Early September is hot as fuck, even in the Bradford Hotel. Which is saying a lot, because it’s a brick-and-stone behemoth that usually stays cool. Of course we tapped into the grid when we first moved in, got AC blowing into the parts where we live—the deep interior parts we fixed up and tricked out, posh as a palace. Actually better than a palace, because there’s nothing fussy—it’s all nice rugs and good, sturdy, oversized furniture guys can lie around on, and of course the best gaming consoles and computing shit money can buy.

But whenever you go outside, it’s a wall of heat. And we’re out there a lot, chasing leads on the Grayson thing. Working overtime to hunt those assholes.

I think about Brooke all the while, thinking about that day at the park. Mostly I remember how perfect she felt in my hands, the way her belly felt when I pressed my rock-hard cock against her, pinning her like a butterfly against her cherry-red car door. It was fucking heaven—the kind of heaven I have no right to. Which is always the best kind.

Even the way she tasted was perfect—its own entire category of taste, not mint or berries or whatever bullshit, but pure, warm, soft, breathy Brooke.

She was stiff at first, like she was surprised, but then she softened. That’s the thing that churns in my mind the most—churning like the angry fucking sea—that moment she went from stiff to soft. The moment her little body let me notch right into her.

She’s fragile as a bird, but she let me hold her, like a sickening little token of trust. She doesn’t know what she’s getting into with me. She has no fucking idea.

Her skin is so soft. She’s just so pure. It’s fucked up how pure she is. It’s fucked up how much she doesn’t know and how untouched she is. Her skin is literally like silk. It makes me want to drive my fist into a brick wall over and over and over.

I churn on her silky, untouched skin while we lurk around in the heat, loitering in dark service alleys. I think about her while we linger outside expensive restaurants, in the shadows of the courthouse, cock hard, mind racing.

The whole train of thought is just dangerous, because when you’re lurking around places and dealing with the kind of people we’re dealing with, you can’t be wanting to smash things or grabbing random guys and driving their faces onto a wall just because you’re in a fucked up place.

But I need to keep an eye on Brooke. Make sure she’s not talking to the cops. The secrets we share are my private leash on her. I let her live, and now she’s mine.

We follow different men around Franklin City. Sometimes we follow Governor Dorman himself. We didn’t know his name back then, but we remember his face. Because trust me, young and drugged as we were, we remember the face of each and every one of the men and women who paid good money to perv out on us over the years.

I’d love nothing more than to show Dorman the end of my blade, and I’m sure we could get him alone without a lot of trouble, but we have to be smart. We have to think about freeing Grayson.

So we track guys. We’ve been hurting a lot of guys to get information. Like the one we ran through the wood chipper. The nicknames he gave us—Jimmy Brass, Johnson, Keeper—don’t mean much. Yet.

Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I head out into the streets in the middle of the night, driving around.

More often than not, I find myself in East Franklin City, outside her big brick mansion with the circular drive and rows of pine trees like soldiers guarding the estate. I look up at her dark window and imagine her sleeping peacefully. Dark lashes resting on her pretty cheekbones. Light brown hair with those angel-bright highlights splayed all messy on her pillow.

It’s her birthday in a week, and this is stupid, but I’m making her a present. A carved hummingbird. I probably won’t give it to her, but I started making it, and I knew it was for her, even though I didn’t say it to anyone. I didn’t even say it to myself at first. I just grabbed a blunt serrated knife and a block of wood and started carving.

I taught myself how to carve in the basement. We never got real knives, for obvious reasons, but a butter knife or two would make its way down there, and if you scrape the shit out of a piece of wood, you can make something. If you do it for hours and hours over many days and weeks, you can make something fucking amazing.

I work on it on stakeouts. I work on it sitting in gloomy alleys. I keep it wrapped in a cloth in my pocket, though its spindly legs are getting fragile enough that I should probably put the thing in a box.

It’s on a Tuesday, the day before her birthday, that I get a break. One of the clubbing guys we pay for information tells me he heard from the grapevine about some rich guy who was asking around about a hitter who’d take a job to kill a cop last year. Said that the guy plays high-stakes poker in the back of a midtown bar on Tuesdays. Limo and everything.

I get the location and go by myself. Partly because Calder and the rest of the guys are out following up on some other lead. Mostly because something about it smells off, almost as if it’s too easy. I decide just to have a look at who this is. If I decide he’s somebody who needs to talk, or maybe somebody who needs to hurt, I can do the hurting, too.

It’s almost better this way—I don’t always like my guys seeing what I do. And the things I’ve been doing, let’s just say they’re not getting rosier.

Grayson’s been inside a few months, and I’m feeling desperate. Whenever there’s something gruesome to do, I make sure I’m the one to do it.

The way I figure, every time that it’s me, it doesn’t have to be one of them.

That’s how I end up behind a sleazy midtown bar. There’s a faded pub sign out front and piles of moldy crates in the back. It could be any old bar, any illegal poker game.

I watch a customer get out of a taxi, his movements cautious, his gaze wary as it darts around the street. He doesn’t match the description I got. I’ll kill a lot of guys if I have to—I need answers. If I don’t get answers, I’m not sure that I can control myself. Maybe that’s a sign that I should bring in the guys.

But I don’t.

Better if only one person has to see. One person to hurt people.

I raise my fist. The knock echoes through the alley.

A man opens the door. Greasy wife-beater. Big scowl. “The fuck you want?”

“The game. I want to play.”

“You know the secret word?”

A secret word? Like this was some fucking exclusive nightclub. I resist the urge to pull out my Glock to prove a point. Instead I pull out my wallet and give him a glimpse of the thick wad of green inside. “Yeah, I know it.”

He snorts. “Good enough. Game starts in two hours, strictly speaking.”

“And less strictly?”

“High rollers don’t show up until midnight.”

That means I have some time to kill. I give the fucker at the door enough money to keep him silent, at least for tonight. He assumes I want to hustle at the game, take them unaware, and that’s fine. No one needs to know my real purpose until it’s too late for them to do anything.

There’s a park down the block, the kind with statues and gardens. The statues are covered in graffiti from the neighborhood gangs. The gardens dried up a decade ago.

Now there’s only a network of bums and drug dealers. They give me hard looks but don’t come close. It isn’t the fact that I’m carrying that keeps them away. They can see that I’m like them. Made hard and merciless by years at the bottom of this city. Everyone here was made in a basement of their own.

I find an unoccupied bench with a plaque, unreadable from the rust. Someone once built this park with care. Someone loved it. I kick away a used needle with my boot before sitting down.

This spot gives me a good view of the side entrance, but I don’t need it yet.

The men I’m interested in, the ones high enough to matter, they’ve got more money than God. I’m done dicking around with the grunt workers, the men desperate enough to take cash for dirty work.

I should wait in silence. Maybe light up. Play fucking Candy Crush on my phone. Anything but dial the number of a pretty little rich girl. I shouldn’t even know her phone number, but my mind’s like a fucking bulldog when it wants something. It knows the numbers forward and backward, as sharp and strong as her shining eyes or the freckles across her nose.

“Hello?” Her voice is clear and soft. Beautiful like her. She’s a sparkling pond, and I’m black ink. The only thing I’m good for is ruining her.

I’m silent a long time. Long enough I expect her to hang up.

Then she says something that makes my heart stop. “Stone?”

How the fuck does she know it’s me? It’s been five months. And how does she know my name? “Have you been talking to the cops?”

“Detective Rivera was waiting for me when I got home. My parents had called him when—”

When we went on that little joyride last spring. A little kidnapping. “He told you about me?”

“Not much. Your name. And he asked me about…” Her breath shudders over the line. “He asked me about a lumberyard.”

The fear in her voice burns me. She might as well be flame. “And you remembered the dust on my arms, didn’t you?”

There’s a rough sob. “Tell me you didn’t do it.”

“That would be a lie, princess. And I don’t lie to you.”

In the silence I can hear her breathing. I can hear her wondering. “I wish you would,” she says finally. “I wish you’d lie.”

I know what it’s like to pretend. I’m done with that, though. “We don’t have anything between us. Not promises or nice words. This is all we have. The naked truth.”

The word naked hangs over the phone line, hard and weighty as a rock. I didn’t mean for the words to be sexual, but as the seconds of silence tick by, they become that way. As if I expect things from her. More than a kiss or a touch. As if I’ll make her fuck me.

“That makes it sound like I’ll see you again,” she says breathlessly.

Is she still afraid of me? She should be, after what Rivera told her.

“Probably. And I’ll make you drive me around. I’ll keep you until I’m done with you, but I won’t make you fuck me, understand? That’s a promise.”

“He said you’d kill anyone to stay free. That you have nothing to lose.”

“Yeah, that just goes to show he doesn’t know shit about me.”

“So that…wasn’t you? At the lumberyard?”

I hate the hope in her voice. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t kill. I said I have something to lose.”

“Oh.”

I would kill for my guys, no question. To protect them. For revenge. Even as I think about it, the picture of her smile forms in my mind. They aren’t the only people I’d kill to protect.

“I can’t answer every question. I can’t tell you everything.” It would put her at risk as much as me. If Rivera thinks he can use her as leverage, he won’t hesitate. “But I can promise not to lie.”

There’s silence, where I can hear her thinking.

I know whatever she says next will be her test of me. A test I’m suddenly desperate to pass. I’ve never gotten close to a girl. Never wanted to. Quick fucks when my body needed a warm, wet place. That all changed the night she witnessed me killing someone. The night I let her live.

There are a thousand incriminating questions she could ask me. A million sins I’ve committed, both things I did on purpose and things that were done to me before I even understood.

“Will you hurt me?” she finally asks. “If you see me again?”

And I breathe a silent sigh of relief, because this is one question I can answer. “Never,” I tell her, my voice dropping with promise. “I’d cut off my hand first.”

I may not know how to date a girl, how to make love to her, but I damn well know how to protect someone. I’ve been doing that since I was old enough to fight. It was only ever supposed to be for the boys in that basement with me, but somewhere along the way, she burrowed into my dark heart.

Was it when she stood up to me in her torn party dress?

Or when her brown eyes softened looking at me across the front seat of her car?

I’ve become obsessed with her. With the shape of her eyebrows. The feel of her skin. I’m stalking her in a way that would make her run straight to Detective Rivera for help if she knew about it.

There’s this Instagram video where she’s in a floppy hat and little orange shorts, blowing bubbles at her friend Chelsea. You can’t see Chelsea—she’s holding the phone, backing away, wanting to protect her phone from the bubbles. Brooke is happy, eyes shining, coming at her with bubbles, a brightly feathered bird captured midflight in all its glory. The clip’s all jerky, and both of them are laughing and kind of screaming, but it’s the good kind of screaming, not the bad kind.

I watch that fucking thing over and over. Forty-six seconds.

I don’t have an Instagram or Facebook account or anything—none of us do. Because what the fuck do we want with that? But we use fake accounts for researching people and casing places. It’s great for knowing where people are or when they’re on vacation.

Or seeing what Brooke is doing.

It’s a hot night, and I really want her to be in those shorts. I need to imagine her like that, breathless and laughing and so goddamn beautiful it makes my chest ache. “Where are you right now?”

“Why?” she asks, suddenly on guard—I can hear it in her voice.

I stare across the park at the moths swirling around a streetlight, around and around and around like idiots. “Because I want to know, that’s why.”

“In my bed,” she says, hesitant. “Reading.”

“What do you have on?”

A longer pause this time. “I don’t know. Just a T-shirt.”

“That’s all?”

“Why are you asking?”

“Because you make me feel like there’s something to fight for.” The words come up out of some dark, twisted part of my soul. They feel both too raw and perfectly right.

There’s a long pause. Then, “Panties,” she whispers. “That’s what else I’m wearing.”

My cock is hard as steel, hearing her say the word panties. “What color?”

“Blue,” she says, sounding breathless, her voice husky. I’m attuned to that kind of shit, with people’s voices. While other kids were learning to ride bikes, we boys were listening for signs of heat-roughened voices in the adults around us.

Like fucking rabbits, alert to every threat in the jungle.

“They’re both blue,” she says. “It’s a sleep set.”

“A sleep set,” I say, as if it makes perfect sense that you’d change into a special outfit for sleeping. I just pull off my shirt and leave on whatever jeans I wore that day. It means I’m ready to fight at any time of night.

I like that she has special sleep clothes. I like to think of her relaxed. Safe.

“What kind of blue? Light or dark?”

She makes a little humming sound. “I’d say…azure.”

Azure? What does that even mean? I can’t tell if she’s fucking with me or being serious anymore—that’s how far apart we are. “Is azure light or dark?”

“Oh. Medium, I guess.” The words come out shyly. “The color of the sky when there aren’t clouds.”

I’m suddenly thinking about her silky skin. I’m thinking about me pressing her against that cherry-red car, my cock at her flat belly, her tight little ass cheeks squished against the warmth of that metal. Blue cotton straining and stretching. Azure.

“You know what I think, Brooke?”

“What?”

“I think there’s a part of your panties that’s dark blue.”

“No, they’re completely blue. I mean, medium blue,” she says, her breathless voice betraying her. “With white lace.”

“I happen to know for a fact that there’s a part that’s darker than the rest.”

“I think I would know.” I can hear the slight smile in her voice.

“You want me to prove it?”

Silence.

“Put your hand between your legs.”

“Stone!” The way she gasps my name gets me even harder.

“Do it.”

“I don’t…I can’t…”

“Yes, you can. It’s so easy. Just slip that pretty little hand—your fingernails are painted pink, aren’t they? Slip them down over your panties. Touch yourself. See if you’re wet.”

“No,” she says on a sigh, but I know I’m winning.

“Okay, okay. Look, how about something easy. You know that line of skin above the elastic band of your panties? Right below the hem of your top? You’re going to trace that with your finger.”

She says nothing. It’s just soft breath. She’s not doing it, but she will. I’ll make her. It’s wrong, what I’m doing, but I tell myself it’s better she’s doing it to herself than me doing it to her. Better her soft, silky fingers on her instead of my fingers, rough and brutal and scarred as the moon.

“I don’t know if I want to do this,” she says.

“You do want to do it. You know how I know?”

“No.”

“Because I’m a bad guy, a criminal, and I can tell things other people can’t. I can tell when somebody’s heart is beating like crazy the way yours is right now. I know when they say they don’t want to do things, but they secretly kind of want to.”

There’s a soft sound, like a whimper.

I push harder. “I live outside of the law. That is where I live, little bird, and that’s where you went the first night with me. And you think I can’t see you, but guess what? You’re in my fucking living room, and it’s my hand you’re going to press between your legs because you belong to me.”

She lets out a shaky breath.

“Are you scared?”

“I don’t know,” she says.

“I think you do know. Honesty works both ways. I won’t lie to you, but this doesn’t work if you lie to me. This all falls apart.” It’s a threat. A push. “And you don’t want that, do you?”

“No.”

I push aside the relief I feel that she wants this. That she’s fucking glorious and sexy and desperate in it. A beautiful girl like her, turned on by fear. Like the fucking holy grail for a bastard like me. “So tell me. Are you scared?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. But here’s the thing—you don’t ever have to worry about anything when you’re mine. I’ve got you. You’re safe, and you’re going to touch yourself until you come.”

Her breath catches.

“Did you ever make yourself come before?” I ask.

There’s a silence. Then, “Yeah.”

“Now you’re gonna do it for me.”

“But…what about you?”

I pause, considering the question. There’s no way I’m touching myself in the middle of a seedy park. The question means more than that, at least to me. What about you? It means, what do you want from me? What’s the endgame here?

Of course there’s no future for me and a girl like her. No future for me at all. I’m going down in a hail of bullets. As long as I can free Grayson and take as many of the assholes who kept us in that basement with me, I’m content with that.

That means all we have is the here, the now. The imaginary touch of my hands on her pale skin.

“I’m there,” I say, my voice hard. “I’m with you, my hand on your stomach, my fingers edging under the band of your panties. Do you feel me?”

There’s a gentle rustle of fabric. A hitch of breath. “Yes.”

In that one word, I see everything—her hand slipping into her panties, her wide eyes in the privacy of her bedroom. Her other hand clutching her phone like the dirty little secret that I am to her. It feels like victory, like I’m so fucking proud, so fucking pleased, that it doesn’t even matter what happens tonight. Doesn’t matter if I find the people we’ve been searching for forever. And that makes her dangerous.

“Now lower,” I say. “I bet you have hair, don’t you? Springy curls a little darker than the hair on your head.”

Her whisper comes out in a rush. “Omigod.”

“You’re doing good,” I say. “It probably feels a little coarse to you, but it would be a fucking cloud against my cock.”

She makes a high-pitched noise. “You can’t—”

“There’s nothing I can’t do to you, baby. That’s what you need to learn. Your body belongs to me. Your mind belongs to me. Every part of you is mine for me to touch. Even that swollen pink slit. Slide your fingers down. See how wet you are.”

A moan. “This is wrong.”

“You love it. Imagine how shocked your mother would be. How angry your father would be. Every person in that fucking birthday party, smiling for you, looking down at you like you’re some little kid. And meanwhile you’re fucking yourself with your fingers, hungry and slick, desperate enough to come for a criminal.”

Her breath comes faster. “I won’t.”

“Won’t what?” She’s already doing it.

“What you said. I won’t come.”

Despite the aching in my cock, I give a soft laugh. “Come. Is that the first time you’ve used the word like that? How about another word? Like climax. Orgasm. Do you want to orgasm, little bird?”

“No,” she stutters, but it’s a lie.

I could call her on it, demand honesty, make her admit how much she wants this, needs it. But there’s something delicious about pushing her against her will. “Doesn’t matter,” I say. “Whether you want to come or not, you’re going to. Those fingers are so wet, aren’t they? Your body knows who it belongs to. Me, sweetheart. You’re mine.”

A black car pulls around the block, crossing right in front of me. Chrome gleams in the moonlight. All the hair on the back of my neck rises. My body is revved up by arousal and pure violent impulse.

Her soft moan is a balm to my cold anger, thawing me out enough to say, “Now find your clit. You know where that is, don’t you? You play with yourself at night, finding all the places that feel good. It must be hard now. Hard and sensitive. Pinch it. Right now.”

She makes a hoarse sound. “Stone. Not like this. You’re not…with me.”

Because I’m already standing from the park bench. I’m halfway across the weed-riddled sidewalk. How does she know that I’m withdrawing? How can she sense that I’m not there anymore?

I shove the questions aside, because they don’t matter. She doesn’t matter. Not really. A pretty face. Sweet brown eyes. A smoking-hot body. That’s all she is to me. That’s all she can be.

And I can push her away more effectively with words than with a gun.

I slip along the side of the building, using the shadows to disguise myself. If I really wanted to be stealthy, I’d hang up, but I need to finish this. For both our sakes.

“Oh yes, sweetheart. I’m there. I’m holding your hands down to your cunt, telling you to fuck yourself. Shoving my cock in your throat until you’ve got tears down your cheeks. Until you’ve got saliva running down your chin. You’re crying, but you don’t dare stop touching yourself.”

Her cries grow louder as I speak, her breath faster.

“And it feels good because it’s so wrong. You’re coming on your hand, spilling that sweet juice all over your slippery fingers. Even while I’m taking away your air, making you choke.”

She comes on the word choke, her body reacting on primal instinct, squeezing her throat until she breaks apart.

Like I’ve done a thousand times, I detach from the moment. I store her moans and cries in a secret place, balm for every dark thing I’ll do in the future. By the time her body finishes spasming, her inner muscle clenching, her breathing exhaled in a low moan, she’s already a memory to me.

“Very nice,” I say, my voice clipped.

I stare down the alley where the black limo has stopped in front of the private poker game. Early. This is a high roller, but he isn’t coming after midnight. Because the guy at the door lied to me? Did the guy decide to have a few drinks before the game?

“Stone?” she asks, sounding lost.

Her voice seems small and distant over the phone line, like it’s across an ocean instead of just the city. “Now you sleep in those wet panties, understand? Keep them on and pretend I came inside you, that I’m leaking out all night long.”

Before she can respond, I click the end button on the phone.

The light in my phone goes out, leaving me in darkness. I erase the call history—nobody needs to know about Brooke except me—and I turn my attention to the back entrance of the pub.

The dark car is pulling away. It moves around to the edge of the park and pulls over. That’ll be the driver, settling in to read or watch something on his phone or smoke or whatever, waiting for whoever it is to finish his game or his business inside. Is this the guy?

Is the game starting?

This is a fact-finding mission. If I don’t recognize anyone, I’ll just sit down and play. You get a really good sense of different guys off playing cards with them, especially if there’s money involved. I take the safety off my piece. Nothing has to get bloody here. It’s just me figuring out who might’ve hired the guy who framed Grayson.

Still, I like to be ready.

I’m back at that door. It’s the same bouncer, and he gets a nice, crisp bill for letting me in. “Game’s just starting to roll.” He nods his head toward a staircase.

I don’t like this. Something about this feels rushed. Not my presence here, but the dark car. The break in schedule. I just don’t know what it is.

“They have their five yet?” That’s how many they’ll need to start, but it’s not really why I’m asking.

He hesitates. He doesn’t seem to like the question. “Yeah, but one of ’em’ll play out.”

I watch him an extra beat. Is he nervous? And upstairs. Not the best. Better than the basement, though. That’s an old weakness, my reluctance to go below ground level. Not that I’d let it stop me.

I turn and head up. At the top, I knock on another door.

It opens, and right then I know it’s wrong because the guy backs way away, but it’s too late, because somebody rushes me from behind, pushing me in. A setup.

Four guys materialize on either side of the door, which gets slammed quick enough. Do they know who I am? Or is this about the game?

They have my arms before I can pull my piece out of the back of my pants.

I go at them with my legs. I land a knee-cracking blow on the biggest guy, and get in a backward head butt on one of the guys holding me—his jaw, I think, from the way he cries out. If this goes bad, I’m extra fucked for that one, but that’s what you do—when you fight, you fight.

Five against one. And they already have my arms. It’ll definitely go bad.

I get in what blows I can before the beatdown. A fist in my face. Warmth explodes, followed by the taste of blood. Another fist drives into my gut, and another and another.

The biggest guy, a baldie with bushy blond eyebrows and a goatee and blood coming off the side of his lips, does the honors while the other two hold me.

“Fucking serious?” he says, smashing his fist into my mouth. The guy I got in the knee is down in the corner, back against the wall. He’ll be trouble later.

I go into it, just go into the misery of it. That’s what you do when there’s no more fighting. You just want it over with, because you know the morning will come again. Or at least, you have to think that. I relax and take the pain. The broken ribs. The blood. There’s no part of me that isn’t battered, but they need me conscious. So eventually they stop. I let them push me into a chair.

The goatee guy puts his hands on either armrest and gets into my face. One of his teeth is cracked. Did I do that? “You’re gonna tell us what you know about Dorman, starting with thing one, and not ending ’til you’re done.” He gets closer. “And we know some of what you know, so there’ll be no use leaving anything out.”

Dorman, also known as Governor-elect Dorman, is the man who framed Grayson—or, at least, we only suspected it until now. But is he the one who directly ordered the hit of the cop and the frame-up?

I spit at the guy, but he’s ready for it and backs up, then he advances and stomps my foot under the heel of his boot, and I just wish I would’ve hit him.