Carter was holding back a grin, but he wasn’t here to goad my soldiers. He was here for a whole other reason, and as I remembered that, the moment passed. I tossed my knife in the air, caught it by the handle and sent it soaring past my soldier. It stuck in the wall behind him.

He’d gone still, his eyes not even moving to the knife.

I gestured to it. “Take it. You’re going to need more than a few guns tonight.”

He stepped to the side, grabbed the knife, and yanked it out of the wall. He nodded to each of us before stepping out into the hallway.

Carter waited until the door closed, then turned to me. “You got his ear. Did you know that?”

I threw him a look. Of course I knew. I wasn’t feeling particularly talkative. “What are you doing here?”

His eyes narrowed, looking over the assembly of weapons I spread on the table. “Are you ready to do this?”

“To do what?”

I knew. He knew. I wanted him to say it.

“Start a war.”

There it was. “Like you did?”

“That was different.”

“How?”

He crossed the room and stood on the opposite side of the table now. He lowered his eyes, studying me. “Do you love her?”

Emotion flickered in my gut, hardening everything again. I scowled, picking up another knife and shoving it into my shoulder holster. It hung beneath a 9mm. “You started a war for the woman you loved.”

“I did.”

“You finished a second one, too. For her.” My eyes cooled. My jaw hardened.

“I did.” Carter was waiting.

“So, you flew all this way to ask me if I love Addison?”

“Don’t go to war if you don’t,” he said quietly. He leaned forward on the table. “She’s theirs. They took one of their own. You broke in to take one of theirs—that’s how they’ll spin this. Are you ready for the fallout afterward? Businesses will be affected. Lives are going to end. Families will be torn apart. You could die. She could die. Are you ready for that?”

“She could be dead already.” I waited, keeping myself controlled. There was another question still coming.

He asked it. “Is she worth this?”

A second passed between us. Another. And a third. I waited, and so did Carter. He’d said his piece. This was why he’d come, to test me. I leaned forward, my weapons ready to go, and said what needed to be said, “Yes. She’s mine.”

Nothing else mattered. Addison was mine.

Carter stood back as I took one more weapon and left. He wasn’t in the family, not as one who would kill beside us, so he remained behind.

I swept out of the room, down the hallway, and out to the warehouse where my men waited. My arrival was the signal. Everything had been planned. Everyone knew their places, and as I went past them, they followed.

We were going to get what was mine.

We knocked once on the back door of a whorehouse. The door opened, and the bass from the main floor vibrated in the night. Some of the smoke and dry ice floated out, and the person who’d given us the tip stepped out into the alley.

I stared down at her. Hard. “Are you doing this to save your life?”

Addison’s former mother-in-law, Carol, flinched, folding her hands together in front of her. She’d pulled on a light jacket but still wore the same clothes I’d seen in the Gala’s security footage. I noticed dried blood on her sweater, and before she’d said a word, I noted, “That better not be Addison’s blood.”

Her head lowered, and I looked down at the top of her hair. But now she glanced back up. Fear lined her eyes. “She’s been hurt. I can’t lie about that.”

“She’s in the basement?”

She nodded, unable to hold my gaze. “Yes. I locked the door going to the main floor. None of the girls will bother you. There’s a room right when you go down. Four guards are in there. They’re supposed to be up here, but they’re watching a game right now. Keep going. I counted maybe eight others down there. Addison is in the back room, all the way down on the left side. There’s another room back there where the guards take their girls. I couldn’t open it to see who was in there, so there might be more men.”

“They’re going to hunt you down.”

Her skinny shoulders shrugged. She looked pathetic. “I’d like to take Addison away with me. She’s family.” She sounded pathetic, too.

“Not going to happen.” I leaned forward. I wanted her to see the disgust in my eyes. “She’s not your family. You never accepted her before, and you’re using her to get rid of your own guilt. If you were my family?” I held a finger out and touched it to the top of her head, pretending to shoot her. “I’d put two right here.” I stepped back. “But that’s how I deal with traitors. Addison might be more forgiving.”

She drew in a shuddering breath. “Yes. Well. Please, just get her out.” Carol took off after that, running down the alley between my guys. I waited for the perimeters to check in, and once they signaled everything was clear, we moved in.

Killing isn’t a big deal to me.

It happens. People are here, then they’re gone. Carter told me one day my viewpoint was skewed because of my family’s past. Fuck if I care. Usually for a job like this, the head of the family wouldn’t be in the lead. But I wasn’t like the previous head, or even Carter. I wanted to go first. I started to thirst for it. Maybe it was the element of surprise. Maybe it made me feel like a badass. Or maybe—two guys stepped around the corner, and I fired off two bullets, one for each of their foreheads—maybe it was this moment. As their bodies hit the ground, maybe I savored the feeling of stepping over them and continuing on, like they were nothing, like they’d always been there and I was going on with my day.