The driver was returning, so I ignored a very different feeling that came over the back of the car. I pointed at him. “He’s back.”He opened the door. Ashton got out first and stepped aside to let me lead the way.I did, ignoring the clerk and a couple other customers inside. The bathroom was empty, thank god, but the lock was pitiful. Holding my bladder, as if that worked, I hauled the giant garbage bin over to block the door. The thing was hella heavy, so it’d do. After that, heaven and relief and yes.That’s when my phone pinged in my pocket.I pulled it out, seeing that reception had come back at some point, and saw thirty text messages, sixteen voice messages, and a whole host of other alerts. Holy shit . . .Pialto: WHAT THE HAT, WOMAN?! WHERE ARE YOU?Pialto: Sorry. What the what. Auto-duck.Pialto: Your cousin won’t tell us anything!Sophie: Where are you? Are you alive? Did you have a one-night stand and it’s amazing and you’re taking a day? Please please please tell me that’

ASHTONI stayed until long after Molly fell asleep, and even then, I couldn’t bring myself to leave her.This—I didn’t know what the fuck this was, but needing to take care of her, the terror that went through me when that gun touched her head. It was nothing to how it felt when she looked at me.I felt struck by lightning.She was scared. She knew she would die, and she looked at me for help. It was in an instant. One look. Not even a second and we both knew what we were going to do.I hated her while growing up and now this? This? What the hell was happening with me? I untangled myself from her. It’d been my fourth attempt. The first two she’d fought back, waking up. The third, I hadn’t had the heart in it myself, but this fourth time—I needed to separate. At least for a bit. I needed to think clearly again, to even remember how that felt.Pulling a shirt on, I headed out and toward Trace’s basement. He had a whole TV lounge area, and in the last month since he’d bought this place f

ASHTONWe’d slept through the rest of the morning.I was sitting on the edge of the bed. Molly was still conked out behind me. She’d fallen asleep after our last time, so I’d moved her, positioning her back under the sheets, but I couldn’t sleep. My body was a mix of satisfaction, exhaustion, and also readiness for whatever was to come.I liked this next stage. Not in a Mafia war, but in our businesses. I enjoyed where the next move was ours to make, where our adversary was wary, where we were the predators. But the stakes were different here.They’d hit us last night, and before we’d even retired to our separate bedrooms, Trace and I had already coordinated our attack. Each of us still handled what our families handled before, with Trace’s family covering transportation and distribution and mine handling the cops and higher-ups, but it was different now that he and I were the heads. We could coordinate better. There was no more needed time to call for a meeting or to decipher if that

MOLLYI got my dad’s voice mail, again. “Dad, you need to call me. I’m actually worried. For once.” I hung up before I could say anything more, like how I wanted to murder him, because if he heard that, he’d never find Kelly’s murderer.“No luck?”I straightened, hearing Jess come into the kitchen.I’d left the bedroom around six because my stomach was doing its best rendition of a pterodactyl squawk, or how I was assuming they would’ve squawked. It would’ve been more like a roar.I’d realized this was not Ashton’s house or another one of Ashton’s places when I went down the stairs and saw a picture of Trace and Jess together. The next picture over was of her mother. Her brother. There were more people, but I didn’t know them, and then I meandered into the office and was captivated for the next hour because there was an entire wall of pictures of Trace during his high school and college years. A lot of those pictures had him and Ashton, and yeah, my stomach was doing all these little

ASHTONWe were leaving the downtown warehouse, which at one point had had three guests, but we made the decision to separate the Worthings. Avery would take them to the compound and put them into the warehouse their detective cousin had vacated earlier. Their interrogation would be a much longer process.“Marco is still at Katya?”I was checking my phone, then cursing when I saw all the missed calls and texts.“What?”I called Eze, my main guy I’d left on Molly. “What’s going on?”“Molly and Jess left the house earlier today.”“What?” I put him on speaker. “You’ve got me and Trace.”“I followed. Your orders were to stay back if Montell was in the house with her. Well, they went to Easter Lanes—”“Where are they now?”“The police station.”Trace jackknifed forward. “What?”They kept talking, but I went scrolling through the rest of my phone. My sources from all departments were alerting me. I clicked on the last one.34: Homicide had them, but OC is pulling rank. I can’t get any more i