“Ah!” Capelli’s gun hand whipped upward out of sheer instinct, the distance between him and Vaughn so close that the guy smartly chose to freeze in place. “Don’t fucking move.”

“Hello, James.” Vaughn actually had the nerve to crack a grin, albeit a small one, and a strange chill started moving through Capelli’s mind. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“If you were looking to double back and slip out of the tunnels through the service exit at the end of this hallway, I’d say that was a tactical error,” Capelli said, dropping Shae’s hand and angling his body in front of hers to advance a step closer to Vaughn in the narrow space of the hallway.

“I don’t make tactical errors,” Vaughn said, the words dipped in steel despite the fact that Capelli had a gun pointed at him. “But it does seem that on occasion, you get very, very lucky.”

Capelli’s brows winged upward, his shock escaping in a huff. “I see. So knowing you’d run rather than carry out your plan to burn this place down was just luck?”

“It was strategy.” Vaughn shrugged. “Covering my ass now gives me the opportunity to come back and fight another day. But you know all about that from squealing on your mother, now don’t you?”

He hadn’t been expecting the blow, and it landed right in his solar plexus. “That has nothing to do with this.”

“Oh, it has everything to do with this.”

Capelli was aware on some logical level that Shae was behind him, that the hallway had two viable exit paths, that they were still pretty far from backup being more than halfway down the passage. But in that moment, the only thing that mattered was the cold, visceral sensation spreading out over him, and Capelli took another step toward Vaughn, this one fueled by menace.

“And the fact that I pinpointed your location here in the tunnels even though you thought you trashed all of Shae’s coms? Is that luck too?”

Well, that shut Vaughn’s cake trap. “Good guess,” he finally said, and Capelli allowed himself the pleasure of a laugh.

“It’s not really a guess when it’s that close to the mark, now is it? There’s a GPS tracker in her boot heel. One you missed,” he added, a swirl of dark pleasure rippling through him at the muscle tightening in Vaughn’s jaw.

“So how are we going to do this, Wraith? You gonna rat me out, too? I heard your mother died in the clink. Stabbed with a screwdriver.” He clucked his tongue. “Such a shame. Could’ve been avoided if she hadn’t been there in the first place, don’t you think?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Capelli wasn’t shocked by the words until he realized he hadn’t been the one to say them. But it was Shae’s voice that hung in his ears, and all at once, he realized how close he’d come to losing her.

How Vaughn had had every intention of killing her. Slowly. Painfully.

His free hand was around Vaughn’s throat in a blinding, white-hot instant.

“There we go,” Capelli hissed, backing Vaughn against the wall for leverage and pressing the Glock to his rib cage for insurance. His anger pulsed through him, sliding under his skin like a living, breathing, mind-altering thing. He could call out, he knew. He could hold Vaughn at gunpoint until the rest of the team arrived to back him up. He could have him in full custody in less than two minutes.

But he wasn’t going to.

Surprisingly, Vaughn wheezed out a strained laugh. “Yeah,” he grated, and Capelli kept his grip firm enough to be painful, yet loose enough to let Vaughn speak. “There we go, indeed. There’s the ice-cold son of a bitch I always knew.”

Capelli’s grip tightened of its own volition, but still, Vaughn sputtered on. “You haven’t cleaned up, James. You’ve just gotten a whole lot better at being dirty. So go on. Do it. Shoot me and get it over with.”

“I’m not going to shoot you.”

Even in his utterly outmatched position, Vaughn had the balls to laugh again. “I always knew you were a pussy.”

“Oh, I didn’t say I wasn’t going to kill you,” Capelli said, and there. There it was.

Fear.

But the flash in Vaughn’s eyes only lasted for a second before turning flat, cold and lifeless. “You were raised by wolves, brother. So go on. Show me your fangs.”

The dare collided with the adrenaline in Capelli’s veins, forming a four-hundred proof cocktail of dark and nasty. He wrapped his fingers more tightly around Vaughn’s throat and started to squeeze. He knew the anatomy, trachea, hyoid bone, external carotid artery—which was hammering away beneath the pad of his index finger. Funny, how delicate it all was. How all it took was one move, one snap decision to change everything.

“Capelli.”

The voice sounded far away. He was aware—quite vaguely—of movement beside him, of Vaughn’s eyes bulging wider, of a more earnest struggle, but he didn’t care.

“Capelli!” came the voice again, yet still, he pressed harder, his fingers digging deep.

“James.”

The single syllable pierced his awareness at the same time his conscience came roaring back to life, carrying out the plan he’d had all along.

“I didn’t say I was killing you, either,” Capelli said. “But you deserve to know what it’s like to be scared for your life. Just like you deserve the one thing you’re afraid of more than dying.”

“You wouldn’t,” Vaughn coughed, staring up at him in true fear. “You can’t.”

“Oh yeah, I really would. You belong in jail, asshole. And I’m going to make it my personal mission to be sure you rot in there for the rest of your nice, long life.”

Keeping the Glock trained on Vaughn just in case, Capelli took a step back and aimed a shout down toward the main corridor.

“Suspect in custody! Repeat, suspect in custody in passageway two, requesting backup!”

The heavy riot of footfall echoed off the damp tunnel walls, and seconds later, Moreno and Hollister arrived on each other’s heels, Glocks drawn.

“Jesus. Nice work, Capelli,” Hollister said, turning Vaughn around roughly while Moreno slapped handcuffs over his wrists. “McCullough,” he added, relief flooding his voice. “Are you okay?”

“I am now,” she said, launching herself into Capelli’s arms, and Capelli didn’t even care that the hallway was starting to swarm with all manner of RPD personnel, all of whom could see every last one of his emotions.

He held her back even tighter.