“No,” she whispered in her sweetest voice. “Stay. This won’t take long.”

Marcus tipped his head back, a furrow between his brows.

Marcella smiled. “You never were one to dwell on the past, Marcus.

I loved that about you, the way things always just rolled off.”

She lifted an empty glass from the table.

“To my husband,” she said, right before the ruin rushed to her fingers in a blossom of red light. The glass dissolved, sand raining onto the felt poker table. A ripple of shock went through the table, and Marcus jerked forward, as if to rise, but Marcella had no intentions of letting go.

“We’ve had a good run,” she whispered in his ear as the anger and hurt and hatred rose like heat.

She let it all out.

Her husband had told her a hundred stories about the way men died.

No one ever held their tongue, not in the end. In the end, they begged and pleaded, sobbed and screamed.

Marcus was no exception.

It didn’t last long—not out of some sudden mercy, Marcella simply lacked the control to draw it out. She really would have liked to savor it. Would have liked the chance to memorize his horrified face, but alas —that was the first thing to go.

She had to settle instead for the shock and terror on the faces of the

other men.

Of course, that didn’t last very long either.

Two of them—Sam, of course, and another man she didn’t recognize

—were scrambling to their feet.

Marcella sighed, her husband’s remains collapsing as she knocked them aside and caught Sam’s sleeve.

“Going so soon?” she asked, ruin surging to her fingers. He staggered, fell, his body breaking by the time it hit the floor. The other man drew a knife from a hidden fold of his coat, but when he lunged toward Marcella, she wrapped one glowing hand around the blade. It decayed and crumbled, ruin spreading in an instant from metal to hilt and then up the man’s arm. He began to scream and pulled away, but the rot was already going through him like a wildfire, his body falling apart even as he tried to escape.

The last two men stayed seated at the card table, their hands up and their faces frozen. All Marcella’s life, men had looked at her with lust, desire. But this was different.

This was fear.

And it felt good.

She took her husband’s seat, settling in among his still-warm ashes.

She used a kerchief to clear a streak of him from the poker table.

“Well?” said Marcella after a long moment. “Deal me in.”

VII

FOUR WEEKS AGO

EASTERN MERIT

GROWING up, Dominic Rusher had never been a morning person.

But the army made him a get-the-fuck-up-when-you-hear-the-sound person, and anyway, sleep hadn’t come easy since his accident, so Dom was on his feet by the third wail of the 4:30 a.m. alarm. He showered, wiped away the fog on the bathroom mirror, and found his reflection.