FORTY-THREE

FORTY-THREE
The gun felt wrong in my hand.

Too heavy. Too cold. Too real.

My fingers had locked around the grip so tightly that my knuckles ached, but I still could not seem to loosen them. I stood there in the underground range with my pulse hammering in my throat, staring at the man on the floor while the smell of metal and old gunpowder pressed into my lungs.

He was on his knees, wrists tied behind his back, face swollen and bloodied. One eye was nearly shut. There was dried blood at the corner of his mouth and fresh panic in the other eye, bright and wet and wild as he looked up at me.

Then there was Wesley.

He stood a few feet away in a black shirt with the sleeves rolled up, one hand resting loosely at his side, his expression unreadable. He looked as composed as if we were in his office discussing tomorrow’s schedule instead of standing over a bound man with my finger too close to the trigger.

He had known exactly what I would find when I came back down here.

He had wanted me to find it.

The man made a broken sound in the back of his throat and shifted toward me on his knees. “Please,” he rasped. “Please, signora, listen to me.”

I said nothing. I could not.

The barrel dipped a fraction, then jerked back up when he moved again.

“I did not want to hurt you,” he said quickly. “I swear to God, I did not. Marco made me do it. He gave the order. He said if I refused, I was dead anyway.”

At Marco’s name, something sharp ripped through me.

The crash.

The screaming tires. The crushed metal. The blood.

My baby.

My stomach clenched so hard it hurt. For one ugly second I wanted to pull the trigger just so the sound in my head would stop. Just so all the fear and grief and helplessness would have somewhere to go.

The man must have seen something change in my face, because his own twisted with desperate hope.

“You know what he is,” he said, voice spilling out faster now. “You know what he does. I was following orders. That is all. Please. Please do not let him make you do this.”

Him.

Not Marco.

Wesley.

My gaze snapped sideways.

Wesley did not move. Did not blink. His attention stayed on me, not the prisoner. That was the worst part. The man on the floor was barely the center of this at all.

I was.

The gun trembled in my hand. I hated that Wesley could probably see it.

The range was too quiet. Too enclosed. Concrete walls. Overhead lights. The faint hum of the ventilation. A dark stain near the drain in the floor that I did not want to think about too closely.

I swallowed. “What is this?”

Wesley’s voice was calm. “A lesson.”

The prisoner shook his head violently. “No, no. It is not a lesson. It is a message. He wants your hands dirty too.”

“Shut him up,” I said, but I did not know which one of them I meant.

Neither man listened.

Wesley’s gaze stayed on mine. “You wanted to stop being a pawn.”

My throat felt scraped raw. “This is your idea of helping?”

“This is my idea of reality.”

The prisoner made a strangled sound. “Reality? He is lying to you. He wants you trapped here. Same as Marco, just prettier walls.”

My breath hitched.

Because the worst part was not that the words were cruel.

It was that they were aimed at fears I had already been trying not to name.

The tracker in the dress.

The bullet in the wall.

The stolen necklace.

The way every safe place had started to feel watched.

The way Wesley protected me with one hand and tightened his control with the other.

The man saw hesitation flicker in my face and lunged at it like a starving thing.

“He will make you one of them,” he said. “Look at this. Look at what he is doing. If you shoot me, you are his. You understand? There is no going back from that.”

“Enough,” Wesley said.

He did not raise his voice. He did not need to.

The man flinched so hard he nearly toppled sideways.

I looked back at Wesley. “Did you torture him?”

A beat of silence.

Then, “He came into my house.”

Something cold skated down my spine. “That is not an answer.”

“It is the only one that matters.”

I stared at him. At the stillness in his face, the control in his body, the complete absence of apology. He was not trying to convince me he was good. Not even now. Maybe especially not now.

Maybe that was what frightened me most.

He took one step closer.

Not enough to touch me. Just enough for the air between us to tighten.

“If Marco sends men into my home,” he said, “they do not leave unpunished.”

“Then punish him,” I snapped. “Not me.”

His eyes sharpened.

For a moment no one spoke. I could hear my own breathing, shallow and uneven. I could hear the soft scrape of the prisoner shifting his knees against the concrete.

Wesley looked at the gun in my hand, then back at my face.

“Choose,” he said.

One word.

No softness. No room to hide from it.

The prisoner started crying then. Not dramatically. Not like in films. It was uglier than that. Wet, broken sounds from a grown man who had run out of pride and was clutching at survival with both hands.

“I have a daughter,” he whispered.

Something inside me twisted.

I hated him for saying it. Hated Wesley for making me hear it. Hated Marco most of all for building a world where men like this existed and women like me got dragged into the middle of them and called it fate.

My finger pressed tighter against the trigger before I could stop it.

I imagined it.

The shot.

The recoil.

His body falling.

Blood on the concrete.

Silence afterward.

I imagined looking at Wesley once it was done.

Would he nod like I had passed some invisible line?

Would he see me differently?

Would I see myself differently?

The answer came fast and horrible.

Yes.

“Yes, you can do it,” the prisoner babbled, mistaking the shift in my face. “You can, I see that, but listen to me. He wants you broken. He wants you like him.”

“Quiet,” Wesley said again.

The man looked at me, not him. “He will never let you go clean. Men like him do not save women. They keep them.”

My arm began to ache.

I lowered the gun an inch.

Wesley’s voice went even cooler. “Lift it.”

I looked at him.

He held my gaze, and for the first time that night I saw something under the calm. Not anger. Not exactly. Expectation. Hard and deliberate and merciless.

He meant this.

He meant every second of it.

A pulse of fury cut straight through the fear.

“You want me to execute a bound man on the floor,” I said. My voice shook, but it came out louder than I expected. “And you are standing there calling it strength.”

His expression did not change.

I laughed once, sharp and breathless and ugly. “No. That is not strength. That is control.”

The prisoner made a small, frantic sound of agreement.

I did not look at him. I kept looking at Wesley.

“This is what you think survival is?” I asked. “Turning me into you?”

His eyes darkened, but he still said nothing.

The silence pushed at me, daring me to fill it, and this time I did.

“You do not get to decide what I become just because you put your name on me.”

Something flashed in his face then. Brief. Dangerous. Gone before I could hold onto it.

“Then prove it,” he said.

“By killing for you?”

“By understanding what this world costs.”

“No.” My voice came out rough now, stripped clean. “No, Wesley.”

He waited.

I could feel my whole body shaking, but something steadier sat under it now. Something harder.

I lowered the gun fully.

The prisoner sagged with a sob.

I stepped back once, my chest rising and falling too fast. “I will not murder a helpless man on the ground to make you feel powerful.”

“He is not helpless.”

“He is tied up.”

“He came here to hurt you.”

“And now he cannot.”

Wesley’s jaw tightened. Barely. Another man would have looked furious. On him it was more unsettling than rage. It was restraint drawn so tight it hummed.

I lifted my chin. “If this was supposed to impress me, it failed.”

The prisoner started speaking again, spilling gratitude, promises, names, anything he thought might save him now that he sensed the moment turning. I barely heard him over the blood rushing in my ears.

Wesley kept looking at me.

Not at the gun.

Not at the man.

At me.

Then, finally, he spoke.

“Take him away.”

The guards appeared so fast I jerked in surprise. I had not even realized they were close enough to hear. They moved in without a word, hauling the prisoner to his feet while he stumbled and cried out and tried to twist back toward me.

“Thank you,” he gasped. “Thank you, signora, thank you, I swear I can help, I can tell you things, I can tell you where he has men, where he is watching, please, please.”

One of the guards shoved him toward the door.

He kept talking until the heavy steel door slammed shut behind them.

Then it was quiet.

Just me and Wesley.

And the gun still in my hand like a mistake I had not figured out how to undo.

The room felt colder with the prisoner gone. Emptier, but somehow more dangerous. My nerves were stretched so raw that even the buzz of the lights sounded harsh.

I put the safety on with clumsy fingers and set the gun down on the table beside me harder than I meant to.

The crack of metal against metal echoed through the room.

“What the hell was that?” I demanded.

Wesley said nothing.

I took a step toward him. “Answer me.”

“It was exactly what it looked like.”

That made something in me snap.

“No.” I jabbed a finger toward the door the guards had disappeared through. “Do not do that cold, smug thing where you say something vague and expect me to choke on it. You brought me down here for a reason.”

“Yes.”

“Yes?” I stared at him. “That is it?”

His face remained unreadable, but there was a dangerous quietness to him now, as if he had gone somewhere inside himself and locked the door.

I hated that it made me want to rattle it open.

“You put a gun in my hand,” I said. “You stood there and watched while that man begged for his life. You wanted me to shoot him, Wesley. Say it.”

He held my gaze.

“I wanted to see what you would do.”

My mouth went dry. “Why?”

He did not answer immediately.

That pause was worse than any confession could have been. It was long enough for every terrible possibility to line up in my head.

Did he want leverage over me?

A secret we would share?

Proof that I was becoming easier to shape?

Proof that I was already his?

The anger in me turned sharp with dread.

“You do not get to test me like I am one of your men.”

His expression shifted then, very slightly, and when he spoke his voice was lower.

“No. You are not one of my men.”

I should not have noticed the difference in tone. I should not have felt it in my stomach. But I did, and that made me angrier.

“Then what am I?”

A long silence followed.

For one reckless second I thought he might actually answer that. Not with one of his evasions, but with something real. Something dangerous.

Instead he looked at the table where I had dropped the gun, then back at me.

“You failed the test.”

The words landed like a slap.

I went still.

Not because they were loud. They were not. He had said them almost quietly.

That made them worse.

A short, disbelieving laugh escaped me. “I failed?”

His face did not change.

Rage and confusion surged together under my ribs. “What test?”

He took one step closer.

Close enough now that I could see the small scar near his jaw, the shadow of stubble, the absolute steadiness of his eyes. Close enough that if I reached out, my hand would touch his shirt.

I did not move.

Neither did he.

But the air between us felt charged, dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with guns.

When he spoke, his voice was calm.

“To see if you would kill for me.”

For a second the words did not even make sense.

Then they did.

And everything inside me went cold.

Not to see if I could protect myself.

Not to see if I was strong enough to survive.

Not to prove I understood the stakes.

For him.

I stared at him, all the pieces rearranging too fast and too horribly in my mind. The tracker. The threats. The way he had been pulling me deeper into his world one lesson at a time. Teaching me how to shoot. How to fight. How to stop being helpless.

I had thought he was trying to make me safe.

But this was something else.

This was about allegiance.

This was about whether I could be remade in his image, under his hand, for his cause.

Marco had wanted to own me through fear and obsession.

Wesley, I realized with a sickening clarity, might want something even more dangerous.

He might want me transformed.

My voice came out barely above a whisper. “You are out of your mind.”

Something unreadable passed through his eyes, too quick to name.

“Am I?”

I looked at him then, really looked at him, and for the first time since I had run into his world, I understood something I had not wanted to face.

The danger was not just that two monsters wanted a claim on me.

It was that one of them had started teaching me how to become one too.

And the worst part, the part that made my stomach turn, was that I no longer knew whether Wesley saw that as protection.

Or as devotion.