Everyone at the table was talking loudly, trying to be heard over the others as they all reacted to the news that Johnny and I had been given just hours before.
Lily O’Sullivan was alive.
Motherfucking alive.
I gripped my head in my hands as I stared at the table, trying to block out their voices.
Because she couldn’t be. I knew in my gut that she wasn’t.
But if she was—I would stop at nothing to steal Lily’s last breath the way he had stolen hers.
“Dare!”
I glanced up when my older sister shouted my name, my eyes already narrowed on her.
“I’ve been calling your name for, like, a minute,” Libby said, her eyes full of concern. “What are we going to do?”
“Nothing.”
Everyone except Johnny erupted in shouts of displeasure.
He didn’t have to say a word for me to know he didn’t agree with my decision. If someone had asked him—I had no doubt he’d leave right now and go massacre everyone on the Holloway property.
I waited until the table quieted before saying, “Nothing until we know for sure. I can’t be sure that piece of shit wasn’t lying to me today. He said her name and I forgot where I was and what we were doing. All I knew was what he’d said and what I wanted to do to a goddamn name.”
“But you said he’d been looking right at you. You said he had no tells,” Maverick, one of the twins, said.
I shrugged.
“It doesn’t matter. I wanted him to be telling the truth because I want a chance to take from them what they took from me. But when I look back on it, I can’t be sure that he wasn’t forcing that stare. We need to make sure.”
I looked every member of my team in the eye to make sure they understood it wasn’t just a suggestion—it was an order.
The twins, my sister, Einstein, Johnny.
Once I received nods from all of them, I looked at Johnny.
“Aric and Lily’s funeral,” I began, bringing up that day we’d sat in the shadows, watching to see if it was true. If Johnny’s cousin Joseph had really killed them both before Kieran had gotten him. “Kieran lost it. He wouldn’t have if she hadn’t—”
“He could’ve faked it,” Johnny said, cutting me off. “Or it could’ve been because of Aric. Everyone knew they were like brothers.”
I lifted a brow. “You gonna lose your shit the way he did if someone kills me, Johnny?”
The bastard smirked. “I might consider shedding a tear.”
“But you can’t know that until it happens,” Einstein said, giving Johnny a meaningful look.
Einstein was a genius. If she didn’t know something, she had ways of finding it out that Google couldn’t dream of. She was my hacker.
She was also the only person who had ever touched Johnny’s cold, dead heart.
And from the way Johnny’s face was suddenly an unreadable mask again, I knew he wasn’t considering what she’d just said—he was considering what would happen if he had to watch Einstein be lowered into the ground.
I knocked my knuckles on the table to get his attention. “That’s what I mean. No ruthless killer like Kieran Hayes is going to do what he did that day over his best friend. You’re made of stone, Johnny? That guy is made of fucking steel. And you watched him break that day. Lily was in that casket. You know it. I know it.”
Of anyone at the table, I knew it.
That rage from earlier threatened to consume me again, but I forced it down.
It had been nearly four years—and about half that since I’d wanted to make every member of the Holloway Gang pay for what they’d done. But in that moment, it was as if no time had passed.
I couldn’t trust myself to walk away from the table and not go unleash hell on all of them.
But if I did that?
Well . . . retaliation was a very real thing in our world, and I wasn’t willing to lose another person from this table. I wasn’t willing to lose another member of my family—blood or not.
“I’m with Johnny.”
I glanced up, my eyebrows raised at the other twin’s words. “Come again?”
“I think Nightshade could’ve been faking it.”
My head was already shaking. “No. N—”
“No, wait a second,” Diggs began. “You’re gonna hear me out, man.”
The room fell silent as they waited for my response to his demand.
Demands weren’t allowed from people in the twins’ positions, especially at the table. But this was my team, and I’d been trying to lead the entire family in a different direction for years . . . starting with this generation.
So instead of throwing around a title I didn’t want—instead of staining the wood floor and adding to the blood from years past—I sat back and pushed out a heavy sigh.
“Listening.”
“Nightshade killed Joseph. Right?” Diggs’s gaze darted between Johnny and me as he waited for a response.
Johnny’s head dipped in acknowledgment, but I answered, “He came in as we jumped out the window.”
“And you heard one more shot after you jumped out,” he recalled from our stories. “That shot could’ve been aimed at Nightshade. It didn’t have to be for Lily. And you know it didn’t take more than a few seconds for him to figure out who Joseph was once he was dead—just like you know they’d expected you to be watching and waiting for them to hand over his body. It isn’t hard to think they’d expect you to follow them to the funeral the way you two did, to see who actually died. It could’ve been one big setup to pin us with their deaths so we wouldn’t try to retaliate for Joseph.”
I slanted my eyes at him. “That’s reaching. And whether or not Lily O’Sullivan died that night, I didn’t need to check Aric’s pulse to know that he did. There’s no way he survived that.”
Johnny nodded.
“Joseph got what was coming to him for it.”
“What the fuck, man, come on,” Diggs grumbled. “Four years ago he was at this damn table.”
“Dare’s right,” Johnny muttered.
“A lot of people would still be alive if he hadn’t come with us that night. Have you forgotten he wasn’t even supposed to be there? And he not only fucked everything up, he killed one—maybe two—O’Sullivans, and they retaliated for it. They took everything from me because he couldn’t keep his hands to himself, or follow the goddamn rules.” My voice dropped to a dangerous level when I repeated, “He got what was coming to him.”
You could’ve heard a pin drop once I finished talking, and I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t take the silence or the sympathetic looks at the reminder of what else happened nearly four years ago.
As much as I was afraid of what I would do if left alone—I knew I would chance it rather than staying in that room.
I stood but didn’t turn to leave. “If she’s ali—” The word choked me, picturing her alive and well. Living in the world when mine was gone. “If it’s true,” I began again, working my jaw, “then we aren’t taking it at the word of a pathetic excuse of a man who knew he was about to die and would’ve said anything not to.” I looked to Einstein. “Search for proof. Can’t find it? Then find someone who can give it to me. Until then, we go on like nothing’s changed.”
When I turned to go, Johnny mumbled under his breath, “What’s the point? I say we go in there now and kill as many Holloways as we can. It’s not like they don’t all need to go to ground.”
I leveled him with a glare when I faced him again, but forced a low laugh.
Because this was Johnny—and I knew him just as well as he knew me.
Johnny was old school.
Illegal games and ways to make ends meet, and taking out the enemy with a bullet to their head.
And if I took him seriously, or even seemed to, there’d be no containing him.
Johnny unleashed would be complete devastation, but he was the closest thing I’d ever had to a brother. I would do whatever it took to keep him alive—even if that meant saving him from his own rage and darkness.
“Why?” I asked him with a teasing hint to my tone. “So the rest of them will come to our homes and do the same? Don’t forget this isn’t a kill or be killed world we live in, Johnny. It’s a kill and be killed world. And I’m fucking tired of burying my family.”
He waited until I was at the door to speak again. When he did, anticipation laced his words—because he knew he had me. “You gonna worry about a little retaliation if Lily O’Sullivan is alive?”
I paused with my hand on the doorknob, sure that the metal would give beneath my grasp as I embraced every dark thought when it came to that girl.
Every dark want.
Every dark need.
“If she’s alive, I’m going there in the dead of night, and I’m ripping Kieran’s world out from under his feet the way mine was from me. And then I’m declaring war on every person connected to Holloway until there’s nothing left of them.”