Alarm blazed through him and thrummed into his fingertips. His calves ached. His blood sizzled under her gaze. He tried to be John, the one she’d laughed with, the one she’d accepted in good faith. He brought the components of her stepfather into his frozen face as fast as he could recall them through the rising yammer of every instinct in his body. “Please.”

But Owen called her attention back before Jonathan could work it all to the surface. She looked away. There’d been no spark of recognition. Carly didn’t know him. How did it ever come down to Carly?

Her chin was trembling when she looked back at Owen. He held the gun on Jonathan casually, almost invisibly, like an extension of his arm. He might as well have been pointing his finger at him.

“Take it to the car and keep going. I’ll be right there.” Amazingly, Owen winked. “Go on, Your Highness. One day you’ll rule more than you already do. But you need to listen to me just now.”

“But Marcelline. What will—”

“Go ahead. It’ll be okay.”

She did. Jonathan watched her thin back retreat, the big piece of the broken Flinck under her arm, the rest of it, the wooden stake of a Dutch master, in her hand.

Terror, like pain, has a threshold. Beyond it is just white noise. The line slipped under Jonathan’s toes and tipped him away from all that he could handle.

Owen took up Jonathan’s sight line. His height and breadth eclipsed the light. The air fell just slightly cooler in his shadow.

“Your problem is that you think this means something. That it has to, even for me. That this is dramatic.” Owen took one giant mother-may-I-step closer. “It’s not.”

Jonathan wanted it to be that Owen punched him in the chest. The pain felt like the blow of a hard, heavy fist. But a crash of gunfire split the air simultaneously with the hit. And Owen was still where he’d been. Not punching. Just aiming.

It wasn’t possible for it to be what Jonathan wanted, and the center of him was now hot and wet. The middle of him had a new gravity all its own. The world whooshed into him, Jonathan staggered sideways and his knees went loose. He went down to his hip and one arm. He heard a pop in his elbow but didn’t feel it. His chest felt solid, flattened, as if he couldn’t break open the bellows of his lungs. He rolled onto his back.

Then Owen was all the sky above him. Owen shook his head, mild in his disgust. He put the gun between them. “Idiot.”

Jonathan’s head snapped sideways with the crash of the second shot.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE