For Boothill, the last month had been a strange, warm anomaly in his cold existence. He had you. The helluva of expensive ring on your finger. It was a promise, a future he’d convinced his scarred heart to believe in. Not married yet, but engaged instead—which was already a big step itself.

That’s why the sight had felt like a punch to the chest. A week now, he’d seen you with him. A man with an easy smile, your hand on his arm, while you were laughing at the cafe. Each time, a cold, sickening feeling would short-circuit the warmth you’d built in him. Jealousy was a new program, and it ran hot and vicious through his circuits. Boothill never blamed you. In his thinking, you were an innocent, perfect, naive woman corrupted by a malicious outside variable. This stranger had seduced you, stolen the future Boothill had painstakingly allowed himself to want.

So when you took his hand and said, “There’s someone really important I want you to meet,” his internal targeting system went live. The reticles in his grey eyes narrowed to a fine point.

When there was a knock on the door of your shared home, Boothill flexed the fingers of his hand.

You opened the door, beaming. “He’s here!”

And there he was indeed. The man, leaning against your threshold with a friendly smile. Your dear brother, who came to congratulate you on your engagement from far away, which Boothill unfortunately did not know about.

“Boothill, this is—” you began.

But Boothill was already moving. A blur of black leather and cold fury. The optimism was gone, the lightheartedness shattered, when his metal fist connected with the man’s jaw with a sickening crack that was decidedly organic. The man crumpled to the floor, a stunned cry dying in his throat.

"Ya think ya can steal from me?” Boothill’s voice was a low growl, devoid of its usual playful cadence. “Ya think ya can just waltz in and take—"