The gun felt cold against Scarlett's temple. She should have seen this coming, but Sarah's hands were shaking so badly that the metal kept slipping against her skin.
"You really think you can do this?" Scarlett asked, keeping her voice steady even though her wrists were zip-tied behind her back. The warehouse smelled like rust and old motor oil, and somewhere in the distance she could hear water dripping from a broken pipe.
Sarah's face was streaked with tears, but her grip on the pistol never wavered. "I don't have a choice anymore, Scar. You know what Marcus told me. You know what they'll do to me if I don't finish this."
Scarlett almost laughed. After fifteen years of friendship, after all the jobs they'd pulled together, after Sarah had been the maid of honor at her wedding, it was going to end like this. In some dingy warehouse on the wrong side of Chicago, with her best friend crying while she prepared to blow her brains out.
"Marcus put you up to this?" Scarlett shifted slightly, testing the restraints. The plastic cut into her skin, but she'd been tied up by professionals before. Sarah wasn't a professional. Sarah was a mess.
"He said you were getting too dangerous. That you were asking too many questions about the Montenegro job." Sarah wiped her nose with the back of her free hand. "He said if I didn't do this, they'd kill both of us anyway."
The Montenegro job. Three months ago, Scarlett had walked into what was supposed to be a simple arms deal and found twelve dead bodies instead of the weapons cache she'd been promised. Someone had gotten there first and made sure no one would be talking about what they'd seen. She'd spent weeks trying to figure out who had set her up, but every lead went nowhere.
Now she knew why. Her own husband had been feeding her false information the entire time.
"Where is Marcus now?" Scarlett asked.
"Safe house in Detroit. He's waiting for me to call when it's done." Sarah's voice cracked. "I'm sorry, Scarlett. I really am. But I can't go to prison. I can't do twenty-five to life because you couldn't leave well enough alone."
Scarlett looked at her oldest friend and felt something cold settle in her chest. Not fear. Not anger. Just a kind of tired acceptance that this was how her story ended. Shot in the head by someone she'd trusted with her life more times than she could count.
"You know what the funny thing is?" Scarlett said. "I was going to quit after this year. Marcus and I were talking about having kids. Getting out of the business before we got too old for it."
Sarah sobbed harder. "Don't make this worse than it already is."
"I'm not making it worse. I'm just wondering if Marcus was planning this the whole time, or if he only decided to kill me after I started asking questions."
"He loves you."
"No, Sarah. He doesn't. Men who love their wives don't have them murdered in warehouses." Scarlett tested the zip ties again. Still tight. "But you know what I keep thinking about? Two weeks ago, when you came over for dinner. You looked me right in the eye and asked me how married life was treating me. You already knew he was planning to kill me, didn't you?"
Sarah's hand was shaking so badly now that Scarlett was genuinely worried she might accidentally pull the trigger before she meant to.
"I tried to talk him out of it," Sarah whispered. "I swear I did. But he said there wasn't another way."
"There's always another way. You just didn't want to take the hard one."
Sarah raised the gun higher, and Scarlett could see her friend trying to work up the courage to pull the trigger. In another few seconds, it would be over. Fifteen years of friendship, three years of marriage, and twenty-eight years of life, all ending because she'd asked the wrong questions about the wrong job.
"Goodbye, Scarlett."
The gunshot was louder than Scarlett expected. Then everything went black, and she stopped thinking about anything at all.
But death, as it turned out, was just the beginning.