He might have been a little over six foot, but looking into the muzzle of a revolver, Alex Hydell had never seemed so diminished. Sweat poured from his temples. “I-it’s like she said. I was hired to follow the guy she’s with…who her mother’s with. I was hiding from them, not from you. I—we don’t know you.”

“You pricks usually know how to lie your way out of trouble. Guess what? You don’t.” He took careful aim at Alex, whose defiant grimace and giant panic breaths signaled he knew he was about to die.

“Wait!” Rose threw her hands in the air as the man thrust the piece in her direction again. “What if you’re wrong? Do you really want to be that guy?”

“Lady, I am that guy.”

She stole in a breath through frozen lips. For the first time in a long time, she felt the chill of evil around her. This guy had no doubt he was right, had no doubt he had the right to kill them; nothing they said or did would convince him otherwise.

Alex boldly snatched at the gun. But the gunman was ready for him. He hammered the piece down on the back of Alex’s neck, dropping him instantly. Then he kicked him several times on the ground. By this point Alex was unconscious, maybe even dead—she couldn’t tell.

Rose considered jumping the bastard while he was seeing red, but she left it too long. He stopped kicking Alex and, standing astride him, resumed his original firing posture, the weapon aimed squarely at Rose. The flash of hate in his bugged-out eyes made her shut hers tight and turn her head away.

Oh, God. This is my time. I’m not ready.

“Eso sería un error, Miguel.”

“What—”

“I think you know what I mean.” The speaker sounded far away and incredibly intimate at the same time, as though he were all around them.

Rose looked up. There, on the edge of the grass, as still as a wax figure, Bellamy stood watching the gunman. The urge to scream at him—for Heaven’s sake, he didn’t need to die here as well, the idiot—didn’t make it out. She was too appalled by his stupidity, that he was throwing his life away for no reason.

The gunman whispered in shock, “It’s you?”

To Rose’s horror, Bellamy began to walk slowly, almost funereally, across the grass toward them. “Yes, it’s me,” he replied.

The gunman back-stepped, eyes bugging. “S-stay away from me.”

“Stay away from her.” Bellamy’s eyes turned to darts as he willed the demand on the gunman.

“I-I wasn’t going to… I swear.”

“Then don’t.”

“But why are you…?”

“If anything happens to this woman, you’ll know the answer to that question.”

“Please… I’ll disappear. I’ll go anywhere. Just stay away from me.”