His expression flickered, suddenly uncertain. He took a step toward her. “I thought you were dead.” A forced stammer, a mockery of emotion. “The cops wouldn’t let me see your . . . I thought maybe you . . . what do you remember, baby?”

Still the pet names.

Marcella shook her head. “I remember making dinner. Everything after that is a blur.”

She caught a glimpse of hope in his eyes—amazement, that he would get away with it, that he could have the best of both worlds: killing his wife and getting her back.

But instead of coming to her, he sank down into his chair. “By the

time I got home,” he said, “the fire trucks were there, the house was up in flames. They wouldn’t let me in.” Marcus slumped back, as if reliving the trauma. The grief. As if ten minutes earlier he hadn’t been playing poker and waiting for his mistress—her one-time friend—to bring him his drink.

Marcella went to her husband, circled behind his chair, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “I’m just so glad . . .”

He took up her hand, pressed his lips against her wrist. “I’m all right, doll.”

She nestled her face into his collar. Felt Marcus actually relax, muscles unwinding as he realized he was in the clear.

“Guys,” said Marcus, “game’s over.”

The other men shuffled, about to rise.

“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.