She shoved this aside. If it was her mother, so be it. She would handle it later. Right now, it wasn’t important why or how Kovit had been added to the list. What was important was dealing with it.

Kovit trembled on the ground, his chest heaving as though he couldn’t quite get enough air. “I’m going to die.”

“No—”

“Yes, Nita. My face is up. No matter what you do, even if you destroy INHUP, it’s too late. My face is already up.”

He ran his hands through his hair, fingers curling into his scalp, and Nita knelt beside him and grabbed his hands before he could scratch his skin off with his finger-nails.

“It’s not over until it’s over.” Nita’s voice was hard and sharp and desperate.

He laughed brokenly, his voice high and a little hysterical. “Nita, no one has escaped the list once their name and face are on it. No one.”

“No one escaped Death Market either.”

“Nita, this is not something you can fix.” His voice broke, and he took a moment to collect himself, his chest heaving, his throat gulping for air. “My name is out there. It’s over. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“It does. It always matters.” She pressed her hands to his cheeks. “Kovit, you can’t give up. You can’t.”

“Why?” His smile was bitter. “All my misdeeds are coming back to get me.”

Nita snorted. “You, of all people, should know there is no karmic justice in the world. There’s no meaning. You can spend your whole life being a saint and still get murdered in a random shootout,” Nita snapped, thinking of the real estate agent who’d taken a bullet meant for Nita in Toronto, her eyes widening as she cried out and fell. An innocent casualty in a war she didn’t even realize was happening. “And you can be the most terrible person in the world, and as long as you have money and power, no one will touch you.

“The world isn’t fair, Kovit.” Nita pressed her forehead to his. “Maybe you do deserve to die. Maybe you’re irredeemably evil. But I don’t care, and neither does the world. And God damn it, I’m not going to let INHUP take you from me.”

His breathing was shaky. “How? How can you stop this?”

Nita pulled away and tugged her cell phone out, giving him a gentle, careful smile. “You think I didn’t plan for this eventuality?”

He blinked. “What?”

“You gave me the idea. Back in Toronto. When you said I should start cultivating relationships with newspapers by selling off those corrupt INHUP names. So we could more easily release any information we got from Tácunan Law.”

“Yeah . . .” He frowned. “What about it?”