Wesley’s eyes widened as he watched his once-Kingpin writhe and blur, the different sides to his face screaming away from each other and then catapulting back together.

Time was not just catching up with him, but erasing him altogether. Pulling the magic from Ashwood’s bones, reversing all that he had gleaned from years of enslavement and murder.

The years rewound inside of him.

It was undoing him.

It was sucking the power from him.

Ashwood fell onto his knees, his shadows gone, his cane broken by his feet.

And his face.

Human.

Plain for all to see.

Dante Ashwood’s face was not haggard, but rewound to give him a youthful and unaffected glow, marked only by a few pinked scars. He didn’t look much older than Wesley, with long dark hair that brushed past his chin. His skin was pulled tight across his face, pale as the ocean’s crust, with eyes the color of a serpent’s skin and a look of hate spread to the very corners of his curled lips.

Dante Ashwood, Kingpin of Uskhanya, destroyer of cities, was human.

He was just a man.

And Wesley had a lot of practice killing men.

Wesley’s gun was on the floor, where Zekia had dropped it after her illusion, and though Wesley couldn’t get to it with his leg still so jacked up, he knew he didn’t need to move to reach for it.

His magic surged, eager.

Yes, it said. That, we can do.

Wesley looked at the bone gun, licked his lips, and then watched it disappear from the ground and reappear in his own hand.

The familiar hilt, the slick way it fit to his palm, like it had been made for Wesley and nobody else.

Tavia locked her fingers between Wesley’s, and the warmth of her, the familiar scratch of her scars and calluses, steadied his heart.

He gripped the gun in his free hand.

“Wesley,” Ashwood said.

Fatherly. Perhaps pleading.

“You’re my son.”

The wind whistled in Wesley’s ears as he aimed the gun.

The clock tower that headed the Crook chimed.

Midnight.

“Yeah,” Wesley said. “I know.”

He fired the shot, straight through Ashwood’s newly human heart.

His father fell to the ground.

Ashwood’s eyes were wide, his hands still, his lips bloody and quivering.

His darkness, finally, fading from the world.

42

TAVIA

He was gone.

Dante Ashwood slumped on the ground, bullet through the heart Tavia was sure he didn’t have. He didn’t move or get back up in some death-defying display of magic. He just lay there, with his eyes as wide as could be, staring straight at Wesley.

Finally, it was over.

“Holy shit,” Tavia said.

Wesley put his gun back in the holster. “Eloquent as ever.”

“I know you guys had a complicated relationship and I should probably say something comforting or poignant,” Tavia said. “But holy shit.”