My hand wrapping Penny’s hip, my ear pressed to her belly, I wake to a grumbling sound.

I realize what woke me: her stomach.

Penny didn’t eat last night. We left the benefit before she got dinner.

The morning sun peeking through her windows, I pull the sheet over her, covering her too-perfect skin. She sleeps with her mouth open and an arm blocking her eyes from the light.

Something locks into place inside me, a merging, a cinching, a fitting of a final puzzle piece.

I want to keep her.

I think I made love to her last night.

I think I really felt her, maybe felt what it was like to love something. Someone.

A warning goes off in my head. The same one I always get whenever I get close to someone who I will inevitably lose. And I will lose her. The same thing that’s connecting us, this fucked up business with our families, will be the thing that separates us.

The kinds of people at her party last night made it clear: I don’t belong with her, and she doesn’t belong with me.

But I still have a threat to make good—I still need money.

How shallow and simple that seems now. Not that I ever cared much about the money anyway. I’m not sorry about giving her the truth, but I am sorry there wasn’t a better way to give it, without manipulating her. Though I’m not certain with any less drastic way she would have believed me.

If there was a way this could’ve gone where I didn’t lose her at the end, I don’t see it.

At least I still get to make her breakfast.

I get the coffee brewing and the oatmeal heating, then there’s a knock at the front door. It’s way too early on a Sunday for anyone to be awake, so I do the normal thing and ignore it.

Except it doesn’t stop. It graduates to a pounding fist, then a two fisted bang, then a feminine shout, “Penny, you have to let me in! This is important.”

Christ, Layla. I stomp to the door and throw it open. “Quiet!”

She takes a deep breath. “Where’s Penny? I have to talk to her.”

“She’s sleeping. I’ll have her call you.”

“No.” She pokes a finger at my chest. “You let me in now. This involves you as much as it does her.”

I shake my head, determined not to let this person ruin the good thing Penny and I have. “I don’t think so.”

“Blake is coming after you.”

“What?”

“This is serious. Not by himself either. You need to let me in.”

I groan and step back from the door.

She charges past me. “Penny! Wake up.”

This is not how I wanted this morning to go. I didn’t want it to be over this soon. I don’t want it to be over ever. But somehow, like every other aspect of my life, I don’t think I’ll have any choice.

* * *

I’m startled awake by, “Penny, you have to get up,” and Layla running into my bedroom.

I sit up in bed and scrub sleep from my eyes, unable to fight the lethargy that’s seeped into my marrow. The lethargy that only comes from feeling well-loved. Not that I’ve felt it before. It’s a new sensation to me, but I know what it is.

“You need clothes.” She turns her back to me and goes into my closet.

Too slowly, I tuck the sheet around my bare chest. It’s nothing Layla hasn’t seen before. We were roommates for years, but still, awkward. “What are you doing here?”

“Put this on.” She throws clothes at me. “You have a serious problem.”

I can’t fathom that. The satisfaction breathing through every cell in my body contradicts it. Surely, nothing can be wrong in the world if I feel this way. “Besides the fact that you barged screaming into my house on a Sunday morning? How did you get past Logan?”

He leans in the door frame and watches me put on clothes. “She said Blake’s coming.” I watch him watching me with the same fullness in his eyes that I feel in my chest. I want to be alone with him more than I’ve ever wanted anything.

“Did you ask him?” Layla says to me.

“Ask who what?” I’m dizzy, stumbling into shorts and twisting a tank top over my head.

“Ask Logan if he’s keeping something from you.”

It takes my blurry mind a moment to remember what she’s talking about. But what registers first—Logan stiffening in the doorway.

I blink, fast. “I need coffee.”

“It’s brewing,” he says, and I follow him to the kitchen.

Layla breathes down my neck. “Blake’s going to be here any minute with . . .”

Logan hands me a cup of coffee, and I stop. “With who?”

She bites her lip and looks nervously out the window. “I came to warn you.” She looks at Logan. “To see if there’s any truth to this.”

“I’ve always told the truth,” he says.

“Oh, really?” Layla crosses her arms.

A vicious knock pounds at the door. “Open up, Penny!” It’s Blake.

Logan moves to get the door. I hold out a hand to stop him. “I’ll get it.”

From the front window, Blake’s glare is less angry than he’s been in a week and more . . . triumphant. There’s a bitterness in his expression that’s not unlike what I’ve seen on Logan when he’s focused on revenge.

My hand shakes on the doorknob, and I open it. Two police officers stand in front of my brother. “What’s going on?”

“We’re here to speak with a Logan Kane,” one officer says.

It takes two tries for my voice to work. “W-why?”

Blake looks past me. “Is he here?” He spots Logan and the look in his eyes—pure vengeance.

Nothing about this can be good.

They follow me into the condo.

Logan stands stiffer than I’ve ever seen him. He has no trust for law enforcement. They let his sister down too many times. All the softness in him from last night, the relaxing of his shoulders, disappears. He transforms back into the fearless, intimidating man he was the day I met him.

I don’t have the courage to ask questions. My tongue fists in my throat, and I can’t manage a breath.

Layla glances from me to Logan, agitation shifting her feet. She comes to my side and puts a comforting hand on my shoulder. I wish I could ask what’s going on, but I’m afraid to find out.

“What’s this about?” Logan asks in a low tone, his gaze a stern broadcast of don’t-mess-with-me.

One of the officers steps toward him. “Are you Logan Kane?”

“Yes.”

“We’d like to ask you some questions.”

Logan grits his teeth. “What about?”

“Regarding the death of Malcolm Vandershall.”

“What?” I blurt. “That makes no sense.”

But Logan doesn’t protest. I expect to see shock, outrage on his face. It’s the opposite. He nods, like he understands, like it’s expected. “Not here,” he whispers to them.

“Would you like to come down to the station?” one officer says.

“I need a lawyer.” Logan points to Blake. “He doesn’t count.”

“We’ll supply you with counsel, Mr. Kane.” The officer moves aside to let Logan out the door.

I grab his hand as he passes. “What’s going on?”

He pauses and glances at Layla.

She crosses her arms. “If you don’t tell her, I will.”

Logan sighs and squeezes my hand. “I worked at the hospital where your father died. I was on the shift that night.”

“You were?” The words hardly leave my throat, the air sticks in my lungs.

“And you quit the day after,” Blake gloats from behind him.

Logan’s face is sincere, not aggressive but not guilty either.

I can’t say it louder. “What does that have to do with it?” A panic builds in me. I don’t want them to say what I think they’re going to say.

“His hospital equipment was tampered with,” Blake says. “Logan murdered him.”

An officer corrects him. “We’re here to question Mr. Kane, not accuse him.”

I can’t see. My vision clouds and my hearing muffles. I try to focus on Logan’s face, to keep it clear. “Is it true? Did you . . .” I swallow my own words.

He closes his eyes and looks away, “I have to go,” then he follows the officers out the door.

The door closes behind him and I want to chase him, to scream at him to come back. Except my legs don’t move, and my voice won’t work.

Blake lingers, unable to hide a victorious smirk. “I’ve gotten rid of him for you. You never have to see him again.”

Before I can think better, I pull back my hand and slap him across the cheek so hard my palm stings. “Fuck you, asshole. Get away from me.”

His eyes bulge and he inhales to yell at me, but Layla shouts over him, “Blake, leave!” He hesitates and she cries again, “Now!” He listens and with a growl, storms out the door, slamming it behind him.

My knees go weak and I have to sit down.

“Over here.” Layla urges me backward to the couch.

I sit back on the cushions and try to remember how to breathe, how to control it, but can’t. My lungs burst with air then stutter in fits and starts.

“It’s okay,” Layla soothes, running a hand down my back. “You’re all right. He’s gone now and you’re safe.”

“But I—I was safe—w-with him.” Or I think I was. I thought I was. He was the one person who told me the truth.

“That’s what he made you believe. He convinced you.”

My heart constricts on itself, like a hammer pounding in my chest. “It was—real. He was real.”

She kneels in front of me and holds my hands. “It wasn’t, honey. He lied to you. And he was very good at it. It’s understandable why you believed him.”

But it wasn’t a lie. If last night was a lie, I . . . I can’t breathe.

Layla keeps talking. I close my eyes and block her out. I cling to what I knew, what I felt, the part that was true, but my thoughts are tangled and I can’t remember where the truth starts and the lies begin. I mumble to myself, “It made sense. It all made sense. It has to make sense?”

“Sh, it’s all right.”

“It’s not all right!” I shake her hands away. “He knew things. Things that made all the other lies clear. He told me the truth, Layla. It wasn’t lies.”

“Okay, okay. I believe you.” She pacifies me. “Maybe some of what he said was true.”

“The stuff about Malcolm. He . . .”

Layla brushes my hair off my face. “Maybe it was true, what he said your father did to his sister. Maybe that really did happen. But . . .”

I squint my eyes shut. I don’t want to hear the next part. I don’t want to think about it.

But she continues, “ . . . he killed your father, Penny. No amount of guilt on your father’s part makes that right.”

I hold my breath, trying to keep it back, trying not to feel the flood of emotions those words make me feel. “But it can’t be true.”

“Of course it can. Would he have told you?”

And that more than anything makes me open my eyes and look at her. “No.” He wouldn’t have told me, but he had every reason to do it. He wanted revenge on my father in the worst way and deserved to get it. It was so obvious the whole time and I never saw it. Revenge against my father is all he’s thought about for years. Of course he killed him.

It makes perfect sense.

“It’s okay.” Layla hugs me. “You never have to see him again.”

I cry harder, even though that’s the last thing he’d want me to do.

Worse than the truth, worse than the lies, worse than the betrayal, I can’t imagine not having him.

Something worse than grief or betrayal shatters like a dam inside me, and I flood with all the things Logan’s given me. The things I knew about and the things I didn’t know about.

I break. Harder than hearing the truths about my father, harder than his death, harder than not being allowed home as a child.

I remember being afraid Logan would make me into nothing.

I was wrong.

He gave me everything, and I don’t know how I’ll survive him taking it away.