Top Assassins Call Me The Lady Boss-Chapter 139: Death’s door

Chapter One Hundred and Thirty-Nine

He knew she had the gun on him.

Not when she lifted it.

Not even when the barrel was aligned.

He knew it before that; in the way her silence suddenly weighed more than any threat she had ever made, in the way the air around her turned unfamiliar, like a room he had walked into one too many times and finally did not recognize.

He saw her finger resting against the trigger.

Trigger. Such a small word for something that ended empires.

He watched her hand.

Watched as it tightened around the gun.

And then back to her eyes. Watched as her eyes focused on him. They weren’t shaking. They weren’t wild. They were steady.

A final resolute had settled in them.

His breath had caught not from fear, not at first, but from disbelief so sharp it felt almost innocent.

She wouldn’t. Would she? His mind reached for the truth the way a drowning man reached for air. She couldn’t. Not her. Not like this. Not after everything they had given each other in hiding and in silence. Not after the way she had trusted him in pieces instead of words.

But then...

She pulled the trigger.

He didn’t move.

It was not because he was brave.

Because for a fraction of a second, he genuinely believed she wouldn’t do it.

Not because the gun might fail but because she wouldn’t.

He had lived too long believing the world bent where he was concerned. The woman who made hardened men flinch, who ruled with blood and silence, and had suddenly gone strange around him. He thought she had grown softer. Slower.

Careful in ways she was with no one else. He had mistaken that for immunity.

He had mistaken it for safety.

If she meant to warn him, he thought she would graze him. Either his shoulder. Or his arm. Anywhere that said Remember who I am. Anywhere that said Don’t test me again.

But this!

This was different. This wasn’t a lesson. This wasn’t restraint. This wasn’t mercy dressed as fury.

When she aimed at his chest, and when her eyes went colder and more deliberate, he understood too late that she had not come to remind him who she was.

She had come to end him.

Sound detonated inside his chest.

Not pain at first.

Just like an Impact.

Like being struck by something huge and invisible all at once. His body absorbed it before his mind could follow. The force drove the air from his lungs in a violent rush, his ribs screaming as though they had cracked even if they hadn’t. His chest burned.

It didn’t stab. It burned.

Then the pain caught up.

It crawled through him like a living thing, spreading heat and fire through muscle and bone and breath. His vision smeared sideways. The warehouse lights bled into one another, white warping into yellow warping into nothing he could name.

Still, he didn’t fall right away.

He refused to.

His knees buckled, slower than they should have. Not from mercy, but from stubbornness. He would not collapse in front of her. Not like a beggar. Not like the men he had put down without ceremony. He had lived too long ruling rooms to die kneeling at anyone’s feet.

Only now did it strike him that he had never truly faced death before. Not until Asli, and the realization burned as fiercely as the wound in his chest. It was a cruel enlightenment that finally taught him exactly how his victims had felt in their final, breathless moments.

Blood filled his mouth. It tasted metallic. Thick. He swallowed it because he refused to spit like an animal.

His world narrowed into strange details.

The cold was creeping up from the concrete beneath him and the echo of the shot was bouncing off.

The ache in his chest deepened into something vast and terrifying. He dropped anyway.

Not like a man giving in.

Like a mountain finally remembering gravity existed.

When his body hit the floor, sound returned to him, not like the crack of a weapon, nor like the rush of pain but the dull, heavy truth of weight meeting earth. His skull rang. The impact rattled what little breath remained inside him loose from his lungs.

Somewhere above him, she stepped forward.

He heard it.

He recognized the sound of her boots the way some men knew their lover’s heartbeat. The rhythm of her had lived inside him too long not to.

His body responded before his pride could stop it. Something in him strained toward her. Not his hand. Not his mouth.

His chest. His bloodied chest.

Instinctively.

Idiotic. He was a big idiot.

Desperately.

Then she stopped.

She didn’t kneel. She didn’t touch him.

The pause cut deeper than the bullet.

And then her steps withdrew.

Away from him.

Each one carried distance with it, carving it into him the way the bullet had carved flesh.

"Don’t," he tried to say.

But no sound followed. His mouth opened.

Nothing came out.

Darkness pulsed at the corners of his vision, thick and creeping like smoke behind glass. He tried to focus, to hold onto something; the ceiling, the lights, the shape of where she had stood.

But his eyes wouldn’t obey.

His brain surrendered in waves, dragging memory where clarity used to be.

His life did not flash before his eyes.

It unspooled behind them.

Inside him.

He remembered his mother’s voice telling him not to stay out for too long even though she knew what he was doing outside. His mother’s voice could soothe his pain now... her voice softer than people believed she had ever been married to a Mafia leader.

He remembered killing for the first time and how his hands hadn’t shaken, they only hardened.

He remembered Markus laughing too loudly around him, too arrogant to ever imagine dying. Too playful to think of it in the first place.

He was going to miss everyone. Miss his father. His mother. Markus. His empire. Everything. Everyone.

He remembered Asli. Not the woman who shot him. The woman who had once slept in his bed and stood at his window pretending she didn’t care she had arrived before he did.

The woman who had pressed her mouth to his shoulder and told him nothing and everything all at once.

The woman who had undone him without even trying.

’So this is how it ends,’ his mind whispered.

Not in a raid.

Not in a blaze.

Not with men screaming his name in loyalty or hatred.

But on a cold floor... shot through the heart by the only woman who had ever made him forget he was built for war.

He thought of the plan he had never carried out.

The betrayal he had buried the moment it stopped being a strategy and started being a loss to him.

He had wanted out of it. He had wanted to end it.

Out of all of it.

He had wanted her and was only thinking about protecting her from her own father.

A laugh choked up inside his chest. It was weak.

Soundless.

Of all the ways fate could have punished him...

It chose love. Something he was incapable of feeling in the first place. And the first time he felt it, it hurt like crazy.

The pain began to dim.

It did not lessen.

It now felt like a distance.

Like he was sinking underwater with his eyes closed.

His heartbeat slowed into something unrecognizable.

It was heavy.

Dragging.

Slipping.

He tried once more to open his eyes.

He tried to pull breath into lungs that refused to listen.

His body burned. Then it softened. Then it went very, very quiet.

And the world...

It let him go.