“Did you always know,” she’d asked Marcus once, undoing the buttons on a blood-stained shirt, “that you had what it took to end a life?”

“Not until the gun was in my hand,” he’d said. “I thought it would be hard, but in that moment, nothing was easier.”

He was right.

But there was, it turned out, a crucial difference between destroying things and destroying people.

People screamed.

Or at least they tried. Bethany certainly would have, if Marcella hadn’t already grabbed her by the throat, hadn’t eroded through her vocal cords before anything more than a short, futile gasp could escape.

And even then, the men in the other room might have heard, if they hadn’t been laughing so loudly.

It didn’t take long.

One second Bethany’s mouth was open in a perfect O of surprise and the next her plump skin had shriveled, her face twisting into a rictus grin that quickly pulled away to reveal the skull beneath, and then even that turned to ash, as all that was left of Bethany crumbled to the kitchen floor.

It was over so fast—there was hardly any time for Marcella to savor what she’d done, and no time to think about all the things she should be feeling, given the circumstances, or even to wonder at their peculiar absence.

It was just so easy.

As if everything had wanted to come apart.

There was probably some law about that.

Order giving way to chaos.

Marcella took up a dishcloth and wiped the dust from her fingers as another raucous laugh cut through the house. Then a familiar voice called out.

“Doll, where’s that drink?”

Marcella followed the voice down the short hall that ran between the kitchen and the den where the men were playing.

“Where the fuck is my drink?” bellowed Marcus, chair scraping back. He was on his feet when she walked in.

“Hello, boys.”

Marcus didn’t have to feign surprise, since he’d expected her to be dead. His face drained of all color—what was the phrase, oh yes: as if he’d just seen a ghost. The other four men squinted through the haze of liquor and cigar smoke.

“Marce?” said her husband, voice laced with shock.

Oh, how she longed to kill him, but she wanted to use her bare hands, and there was a table between them, and Marcus was holding his ground, looking at her with a mixture of suspicion and worry, and Marcella knew what she had to do. She began to cry. It was easy—all she had to do was think of her life, the one she’d worked so hard for, going up in flames.

“I’ve been so worried,” she said, breath hitching. “I woke up in a hospital, and you weren’t there. The cops said there’d been a fire and I thought—I was afraid—they wouldn’t tell me if you’d been hurt in it. They wouldn’t tell me anything.”

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.

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.

Five years had done a lot of good. Gone was the harrowed look of someone in constant pain, the gaunt features of a man trying and failing to self-medicate. In his place was a soldier, lean muscles winding over broad shoulders, tan arms strong and back straight, his hair cropped short on the sides, slicked back on top.

He’d gotten his shit together, too.

His medals were mounted on the wall, no longer thrown carelessly around the necks of empty liquor bottles. Next to them hung the X-rays. Each metal plate and bar, pin and screw, every way they’d put Dominic back together, glowing white against the backdrop of muscles and skin.

The place was clean.

And Dom was clean.

He hadn’t had a drink or a dose since the night they dug up Victor—he wished he could say since the night they met, when Victor erased his pain, but the bastard had gone and died, left Dom high and dry and in a world of hurt. Those had been two dark nights, ones he didn’t want to remember, but Dominic’s control hadn’t faltered since.

Even when Victor shorted out, and the pain came rushing back. Dom white-knuckled it, tried to treat the episodes as a reminder, the reprieves as a gift.

After all, it could be worse.

It had been worse.

Dom wolfed down a cup of too-hot coffee and a plate of too-runny eggs, slung on his jacket, grabbed his helmet from the door, and stepped out into the gray predawn.

His ride sat waiting in its usual spot—a simple black motorcycle, nothing fancy but the kind of thing he’d always wanted growing up and never been able to afford. Dom wiped the dew from the seat before swinging his leg over, kicked it into gear, and savored the low purr for a moment before setting off.

He rode through the empty streets as Merit began to wake around him. This early, most of the streetlights were in his favor, and Dom was out of the city in ten minutes. Merit tapered off to either side before giving way to empty fields. The sun rose at his back as the engine screamed beneath him and the wind buffeted his helmet, and for fifteen minutes he felt totally free.

He hit the turnoff and slowed, easing his bike down an unmarked road. Another five minutes, and Dom passed through an open gate, slowing as the building came into sight.

From the outside, it looked like nothing at all. A hospital, perhaps. Or a processing plant. A set of white blocks stacked together in a nondescript formation. The kind of place you’d drive by without a second glance, unless you knew what it was.