Page 89 of Beautiful Villain
“This,” I said softly, “is the only mercy you will get.”
37
Archie
The fucker shot me.
Twice.
Straight through the knees—because of course he did.Blood poured out of me and soaked into the dark gravel, and my first coherent thought wasn’tI might be dying, butthat bastard just ruined my best suit.
Tailored.Imported.Perfectly pressed this morning.
Gone.
I made a mental note to bill him for it.Assuming I lived long enough to be petty about it.
The pain hit a second later—hot, savage, intimate.The kind of pain that didn’t just hurt, but demanded attention.My legs screamed as fire tore through my tendons.My dignity crawled off into the night and never looked back.
I lay there, flat on my back, staring up at the indifferent sky, and had to admit something.
This was not how I’d imagined my final moments.If I was being honest—and death had a way of demanding honesty—I’d always imagined a beach.White sand.A woman beside me who didn’t look like she wanted to escape through the nearest exit.A drink in my hand—something with salt on the rim and too much alcohol to care about the future.
Not cold gravel.Not blood pooling beneath me.Not my knees staging a full-scale mutiny.
Life, it seemed, had a sense of humour.
And it was a mean one.
Smoke hung low over the road, stinging my eyes.Metal ticked as it cooled.Somewhere close by, one of my men made a wet, gargling sound that suggested his lungs had given up their fight.
I turned my head.Or tried to.
Most of them were down.Dead.Dying.Or doing that thing men did when they knew help wasn’t coming—lying very still and hoping someone mistook it for composure.
No one was coming for me.
That was…enlightening.
My knees hurt like a bitch.
It wasn’t a dignified pain, either.It was loud.Screaming.Every pulse of blood felt like a personal insult.I’d been shot before, but knees were a special kind of betrayal.They weren’t vital, but they were intimate.They reminded you exactly how much you depended on them.
I laughed.Softly.It came out strangled, more breath than sound.
So this was it.
I stared up at the sky, black and endless and profoundly uninterested in me, and felt something settle into place.Clarity, maybe.Or the kind of calm that showed up when denial finally packed its bags and hit the road.
Mikayla.
Of course she was there.In my head.In everything.
I’d been so sure.So convinced that if I just held on tightly enough, she’d come around.That love could be negotiated.Structured.Enforced.
Jesus Christ.
Now, with a gun pointed at my head and blood pooling beneath me, it was painfully obvious how stupid that had been.
