Page 130 of Dirty Game

Mikhail backhands her so hard she falls into the end table, knocking a lamp over.

The gun wavers, just for a second.

And then suddenly, blood, a body slumping to the ground, pooling around Mikhail’s twitching feet.

For a second, it’s just the noise—wet, animal, the gurgle of a man dying badly.

Sienna stands over him, knife sunk to the hilt in his throat.

Her hair is stuck to her cheeks, wet with tears or sweat, or maybe just all that blood.

I count to three, waiting for whatever she’s about to do next.

Sienna drops the knife.

It clatters across the tile, skids under the coffee table.

Her whole body trembles, and for a moment I think she’ll collapse. But she doesn’t. She looks up at me, face hollowed out,and says, “Maybe he is better off with you. I’m… I’m worse than you are, Varrick. The years have changed me, poisoned me.”

“Considering what you did to our son, I’d have to agree.”

I scan the room. Korrin stands at the door, shotgun up, covering our six.

Cyrus has Rosalynn pressed back against the wall, a human shield for a woman who still hasn’t figured out she can be protected.

Mikhail is dying ugly, but he’s not the threat now.

She wipes her mouth, leaving a red smear across her skin. “Let me live, Varrick, please. Let me disappear.”

I want to kill her.

The silence stretches between us like a taut wire.

Sienna on her knees, Mikhail's blood spreading across the marble, my gun heavy in my hand.

"Please," she whispers again. "I can disappear. You'll never see me again."

I think about Dante's bruised eye. The way he flinches when anyone moves too fast. How he said he was "learning to duck."

A child learning to dodge his mother's fists.

"You hurt our fucking son," I say, my voice flat.

"I disciplined?—"

"You gave him a black eye for looking too much like me."

Each word makes her flinch. Good.

"He told Rosalynn everything," I continued. "Every beating. Every 'discipline.' Every time you made him feel worthless for having my blood."

Korrin shifts behind me, impatient. But this is between Sienna and me.

"I was angry," she says. "He reminded me of you, of what we had?—"

"What we had was mutual destruction. But Dante wasn't part of that. He was innocent."

"No one's innocent in our world."