Chapter 9

AVERY

Not a single word has passed between us since the muffled crack of the gunshot.

The inside of her car is a vacuum of silence. It’s a black sedan, the interior all cool, butter-soft leather and dark wood. There’s no smell of blood or alley filth here, just the clean, subtle scent of leather and her perfume. Her hands rest on the steering wheel at ten and two. They are perfectly steady. I watch them, waiting for a tremor, a nervous tap, anything. But there’s nothing. She’s not in shock. She’s not wrestling with what she did. She’s just driving, her focus on the road as absolute as it was in the alley.

She glances over at me once. A quick, assessing look, her eyes scanning my profile before returning to the windshield. She’s checking my vitals. Making sure I’m not catatonic.

I am, in a way. My body is functioning – I’m breathing, I’m blinking – but my mind feels detached, floating several feet away. It’s a quiet, internal shutdown. I feel like I’m watching a film of myself sitting in this luxurious car.

Did that really happen?

The question loops, sterile and useless. I saw it. I heard it. I smelled the sharp, acidic tang of gunpowder and the metallic scent of blood beginning to warm the cold air.

Did she really kill a man? In front of me?

The body slumping. The dark pool spreading, steaming faintly on the asphalt.

Because of me?

And the most pressing, unanswerable question: What am I supposed to do now? With her? With myself?

I stare out the window. The city blurs past – streetlights becoming streaks of gold, neon signs smearing into red halos. I try to corral the chaos in my head into a coherent thought, a feeling, a moral stance. But it’s all just static. A high-pitched whine of panic and disbelief, underscored by a physical sensation that shames me.

Because fucking hell.

I am still aroused.

The heat is a low, persistent throb between my legs, a dull ache that hasn’t subsided since I saw her press the gun to his head. It’s tangled up with the nausea and the shock, a sickening cocktail.

I should be horrified. I should be planning my escape, memorizing her license plate to give to the authorities, something, anything.

But all my mind replays is the cool, even tone of her voice when she told him to confess. The absolute stillness of her body, the gun looking less like a weapon and more like a part of her anatomy. The terrifying, exquisite calm she maintained, from the first moment I saw them in the alley to the moment she guided me to this car without a single wasted word.

I’ve read about characters like her. I’ve devoured psychological thrillers and dark romances about dangerous, magnetic women who operate outside the law. It was always a fantasy, a safe thrill between the covers of a book.

None of them ever felt this real. None of their fictional danger ever seeped into my actual skin, down into my bones, settling deep in my gut as a dark, unwelcome thrill.

Seriously, Avery?

I’m not just shaken.

I am profoundly, undeniably turned on by a murderer.

And as the car glides to a smooth stop in front of my apartment building, the engine cutting into a deeper silence, I realize I don’t know what terrifies me more:

That she did it…

Or that, on some primal, undeniable level, I understand exactly why she felt it was necessary.

***

VICTORIA

I have a rule. It was never written down, never spoken aloud. It was a line I drew in the dark, a boundary for my own soul.

Never kill in front of a civilian.

Someone who doesn’t live in this world. Someone who still looks at violence as something that happens on a screen, who believes in due process and the fundamental goodness of people. Someone with wide, unbroken eyes.

But tonight, I broke that rule.

I didn’t even hesitate. The moment I saw him tracking her, the calculation in his stride, my training took over. The threat assessment was instant, the solution clear. But the variable – Avery, watching, witnessing – that should have changed the calculus. It always has before. I would have subdued him, scared him, handed him off to a contact in the department. A messier, less permanent solution, but one that kept the darkness contained.

But with her standing there? I didn’t consider the alternatives. I made her watch.

Avery makes me… impulsive. She bends my instincts. She pulls at the rigid framework of my control, and the new shapes it twists into feel frighteningly natural.

She didn’t scream. She didn’t run. She stood there, her breath a faint cloud in the cold air, and she looked at me not with the horror of a bystander, but with the intense focus of someone trying to solve a complex equation. She was grappling with it, and a part of her was close to understanding.

That’s what unsettles me.

I can justify the kill. That man was a predator. I’ve seen his kind my whole life – the kind that sees women as opportunities, as objects for their use. His confession was just the verbalization of his intent. If I hadn’t intervened, Avery would be in an emergency room right now, or worse. She’d be another silent statistic, carrying the weight of his violation for the rest of her life.

So, no. I do not regret ending him. The world is cleaner for it.

But I may regret making her a witness.

I showed her the machinery. I didn’t just let her enjoy the perfectly running clock; I opened the back and forced her to look at the grinding, necessary gears. She saw the shadow. The unflinching hand. The final, brutal consequence.

I don’t know if she can come back from that. I don’t know if the woman I saw in the club, all sharp wit and guarded curiosity, can coexist with the memory of what happened in that alley.

And I don’t know what it means that I, the one who has always compartmentalized, can’t seem to lock this away.

Because there was a moment, after the sound faded and the body fell, when our eyes met. And what I saw in hers wasn’t just shock.

It was a flicker of raw, undeniable want.

A reflection of the same dark current that jolted through me. The thrill of absolute power, the terrifying intimacy of shared violence.

It’s still there, a low hum in my blood.

But so are the questions I saw forming behind her eyes. The moral, complicated questions she won’t ask me tonight. She’s home now, undoubtedly. Sitting on the edge of her bed, maybe, shaking. Trying to reconcile the woman who almost made her beg to touch her with the woman who ended a life. Drowning in the same chaotic noise I can’t silence.

I pour two fingers of whiskey into a heavy crystal glass. I don’t drink it. I just stand at the vast window of my apartment, the city’s lights like a swarm of frozen fireflies below. 

She made me break my most important rule.

I don’t know what that makes me.

But I know this with a certainty that feels like a verdict:

If she walks away from me after tonight, I will let her go. It will be the one mercy I grant us both.

But if she comes back…

If she crosses that threshold with full knowledge of what I am…

Then there will be no more rules. No more holding back. I will have all of her.