Marcella clicked her tongue, pressing her hand flat against the final pillar. “If you had a damn bit of sense,” she said, red light seeping from her palm, “you would have run.”

The concrete beneath her hand gave way, and as it did, the other pillars began to shudder and lurch, each already weakened by her passing touch. The building let out a heavy groan as the columns crumbled and the roof bowed, buckled.

Mellis and Kolhoff were running now, but there was no point. June had already locked the doors. A massive chunk of stone came crashing down, Marcella in its path.

She watched it fall, fascinated, limbs fizzing with excitement and fear.

“Jonathan,” she said, but he was already looking, and the air around her shimmered with blue-white light just before the rubble struck.

Rocks shattered against the forcefield and slid off, raining harmlessly down around her.

Marcella remembered the first time she witnessed a demolition. The thing that struck her most, after that initial boom, was the quiet grace, the way the whole behemoth had sagged sleepily, sinking less like a mass of bricks and steel than a failed soufflé. It was, admittedly, a little less peaceful from this angle, and not nearly as quiet.

But Marcella savored it all the same.

Savored the men’s screams, the warping metal and the broken rock

and the way the whole world shook as the building fell down around them, burying Kolhoff, and Mellis, and Caprese. Three more men who’d stood in her way.

The wreckage carved a circle of destruction around Marcella, around Jonathan, leaving them unharmed, though barricaded. Contained. But there was nothing that could hold her now. Marcella brought her fingers to the nearest block of concrete and pressed, her whole hand flaring crimson, a violent light spreading like fire up her arm.

The concrete weakened, cracked, shattered, the obstacles laid to waste, the path made clear.

Marcella had yet to test the limit of her power. Or rather, had yet to find it. The destruction came so easily.

She strode out of the ruined building, Jonathan trailing like a shadow.

June was waiting at the edge of the rubble, eyes wide. “That wasn’t exactly subtle.”

Marcella only smiled. “Sometimes subtlety is overrated.”

June gestured to the suited men spilling out of the waiting black sedans. “And what do we tell the cavalry?”

Marcella considered the men.

“Let’s tell them,” she said, “that the Merit mob is under new management.”

* * *

MARCELLA collapsed onto the cream leather sofa, laughter bubbling across her lips. “You should have seen their faces, June . . .”

The city stretched beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass, glittering in the last shards of light.

Marcella had always wanted to live in the National.

Now that she was here, Hutch’s penthouse felt like a temporary stop on the way to bigger, better things. But it was still a pretty one.