I heard Nassir heave a sigh and I rose to my feet so that I was standing behind him. “Please don’t do this.” There was a quiver in my voice but my heart made me sound stronger than I was feeling. I touched my face, surprised to find a steady stream of silent tears running across my cheeks.

Nassir spared me a hard glance over his shoulder and turned back around to focus all his attention on the armed teenager. “Until I got my hands on the old man and you were trapped in a house with him.” Nassir sounded resigned and regretful. His words were heavy and his posture was repentant. He was actually sorry for what had happened to the kid because of his actions, even if they had been done to save me.

“I could take the beatings because eventually I got big enough to fight back. The filth, and the abuse, meant nothing because all along the worst thing he was doing was touching my sisters. He couldn’t go out after you crippled him, wouldn’t leave the house because of his fucked-up face, so instead of being his kids, my sisters became his new targets. Their childhood, their innocence, was stolen because of you. At first I thought I could just ruin your business, make you mad, and force you to spend all your precious money, but then I realized it wasn’t enough. You had to pay like we did. You should have your life, your future, taken away just like my sisters did.”

Nassir made another noise low in his throat and I saw him wave his hand. A slight movement caught my eye and I saw Chuck and a couple of the other security staff creeping around the side of the building with their own guns drawn.

“I understand why you feel that way, I really do, but if you kill me, if you pull that trigger, you are making a choice that you can’t unmake. You are doing exactly what your old man set you up to do. You are acting like nothing more than the monster I started to build all those years ago.”

He reached out his hand to grab the kid’s shoulder, and when the young man jerked away, I wasn’t the only witness to the scene that gasped. Nassir was playing a dangerous game and he was going to lose everything if the kid didn’t choose to play along. I was scared of losing him and my heart broke as he tried so desperately to make this troubled young man see that even in hell there were options. No matter where you were or what your future looked like, your life was a product of the choices you made. That was why I needed to be able to give the people here in the Point the chance to make better lives for themelves. Every action had a consequence and sometimes it was the consequences that could kill you.

“You have the opportunity to make your shitty life into something better. Go get your sisters out of the system and give them a better life, the life they always deserved. Worry about saving them and yourself instead of ruining something that’s already been broken and repaired too many times to count. Put the gun down and make the choice to be something better than I am, to be better than what your old man tried to beat into you.”

The gun wobbled a little and I thought my devil did his thing and bargained with his greatest asset—his life—and won. I tried to exhale a breath that felt like it was stuck in my throat, and I saw Chuck creeping closer and closer. His gaze was shifting between where I was still crouched behind the SUV and where Nassir stood with the young man on the other side.

“How am I supposed to be anything other than this?!” The kid’s voice rose and I heard panic and something wild in it. “I didn’t finish high school. I have no money, no job, and my family is in pieces. In this place, being a man makes you weak, but being a monster makes you a legend.”

He was going to pull the trigger. I saw it at the same time Chuck did because I screamed Nassir’s name and scrambled to my feet so I could launch myself across the front seats of the SUV to try to grab ahold of him. There was no way I was going to make it in time. The gun was too close to his chest and the kid had already made up his mind.

The first blast made me deaf and had Nassir wilting to the ground as soon as it sounded. I wasn’t fast enough to get him before he hit the asphalt. The rapid blasts that followed had the kid’s body jerking in a morbid dance in front of my eyes as bullets tore into him, making the gun fall out of his hand. He collapsed on the ground across from his victim.

I got out of the driver’s side of the car and fell onto my knees next to Nassir’s side. I couldn’t tell where the bullet had entered him because there was so much blood seeping onto his chest. The white fabric of his shirt was turning entirely crimson and he wasn’t moving at all. I pushed the sides of his suit jacket out of the way while I searched for a place to put pressure. I was watching him die right in front of me. Suddenly all those years of fighting to be independent, of struggling to make it on my own, felt wasted and foolish. I was more myself with him than I had ever been and now I felt like I was losing one of the best parts of me.

Chuck dropped down on the other side of him and tapped him on the cheek. Tarnished bronze eyes peeled open with great difficulty to peer up at us. “Already called the law. They got the medics with them, boss, so you hang in there.”

“I can’t see where he’s hit, can you?” I felt like I needed to put pressure on the wound, to stem the flow of blood rushing out of the man I loved, but I was useless and all I could do was grab his lifeless hand and hold on. His fingers didn’t even slightly twitch and I could see how hard it was for him to breathe.

“I think he got hit more than once. Idiot. Trying to negotiate with a gun pointed right at his heart. What were you thinking?”

Chuck seemed as worried and at as much of a loss as to what to do as I was. I leaned forward and pressed my lips to Nassir’s. They were so cold and all I could taste was my own salty tears and the tang of blood. There was no life in there to kiss me back.

He was thinking he would offer the kid a break he had never been offered. He was thinking he would show the young man that when you had a reason, had a purpose, you could make choices that mattered. He was trying to tell him that even when you were broken and twisted deep down inside, there was always a way to get in there and shape all those mangled pieces into a better man. Maybe not a good man, definitely not a law-abiding and upstanding man, never an easy or agreeable man, but a man that was better than what he had been created to be.

“If you die on me I’m going to be so mad at you.”

I whispered the words against his unresponsive mouth and started crying in earnest when a warm puff of air escaped to touch my lips.