She hadn’t heard a sound from Ethan in a long time.

Was he even alive?

“Kalani, just park.”

Lea had become more and more agitated with her, especially as Kalani kept missing the entrance to the airport parking lot, and then as she kept circling around looking for the right spot. She was stalling for time, time to think and plan. But perhaps it was made too obvious, Lea sounding like she was almost ready to train the gun on her sister.

“Jesus Christ, just park this fucking thing,” Lea said. “What’s wrong with you?”

Kalani would have laughed at the question had the situation not been so dire and depressing

“There,” Lea cried, “to the right, there. Park there, for God’s sake.”

“I’m just trying to get close. Don’t you want us close?”

“We want the opposite of that,” Lea said. “Use your head.”

After what felt like hours of driving, they’d found themselves at a small cargo airport outside Charleston. Finally, there were other cars. Other people. Kalani felt good about that, and not so good, all at the same time. It was nice to get off the road and to finally be somewhere, to get things moving along in meeting the Blackwoods crew and finally getting it the hell over with. But it also meant that tiny window for reaching out for help, for doing any sort of intervention with Ethan, was becoming shorter and shorter.

And Ethan . . . he was sleeping.

Ethan had been unconscious for the last two hours. Lea had even slapped him to check if he was still alive. He may have been alive, but there was hardly a response. After that, Kalani had insisted that her sister check his breathing regularly. That had continued uninterrupted, at least.

But there they were at the airport, at their destination, and he was still asleep.

“I’m worried,” Kalani said.

“I know it’s scary, but we’re almost done. We’re almost done with all this shit, Kalani. These guys are here to help us.”

Lea was talking about Blackwoods. Kalani was thinking about someone else. “I’m worried about Ethan. What do you think’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing,” Lea said. “It’s a perfectly normal reaction to the medication.”

“Medication?”

“Fentanyl,” she said.

“Fentanyl!?”

“I slapped a sticker on him. Three of them, to be exact.”

Kalani, in various forms, had been around drugs most of her life. Some of it through work, some of it from watching the various poor decisions that Lea had taken through the years. But she had no idea what “a sticker” was, or how much or how little of it was needed to do some serious harm to Ethan. All she knew was that people died every day from Fentanyl.

“I see you’re confused,” Lea said. “I believe, in the industry, they call it a transdermal patch.”

“You fucking drugged him . . .”

“For his own safety, of course. And ours.”

Despite the insanity of the situation, the irony rang through loud and clear. Instead of Lea being the sedated one  . . . she’d just saved up all her fucking goods for Ethan.

It occurred to her how alone she really was. Despite having her sister with her. So utterly alone.

Despite the shell of Ethan’s body.

Kalani felt the radio with her hand, to make sure it, at least, was still there.

“We’re already late,” Lea said. “We need to get a move on. They might even be out on the runway by now.”

“What are we doing? I mean . . .” A glimmer of hope blossomed through her chest. “I mean, we’ll just leave Ethan here in the car?”

“Not exactly,” Lea said.

“But he’s sedated. He’ll be out for hours, right? Where’s he going to go?”

“We can’t take chances like that.”

“Then I’ll stay back to watch him?” She felt herself hoping for all the different improbabilities of such a plan to actually work out. The radio. Time alone with Ethan . . .

Except Lea was too smart to allow any of them to happen. Instead, she chuckled quietly and said, “No, you’re coming with me, Lani. That’s why I brought you here. Did you forget they want to talk to you? Face to face?”

“Can’t you just relay the message to them for me?”

“But then I can’t relay theirs,” Lea said.

“What’s theirs?”

“An invitation aboard. A trip across the country. It’s a nice plane. And a brand new start with the witness protection thing. Only we’ll be doing it Blackwoods style. So, it’ll be more fun. Less jail time.”

“Sure . . .”

“Ethan’s invited, too.”

Kalani didn’t like the way she’d said that. The only way Blackwoods would let Ethan would accompany them would be in an even less conscious state than Lea had already left him in.

“This is happening too fast,” Kalani said, needing to slow it down. Slow her thinking down, too. And her breathing. “So, you stuck a patch on him . . .”

“When I first pushed him in the car. I had it ready. Pushed him in, slapped a triple dose on the small of his back, used the muzzle of the gun to hold it there in place. Obviously he didn’t feel anything. Look at him right now, Kalani. He’s sleeping like a baby. He’s in heaven.”

Not heaven. Kalani wanted to keep him out of the afterlife at any cost. The only life she wanted for Ethan was the one they could create together.

“Is he really okay?” she said, turning around in her seat to look back. Under the lights of the parking lot, she could see drool out the side of his mouth. At least his face hadn’t turned blue. No vomiting, either. So far, so good. She knew some of the symptoms of an overdose, having lived through a few by proxy. But Ethan looked otherwise okay, for a first time heavy hit of fentanyl.

“You want to trade spots and come back here and snuggle with him?” Lea said. She smiled. “He’s cute, by the way. I never told you that. He actually probably is a nice guy.”

“So then why are you going to screw him over?”

“He’ll be fine.”

“Really? Blackwoods isn’t upset with him for . . . rescuing us in Hawaii?”

“They don’t care about that. You know who they’re after.”

Kalani thought about it for a half second before the faces came to mind. Tucker and Macy. Cole and Annica. Ethan, on the other hand . . . Maybe he might just skirt by. Blackwoods already had enough enemies. Enough mouths to silence. Lea’s actions proved they were making a desperate attempt to consolidate and kill as many problem people as they could before the trails back to their head of operations could start.

There would be no way that Lea would really let them wind up on the wrong side of the ledger. Right?

Maybe she and Ethan could sit this one out after all. And Lea was a smart girl. And not entirely evil. She couldn’t be, not her sister. Maybe things could work out after some minor adjustments. She could make adjustments; she’d done that all her life. Now it just had to be seen if Ethan could adjust, too . . . wherever they ended up.

“So what’s your plan with Ethan?” Kalani finally asked, her mouth going dry just thinking about it. “Should we tie him up with the seat belts so he can’t escape?”

Lea tapped the gun against her hand. “Hmm . . .”

“They might not even be necessary,” Kalani said. “He might not even wake up at all by the looks of it. You sure he’s breathing?”

“He’s fine. He’s probably having the best sleep he’s ever had. You might want a similar dose when we get up in the air.”

When Kalani heard Lea rummaging through her bags in the back seat, a flash of a memory came to her—a straitjacket. The idea she’d been waiting for.

“Anyway, I was thinking about sending you in there to go find them. I can stay here with Ethan.”

Kalani hated that idea, but focused instead on the new possibility. Tie him up, leave him to his own devices. Hope to God he woke up.

Even more hopeful that he could actually pull through with one of his magic tricks.

“I got it,” she said.

“You got what? An idea that could help us out? An idea, finally?”

“There’s a straitjacket in his bag back there.” She forced herself to make a face. “God knows why he’s got that. We can tie him up in it.”

“That’s an interesting idea,” Lea said.

Kalani wanted to give her no time to think about it, a tactic similar to what Lea had done. Steamroll over the opposition. In this case, any idea other than Lea’s false sense of security that Ethan would be held at bay in the jacket.

Of course, the success of the whole scenario was riding on Kalani’s perhaps false hope that Ethan could actually get out.

A drugged-out-of-his-head Ethan.

But it was better than nothing.

It was better to just trust him and his skills that had saved them in the past. She just had to trust him.