“I’m as fucked as you are, man,” he says, spitting onto the ground. “Cops rolled up on me last month, found drugs I was running for Charlie. Said I could either help them put the old man away or I was gonna land myself inside for twenty. They told me to feed this stuff to the Wreckers.”

“And you agreed?” I may hate Charlie right now—it’s a living, cold thing inside me, a pit viper, coiled and tightening with each new piece of damning information, readying to explode in a lightning fork of vengeance—but I hate the cops even more. Call it conditioning from spending so much time with the fuckers after Murphy’s body turned up.

Unburied.

And after I had buried him in the one place only Charlie knew about.

Fuck!

“Would you do twenty for Charlie, knowing what you know now?” Rick asks the question like the answer is fucking obvious. And it is now. No fucking way. I crook an eyebrow at him in return—fair comment.

“You’re going to do something for me,” I tell him.

He rocks back in his seat, surprise flitting across his face. He really had resigned himself to the idea that I was going to kill him. That his revelations about Charlie were going to fall on deaf ears. And maybe they would have if we’d had this conversation six weeks ago. But not after the confirmation that Charlie probably had something to do with Sloane’s sister. Not after the cell phone tap. “What d’you need?” he asks, equally stunned, relieved and dubious.

“Get in your car. Close the door. Drive to Anaheim and wait there for me.”

His eyebrows bank together in a perplexed frown. “Anaheim? What the fuck you want me to go to L.A. for?”

“Because I said so. And give me the name of the officer you’re reporting to as well.” It’s safer to know the name of the bastard who’s going to be sticking their nose into Charlie’s, and therefore my business over the coming weeks after Rick disappears.

“Ain’t just no cop,” Rick warns. “Detective Lowell. Denise Lowell. DEA.”

That acronym is the worst possible fucking news ever. The DEA looking into Charlie’s shit? Might as well write my own personal dossier of crimes committed and hand it over personally if what Rick’s telling me is true. If the old man’s sold me out once to save his own hide, he’ll do it again. Especially with a department as ferociously determined as the drug enforcement agency. Power hungry sons of bitches, the lot of them. A big bust, the takedown of a crime lord the size of Charlie is a career maker. Promotion for sure. I need to know everything there is to know about this Denise Lowell. And yesterday.

“Give me your cell phone,” I snarl. The man scowls, offering it out. I toss it on the floor and stomp down on it hard. Rick just nods, staring remorsefully at the shattered debris left behind on the blacktop. “When you arrive in Anaheim, Michael will come find you. Stay out of the way. Keep your fucking head down. Otherwise you’re gonna lose it for real.” I turn and walk away. Rick and I have never gotten on, never seen eye to eye, but he will obey me now. Even if he has no idea what I have in mind. The bared teeth, the wrestling over the Alpha position, the competition only he ever perceived between us—he never stood a chance—is over.

I held his life in my hands, and I let it go.

With Rick about to hit the freeway, it’s time for me to get out of town, too. Time for a lot of things. It’s beyond time to free Alexis Romera from the cartel; time for her to be reunited with Sloane and the rest of her family. And I may have somehow made Charlie Holsan’s shit list, but the old man’s made a big fucking mistake, too. I’m going to show him just how big a mistake he has made. He’s gonna wish that he’d left me to rot in the back room of my uncle’s shit-infested house all those years ago.

It’s been fifteen days. Fifteen days, and I haven’t heard a peep out of Zeth. I don’t know what I was expecting—him camped out on my lawn, stalking me from my place to the hospital and back every day—but it isn’t this: total radio silence. The worst part of it all is that I’m majorly on edge, constantly on the lookout for him. I’ve played the part of the unhappy victim in our strange relationship for a while now, but the reality of it is…I want to know where he is. What he’s doing. And why he hasn’t been to see me. I have officially lost my mind. I know why he’s disappeared off the face of the planet, and I’m aware that it’s my own stupid fault. The kiss. I realize now that there’s little more personal than kissing someone when they’re inside you. And as far as I can tell, personal is the very last thing Zeth wants this thing between us to be.

“Urgh. Meatloaf today. Why does it feel like every day is meatloaf day in this canteen?” The interns in front of me, two young women clutching their trays to their chests, whine about the food while I flick through my patient list on one of the electronic tablets the hospital purchased for the ER earlier in the year. One pelvic fracture, one mystery rash and fever, one gunshot wound to the chest. The last guy was brought into the trauma center under lights and sirens, barely breathing, pulse thready and close to non-existent. He’s Italian, some kid whose brother owns a bunch of fresh produce markets downtown, or at least he had before his head had been blown off. Gang-related, they say. Mob bosses, they say. I have problems believing that, though. Seattle is hardly known for its seedy criminal underbelly. Either way, the kid’s brother was killed and the kid himself had almost died. Right now he’s sleeping off the anesthetic upstairs in the ICU with a phalanx of cops guarding him at either end of the corridor. They’re either afraid that he’s going to escape, or they think someone will be along shortly to try and finish off the job. Either way the police presence is making me anxious. It always does. That uniform. I associate it with one thing and one thing only: Alexis. When she went missing, my parents’ house was crawling with cops for days. At first they were serious and determined, assuring my mom and dad that Alexis would show up, that they would find her. But as the days ticked by less and less cops showed up at our house, and when they did they would come bearing a different story each time.