“Chrissy?”

My father let out a groan as he shifted beside me, his hands bound behind his back with zip-ties just like mine. The sound of his voice was the first bit of relief I’d felt ever since I’d seen him lying on the ground at Lonnie’s feet. Lonnie, who had been in my life since we were both still getting pimples. Lonnie, who had been my father’s protégé ever since they’d met. He’d seen promise in Lonnie, and this was what he got for it.

I flexed my wrists against my bonds, pulling as much as I could without drawing any attention to myself. I’d been working on them since they’d tied my father and I up, and—if I was lucky—I’d be able to get my hands free by the time rescue arrived.

If it arrived.

After all, who was there to save me, now that Crush was out of my life?

“Lonnie…” my father groaned. “What’re you doin’? I thought we were family.”

Lonnie, who had taken a seat behind my father’s desk turned to face him, smiled a smile that didn’t reach his eyes—a cold kind of smile that told me the thoughts behind those eyes were anything but kind.

“We were never family, Nicky,” he said, propping his feet up on the desk. “Like you said before, you owned me. But not anymore.”

“I was good to you!” my father said, his ire starting to rise as he got up onto his knees. “I took you off the streets, gave you a place in my organization! You owe me everything!”

“And how many times have I tried to make you proud?” Lonnie asked, swinging his feet back down off of the desk so fast that I almost jumped as he stood. “How many times have I tried to show you that all your investment was paying off?”

He paced around the deck and over toward the two of us, his eyes wild, his usually neatly combed hair out of place in several places. He looked totally unhinged. “And what the fuck did it ever get me?”

“You’re my right hand man!” my father protested. “You’re the closest thing I have to a son!”

“Well, if this is how you treat a son, then it’s no wonder why your daughter skipped out on you,” Lonnie hissed, getting down on my father’s level, kneeling on the floor. “I was planning on ruining your reputation—playing the long game—but I really don’t have the patience for it.” He stood again and turned to me. “Especially not when I have two little wrenches in my plan, screwing everything up!”

He shouted the last three words right in my face, spittle flying from his mouth before he turned away, strolling back around the study.

“Caputo,” Sergei’s voice carried from the other side of the room. “A moment.”

Lonnie gave a snarl of annoyance as he crossed the room over by the window, their voices too low for me to hear.

“What’re we going to do, Daddy?” I asked, still working at trying to get some give out of the zip-ties. My wrists were already starting to get sore from the friction of the plastic against my skin.

“I don’t know what the hell we can do, sweetie,” my father admitted, looking over his shoulder at Lonnie. “If there’s as many men out there as I think there are, then we might not stand a chance even if we do manage to get out of these.”

He was right. Sergei and his men definitely had numbers on their side, and without anyone to back them up, I honestly had no idea how we’d ever manage to make it out of the house alive, let alone some place that was by any means any safer.

Everything looked hopeless, and if something didn’t turn in our favor soon, then we were both about to be executed.

“If you want to fucking stand there and make comments about how I’m doing things, then why don’t you do something useful and go check on those fucking goons of yours, since they apparently forgot how a goddamn radio works?”

Sergei muttered something under his breath in Russian before turning and leaving, taking one of his henchmen with him with another barking commands in his native tongue.

From the looks of it, we were going nowhere fast.

But then our luck turned.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move just outside of the window right as Lonnie turned his back to it, something that looked vaguely human-shaped. I squinted, trying my best to make it out as I watched it slowly move along, just barely cresting over bottom of the window as it went.

And then a very familiar face appeared.

Crush! I thought, my heart suddenly soaring in my chest just before his face disappeared back into the darkness of the night outside.

I tried to hide my smile, to avert my eyes from where I’d seen Crush just moments before. But it was no good.

“And what the fuck are you smiling at?” Lonnie snarled, suddenly in front of me, blocking my view of the window. “Pretty damn sure this is the last moment I’d be smiling in your shoes.”

“I’m smiling because all of this is your fault, Lonnie,” I said, staring up at him. “Just like everything else, this is all because you fucked up.”

“Shut your goddamn mouth, you little bitch,” Lonnie growled, raising his hand to slap me.

“Don’t you dare touch my little girl!” my father snarled, straining against his own bonds, drawing Lonnie’s attention away from me. “I should have left you in the gutter where I found you, Caputo, with that drunk of a father of yours.”

Lonnie shoved my father onto his back, stepping forward and pressing his foot down onto his chest. I could hear my father wheeze as Caputo laid into him with all his weight.

“You don’t get to talk to me that way anymore, you piece of shit has-been. I’m going to be the one calling the shots, especially after they all hear how you offed yourself after your pretty little girl decided she’d rather be dead than back with her daddy.”

“God, you sound like such a fucking idiot,” I muttered, trying to keep my cool as I watched him constrict my father’s breathing. “No one would believe that.”

“I don’t really need them to believe it,” he laughed, taking his foot off of my father’s chest and turning to face me. “I just need to make sure they don’t think I had anything to do with it.”

Lonnie turned his back on us, and once more I pulled at the plastic ties around my wrists. With one final tug, I finally felt them give, the tension just slack enough that I could get my hands through.

“It won’t matter what they think, Lonnie,” I said, looking over at him as he took his place behind my father’s desk once more. “Not after tonight. Not after you’re lying dead on the floor.”

“Oh, yeah?” he laughed, spinning in my father’s high-backed chair. “And who’s going to kill me? You? Last I checked you had your hands tied, and in case you missed it, I’ve got a gun.”

“Enough,” Sergei said as he pushed into the room. “We have a problem. My men are missing. We need to search the grounds and—”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t worry too much about them right now. You’ve got enough to deal with right here,” Crush said.

I’d never been more happy to see him in my whole life. And not just because from where I was sitting, what he was holding in his hands looked an awful lot like a goddamn Uzi.