretend you're any better. You've killed people. You've destroyed lives. You're no different than I am."

"Never said I was. Never claimed to be anything but what I am." He tilted his head, and something shifted in his face, something cold and final. "But I'm not the one who's about to die in an alley."

Her hand went to her pocket.

She'd practiced the motion a hundred times. In front of a mirror. In the dark. In the Arctic Circle with her fingers numb and her breath fogging in the frozen air. The gun was small, a compact little thing she'd bought from a man in Valletta who hadn't asked questions because she'd paid him enough not to. It fit in her palm like it had been made for her, and she'd told herself she would use it if she had to. She'd told herself she was capable of it.

Her fingers closed around the grip.

She wasn't fast enough.

She'd never been fast enough. That was the thing about spending her life watching other people. She got very good at observing, and very bad at doing, and when the moment came, when she actually had to act instead of just catalog, her body betrayed her. She’d hired all her killers. Her muscles didn't know the motions. Her reflexes weren't tuned to the speed of violence.

Archer's gun was already in his hand. She didn't see him draw it. One moment his hands were at his sides, and the next the barrel was level with her face, and somewhere in the distance a car horn sounded, and a rat squealed, and the world kept moving like nothing important was about to happen.

The shot was loud in the narrow alley, a crack that bounced off the brick walls and rolled down the corridor of garbage and shadow. Rats scattered in every direction, their bodies flowing under the dumpsters and into the dark spaces between the buildings.

Helen didn't hear them.

The bullet hit her in the middle of her chest, a small dark hole that was almost neat, almost surgical. Her expression didn't change. It didn't have time. One moment she was Helen, with her hatred and her millions of dollars and her lifetime of judging other people from a height she'd built herself. The next moment she was nothing. A body collapsing onto the cracked asphalt. Her heels splayed at awkward angles. Her jacket pooled around her like a broken wing.

The tablet clattered to the ground beside her, the screen still glowing through a spiderweb of cracks.

Archer lowered the gun. He stood there for a moment, looking down at her as her life ebbed out. The sound of the rats already creeping back from the shadows to investigate the new thing in their alley registered in her dying brain. They didn't care that she'd been rich. They didn't care that she'd been powerful or righteous or any of the other things she'd told herself she was. She was just meat now. Just another thing for the rats to pick over.

Archer bent down and picked up the tablet. Wiped the screen on his sleeve. He turned it around and held it up to her face to unlock it.

She wanted to protest, to close her eyes and stop him from changing the password so he could access the millions that were sitting in her offshore account, but her eyes wouldn’t obey her. All of her energy was slowly leached out of her like the ever-growing pool of blood on the alley beneath her. She registered his sardonic smile, then he turned the tablet back around and began typing.

"The mighty," he said quietly, to no one in particular. "Fallen."

He turned and walked out of the alley without looking back.

Behind him, the rats closed in, their tiny claws clicking on the asphalt, their whiskers twitching in the dark. She felt the first one nip her ear. Death couldn’t come fast enough now.