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“ARE YOU WATCHING ME New York?!” Rowe shouted out. “Do you see me now?! Are you finally paying attention to me? Are you regretting that you judged me? That you treated me as if I was some kind of monster? Because this is what happens when you come to those conclusions!” he said as he shook me against him. “You lose one of your precious fucking princesses!”
“Put down the gun or we’ll shoot!”
Startled, I watched two men in tuxedoes cut through the crowd and aim their guns straight at Rowe’s head, which was just behind mine.
No! I wanted to shout out to them in fear. Stand back! Now! If you try to shoot him, you might miss and he’ll kill me!
It was at that moment that red laser beams flashed from their guns and cut the distance between us. Were those beams wavering across Rowe’s face? His head? I had no idea...
I also didn’t know whether Rowe even cared at that point.
From the start, this had been a suicide run. He’d already said that both of us would die tonight. And so I swallowed that, sucked the darkness down deep into my soul, and tried hard not to feel the despair that was swirling in my gut, even though I nevertheless felt it because I didn’t know what the next few moments would bring.
Or what I might be able to do to end this.
I looked over at Alex—my sweet, sweet Alex—whose eyes were bright with tears of rage but who was holding himself back for a reason. He knew that if he intervened, that he might make matters worse. The dilemma he was facing was all over his face—the frustration, the indecision, the not knowing at what point he should jump in and help me.
Before telling him that I loved him, I thought about the short time we’d had to love each other and the children I hadn’t been able to give him. I said those words—I said out loud that I loved him—and then an idea occurred to me and I immediately acted.
With a sharp, backward snap of my head, I slammed my skull as hard as I could against Rowe’s face. Just as he bellowed out in pain and stumbled back, I immediately reached up for the gun that he’d been holding to my temple and wrestled it away from him.
At that moment, I watched the crowd react with screams of fear and I knew why—with the gun flailing between Rowe and me, it could go off at any moment and a stray bullet might hit any one of them.
“Give me the gun, you fucking bitch!” Rowe growled into my ear.
With everything I had in me, I swung around and faced him without losing my grip on the gun. I tried to knee him in the balls but I missed, striking him instead in his thigh. As we continued to struggle for control of the gun, I saw the blood pouring from his broken nose, and I saw the sheer hatred mixed with utter surprise in his bloodshot, wilder-than-wild eyes.
Surprise...
A surge of adrenaline overcame me.
Use his surprise, I thought. Use it in your favor. Bring him down!
While I kept one hand on the gun and tried like hell to keep the barrel from pointing at me, I punched Rowe squarely in his right eye with my left hand—on which were the enormous engagement and wedding rings Alex had given me. And when I did that—when those diamonds dug deep into his eye and I twisted my fist in an effort to destroy his eye—Rowe stepped on my dress’ ridiculously large skirt and grabbed my arm as he fell back, sending both of us crashing to the cement with me landing on top of him with a thud just as the gun went off.
People screamed.
“He’s been shot!” I heard a woman bellow. “Somebody help me! It’s my husband!”
“Don’t shoot!” I heard Alex shout behind me, likely to the security guards at his sides. “You don’t have a clean shot! Her gown is covering most of his body! Don’t you dare shoot unless you are certain that you can take him!”
“Take me?” Rowe spat at he started to thrash beneath me. His heavy, clotted breath huffed against my face. “No one is taking me tonight but me! But I’m killing you first, Jennifer. You’ll see.”
The hell I would.
With his threat imminent, our bodies intertwined as we rolled around on the cement, each of us determined to gain control over the other—and more importantly, the gun.
But Rowe was stronger than I was. I’d taken him by surprise, and ruined his right eye, but surprise was fleeting, and now the man was gaining ground on me. Fighting harder against me. I felt my embrace on the gun weakening, and I damned myself for it. I had to do something to give me control of the gun and finally snuff out his life forever.
Cut him, I thought. Cut him with your nails...
When I did, when the back of my nails raked across his face, my diamond solitaire snagged against the corner of his mouth, set in like a hook, and my momentum tore his mouth wide open.
I looked down at him in horror.
I’d cut him so deeply, his back teeth were now completely exposed to me, smeared with blood, saliva, and mucus amid the torn flesh hanging from his yawning, ruined cheek.
His tongue darted out of his mouth like a lizard, swiping from side to side as he cried out in pain. He kicked beneath me like he never had before, and made a strange sound at the base of his throat. Then, out of nowhere, I saw a man’s shoe come forward and kick the gun so hard that it spun and skidded away from us and onto Park Avenue.
“Jennifer, take my hand!”
It was Alex—he’d waited for his moment to act—to save me—and he’d taken it.
I shoved my hand into his and then felt the front of my dress tear open as Alex pulled me off Rowe, who had been clutching the top of my gown with his free hand.
Exposed, I wrapped my arms around my bared breasts and staggered backward while Alex leaped onto Rowe, and started to pummel him with his bare fists.
He was going to kill him—I knew it. The blows he was raining down onto Rowe’s head were so intense, so wildly out of control, that I knew my husband had gone to another place—one that would keep me protected from Rowe forever.
And for Alex, forever could only come with that man’s death.
“Get on your feet,” Alex said as he took hold of Rowe’s jacket while traffic on Park slowed as the situation mounted. “Stand up! Move it!”
When Rowe was up, his face a broken, bleeding wreck that now resembled a monster’s, Alex shoved him against the foundation’s exterior. “You think you can take my wife’s life, you son of a bitch? The woman who means the world to me? You think that you can just come back to this city and fucking murder people at will and without repercussion? You think you can get away with any of that? Here’s the thing, you motherfucker—you can’t.”
As Alex reared back his fist to slam it into Rowe’s throat, I heard a muffled crack from somewhere behind me and then watched Rowe’s head suddenly explode into nothing as its remains flew up into the air—and back down onto Alex.
Covered in blood, bone, and brain matter, Alex stumbled back in shock while I did the same. With blood jetting from Rowe’s neck in thick, sickening torrents, his body started to shutter in a series of convulsions before he eventually slumped over onto his side, became very still and just lay there—dead.
