“No.” With his free hand, he reached up to the zipper on his sweatshirt. Even though his fingers were trembling, he managed to grasp the toggle and pull it down. . . .

To reveal the bulletproof vest he was wearing.

“Breath . . . just . . . knocked . . . out of me.” With that he took a proper inhale, one that expanded his chest fully and was expelled evenly and cleanly. “Took it off . . . dead soldier . . .”

Grier blinked. Then shoved his hands out of the way and probed the hole . . . where the bullet had been caught and held in the tensile fibers of the Kevlar.

Her body reacted on its own, a bizarre superstrength overtaking her as she yanked him up off the floor and held him to her heart.

“You’re a . . .” She started to cry properly as horror and terror gave way to sweeping relief. “You’re a brilliant man. You’re a brilliant . . . stupid man . . .”

And then his arms were around her and he was, against all odds, holding her back.

All too soon he was separating them, though, and picking up his gun.

“Stay here.”

With a grunt, he got up and shuffled around to check on Matthias, and as he went over, she unbound her feet and scrambled to her father.

“Are you okay,” she asked as she went to work freeing his arms.

He nodded furiously, his eyes not on her but on Isaac as if he couldn’t believe the guy had survived either. And the instant his hands were free, he took over undoing his ankles.

Grier looked around, and then as a precaution in case anyone else showed up or was in the house, she went for the nine-millimeter she’d been given when Jim Heron had appeared.

Assuming that actually had been the man.

Something told her that perhaps what she and her father had seen hadn’t really been there at all.

Matthias knew it was a mortal hit and he was glad. Yeah, he’d wanted Jim Heron’s gun to do the deed, but Isaac’s had worked just fine—and Rothe had been part of the whole survivor problem, hadn’t he.

At least he’d gotten even with one of them.

As the arterial tear in his heart started to leak into his chest cavity, breathing became difficult and his blood pressure dropped, his body going numb and cold. Which was nice. No more pain.

Well, not exactly. That stinging, left-sided agony stuck with him . . . and it was as he lay dying that he figured out what it was: He’d been wrong. It wasn’t his heart preparing for a coronary. It was—shock of all shocks—his conscience. And the way he knew that was because as he thought of the fact that he’d killed a relatively innocent man, in front of a woman who loved him, the pain got exponentially worse.

Wasn’t this ironic. Somehow, in the depths of his sin, the sociopath had found his soul.