She needed money.

She saved every penny.

Fuck if I knew why.

Fuck if I knew what for.

I wanted to believe that she’d stolen Luna’s iPad so she could sell it. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending how I looked at it), I’d grown up amongst enough thieves to know that jewelry and cash were the only things they were actually interested in. Shit you could pawn or burn. Anything else was…well, pointless.

Which left me with the inevitable conclusion—Jordan Van Der Zee.

She hated her father, but that really didn’t mean shit. At the end of the day, life was not a game of chess. Life was fucking Jenga. You tried winging through it, hoping it wouldn’t fall down in spectacular fashion and bury you. I was the first to acknowledge that sometimes you had to do stuff you weren’t completely okay with for the greater good. There was always a bigger game to be played, and Edie‘s father had clearly cut the umbilical cord to her money stream.

She had a secret. A dark lie that had thrown her off her golden path. Everyone harbored a clandestine secret or two. No exceptions. I’d never been interested in knowing what they were before. Part of me was thankful that Vicious, Jaime, and Dean allowed me to stew in my silence. They didn’t push me to talk about shit, which was a blessing.

But with Edie, I wanted to know. I wanted to pull the secrets out of her like a magician. To wrench this endless handkerchief from her mouth and know everything there was to know.

Why does she need so much money? Why did her dad cut her off? What lies behind her agenda against the wealthy? Why does she call her father Jordan? Why do I get the feeling that she hates him almost as much as I do? Who the fuck is Bane and how can I make him disappear without any grave consequences?

Really, the iPad was the least of my worries.

Edie Van Der Zee consumed me in ways only my daughter ever had, and that should be enough for me to demote her ass to another floor, or better yet, get her fired. Acting on my craving for her was impossible. But I couldn’t get rid of her, either, because Luna loved her. Fuck, Edie had hugged her today at the traffic light. That was huge. Maybe not for Edie, but definitely for me. So I decided to go against my instincts, rules, and basic principles and let the iPad incident slide. I was going to keep an eye on Edie’s ass from now on, and not in the way I’d been checking her out, but allow her the benefit of the doubt. For now.

For now.

The following Saturday, Camila asked if she could take Luna to the zoo and I jumped on the opportunity to have some time for myself. Even though my parents took a huge chunk of the parenting load, and Camila did some of the heavy lifting, I was the one who had to tackle the real emergencies. Like taking Luna to the pediatrician when a rash broke out all over her body, or when she got stung by a bee, or when she had a fucking breakdown in the middle of Target and cried on the floor for twenty minutes straight because some douchebag hit his dog in front of her in the parking lot and her heart broke along with the dog’s back leg.

I spent my morning weight-training with the guys. All their wives had decided to take the kids for ice cream. I was half-relieved Luna was with Camila, because I knew Emilia would ask to take her with them, and Luna didn’t like hanging out with my friends’ kids very much. Knight protected her furiously every time someone made fun of her—he was a year younger but acted like an older brother every time they were together—but Daria regarded her with caution and confusion.

“So, are you growing a hymen on your dick, or how does it work?” Dean grunted, curling his biceps with a forty-pound dumbbell in each hand in front of the mirror in my building’s gym. Every single one of these bastards had their own personal gym at home, but they always ended up crashing here, because they enjoyed the music, company, and making fun of the local meatheads.

Jaime slapped the back of Dean’s neck. “Time to shut up. Let the man live his life the way he pleases. You’ve never had to deal with something like this.”

“That’s right.” Dean gritted his teeth, shooting Jaime a dirty look. “I don’t have to deal with any bad shit. Right, man?”

Vicious was close to rolling his eyes, and the fucker never showed exasperation, even at the toughest times. He finished his set of chin-ups, jumped down from the bar, and walked over to us, squeezing his water bottle all over his face and opening his mouth to drink some of it.