Tools scattered across the floor, but before Victor could reach any of them Eli caught him around the middle, and they went down hard, Eli’s scalpel driving down toward Victor’s injured shoulder. He knocked Eli’s arm off course at the last instant and the blade scraped against concrete, drawing sparks.

With Eli unable to heal and Victor unable to hurt—they were finally

on equal ground.

Which wasn’t equal at all.

Eli was still built like a twenty-two-year-old quarterback.

Victor was a gaunt thirty-five, and dying.

In the blink of an eye, Eli had forced his elbow up against Victor’s throat, and Victor had to throw all his strength into keeping one arm from stabbing him and the other from crushing his windpipe.

“It always comes down to this, doesn’t it?” said Eli. “To us. To what we did—”

Victor drove a knee up into Eli’s wounded stomach, and Eli reeled, rolling sideways. Victor staggered to his feet, shoes slipping in Haverty’s blood. He caught up one of the fallen instruments, a long thin knife, as Eli lunged at him again. Victor dodged back half a step, and kicked out Eli’s knee. His scalpel-holding hand hit the ground for balance and Victor brought his boot down, pinning hand and blade both to the floor as he swung his own knife toward Eli’s chest.

But Eli got his arm up just in time, and the knife sank into his wrist, blade driving deep, and through. Victor let out a guttural scream, but when he tried to pull free, Eli caught his hand in a vise grip, and twisted. Victor lost his balance and went down, Eli on top of him, the blade now in his grip. He brought it down, and Victor threw his hands up and caught Eli’s wrists, the blood-slicked knife suspended between them.

Eli loomed over him, leaning his weight on the blade. Victor’s arms trembled from the effort, but little by little, he lost ground until the tip of the knife parted the skin of his throat.

* * *

EVERY end may be a new beginning, but every beginning had to end.

Eli Ever understood that, leaning over his old friend.

Victor Vale, weary, bleeding, broken, belonged in the ground.

It was a mercy to put him there.

“My time will come,” he said, as the knifepoint sliced Victor’s skin.

“But yours is now. And this time,” he said, “I’ll make sure you—”

A sound tore through the steel room, sudden and deafening.

Eli’s grip faltered as pain, molten hot, tore through his back—

through skin and muscle and something deeper.

Victor still lay beneath him, gasping, but alive, and Eli went to finish what he’d started, but the knife hung from his fingers. He couldn’t feel it. Couldn’t feel anything but the pain in his chest.

He looked down, and saw a broad red stain blossoming across his skin.