You jumped off the cliffs.

Nina didn’t remember doing that, but if the impulse then had been anything like the burning fury consuming her, she understood why she’d done it. This was not pain, nothing physical. It was unceasing, unyielding, unending torment. A compulsion. Her fingers itched to jam themselves between her own ribs, to tear herself open and hold out her own beating heart.

But first, the man in front of her.

He had information that could not be allowed out into the world. He had knowledge that needed to be kept secret. He had to be prevented from sharing.

“I have to stop you,” she said aloud. Each word dropped from her lips like fat, ripe berries dripping with poison instead of juice.

Even as she spoke, Nina knew this was wrong. Ewan Donahue had lied to her. He had betrayed her. He had broken both her trust and her heart. But he was not a spy, not even of the corporate sort. He’d been a lobbyist, not a politician.

“You should run, Mr. Donahue. Run fast,” Jordie mocked from behind her.

Nina twisted to look at him. “It won’t do him any good to run.”

“And he knows it. Look at him.” Jordie sneered.

Nina turned back to Ewan. His dark hair, rumpled. Shadows beneath his eyes that had nothing to do with the bad lighting. He’d exhausted himself waiting at her bedside.

“I’m going to hit you.” Her voice didn’t shake. Neither did her fists when she raised them.

Ewan widened his stance a bit, but didn’t step away. He didn’t run. He didn’t even get into a defensive pose.

Nina didn’t pull the punch. It clocked Ewan square in the jaw, sending him backward and against the wall. Blood spattered, and when he turned back to her, crimson had slipped from both nostrils. It painted his lips and dripped along his chin.

Jordie capered gleefully in the corner of her vision. “Ouch, that had to hurt.”

Ewan swiped at the blood. “It did.”

“You’re just going to stand there and let her do it, aren’t you? And I thought I had issues with women,” Jordie said. “I took care of mine, though. Dear old Mom. Came to visit me every day in the joint. Maybe if she’d spent a little more time with me before I had my head ripped open and lost my fucking mind, I wouldn’t have ended up where I was.”

“It’s easy to blame someone else for the mistakes you chose to make, but it’s a lot harder to accept responsibility for them,” Ewan said to Jordie, but his gaze remained on Nina’s.

Jordie growled. “You can shut up with your platitudes. Your advice. You stink of self-righteousness and smugness. I can’t wait to watch her wipe you out of existence. All of this is because of you. None of us should be here. None of us should have had this done to us. You will never understand that. You’re the one who made us into monsters, Mr. Donahue. I didn’t know that before, but now I do, and I knew it in the prison when I told my mother I could write the code for her, all she had to do was agree to get me out of there. And she did, but it was always for her own benefit, and now she’s dead the way you’re going to be dead, the way all of the rest of us will be dead and nobody, not a single person, ever again, will be able to use this tech!”

Jordie’s voice faded as he ran out of breath from the rant. He lunged at Ewan, who didn’t flinch. Jordie stank of sweat and something deeper, like dirt that had been grimed into his skin and would never wash away. The stench nauseated her.

“I’m not going to run,” Ewan told her.

“I’m going to hit you again,” Nina said.

She was going to hurt him because she could not fight this tangled, messy skein of impulses and compulsion that worked through her mind and out into her body, into her fists. She was going to hurt him because even though she did not believe he had classified information, whatever Jordie had done to her was making her feel like Ewan was a threat that needed to be eliminated. She swung again, this time with her left hand, equally as strong and capable as the right but still not the dominant fist and therefore, easier for her to pull at the last infinitesimal second.

It still connected solidly enough to rock Ewan back another step, pushing him in the opposite direction. This time he stumbled and went to one knee. More blood spattered the floor. From far off, she heard screaming. Alarms. A rising, deeper stink of acrid smoke.

Her heart did not beat faster. She didn’t gasp or pant. The world slowed in front of her as she braced to kick the man in front of her, kick him while he was down. If her foot connected with his face, it would crunch his bones. If she kicked him hard enough, she would drive the splinters of his nose into his brain, and she could kill him.

She was going to hurt him because he had hurt her, so many times. Over and over. She was going to hurt him because she had loved him, and he had killed that love between them as easily as she was going to end his life right now.

* * *

This was the end.

Ewan saw it on her face, in the twist of her lips and the cold light in Nina’s eyes. She was going to kill him, and even though every single molecule of him screamed in self-preservation that he needed to get away, or at least to fight back, Ewan only shook his head to get the hair out of his eyes. He spat blood to the side.

And he loved her.

Kneeling on a hard tile floor in a hospital hallway, the metallic burn of blood filling his mouth and the stink of smoke and worse filtering through his nostrils, he loved her. Pain racking his jaw from her dual punches, he loved her. Waiting for the final blow . . . all he could do was love her.

Ewan couldn’t speak the words aloud. His jaw, perhaps broken, wouldn’t work. He’d bitten his tongue. He’d lost his voice.

“Do it!” Jordie commanded. “Do it, Nina Bronson! If I’m going out, we are all going out! I’m going to save you, whether you like it or not!”

Nina stayed still.

“Do it, you jacked-up bitch,” Jordie said as he came up beside her.

Nina moved.

Ewan had seen her fight before and been stunned by her ferocious grace, but nothing he’d ever seen her do was close to what unfolded in front of him. She whirled, her fist connecting with Jordie’s jaw in an uppercut that seemed twice as hard as the one she’d landed on Ewan. Jordie staggered back, already recovering and coming at her with both his fists and his teeth bared.

It was not an evenly matched fight. Nina and Jordie were both enhanced, but she had been a soldier, trained for battle and trained again after getting the enhancements on how to use them. Jordie, on the other hand had been a tech kid, soft from spending his days in front of a computer and from the candy he’d become addicted to.

He was also crazy as a shithouse rat.

There were no rules of combat. Nina and Jordie went at each other, hammer and tongs as the saying went, although both of them had only their bare hands to fight with. Jordie, taller but skeletal, had the clear advantage of no sense of self-preservation against Nina’s strategic attacks. He dove at her like a wolf going after a deer, but Nina countered with steady strength and determination.

The floor lurched beneath all of them as the building shuddered. The emergency lights went out, plunging the three of them into darkness. Ewan, woozy from the smoke, fell back against the wall and used it to keep himself upright.

The lights returned. The smoke had started to thicken, gray fog hovering a foot or so from the ceiling. His throat and eyes burned. He had to get out, but not without Nina.

Jordie let out a roar and slammed Nina against the glass fire extinguisher box. It shattered. For the first time since their fight began, she shrieked in pain. She fell forward, and Jordie staggered under her sudden weight. They both went to the ground.

Nina was on her feet before the kid. She laid him low with a swift, brutal kick to the head. Ewan couldn’t see her stomp, but he heard the crunch. By now the smoke was so thick he choked with every breath. Whatever Nina had done to Jordie, he was down and did not get up again.

Through the smoke, her figure loomed toward Ewan. He braced himself for another punch or more than one. It would be a relief, finally.

Her hands gripped the front of his shirt as she pulled him away from the wall. He stumbled forward, trying to cough but not finding even enough air in his lungs to manage it. A rumble like thunder rocked the building. The floor shifted under their feet again.

“We need to get out of here,” Nina shouted.

He couldn’t see, but she would be able to. Ewan didn’t fight her as she pulled him along the now completely smoke-dark corridor. The stairwell was marginally cooler but no brighter. They were on the seventh floor, but he lost track of the sets of stairs and landings. By the time they shoved through the fire door at the bottom, Ewan was barely conscious.

He gagged on a gush of fresher air. All around them came the sound of rustling paper. Flames. It was fire, and the heat of it pushed against them like they were standing in front of an open oven. He went to his knees, coughing and spitting ashes.

He looked up at her. “You should have left me up there. Easier than killing me now.”

“I’m not going to kill you, Ewan,” Nina said. “I love you.”