CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

He wished he could be there with her. Holding her ’til she fell asleep. Kissing her forehead as her eyelids fluttered closed. Brushing loose strands of hair away from her face.

Instead, from the wooden swing on the back deck of his house, Colin zoomed in on the screenshot Elle had sent him a few hours ago. The one of her newest text. A night breeze tripped through the trees as he studied the message. He stared so long he let his vision go blurry. The message turned hazy around the edges of the words, and the letters seemed to float off the screen.

Ladies. Smarter. Pretty.

Then one word, in all caps, slammed into him.

INVOLVED.

He tapped in the community center’s web address into a search bar. Quickly he found Elle’s bio, where it said she prided herself on being involved with the local community.

In his head, he replayed the messages.

Be careful who you get involved with.

Hey, pretty lady. Don’t you be messing around with that new guy. WJ.

Pretty ladies should be smarter about who they get INVOLVED with.

The blurry haze evaporated. The clouds burned away, and the sky was clear. Colin had figured a gang member was somehow targeting her, because she was involved with a man whose family had been torn to pieces by a gang. Someone like Kenny or T.J. Nelson, who didn’t want the case reopened. Someone who was trying to intimidate Colin’s family through the woman in his life.

But that theory didn’t entirely add up.

He called Ryan. His brother answered on the first ring. “What’s up? It’s late. You okay?”

“Yeah. You answered quickly. What are you up to?”

“Sophie and I just finished a game of pool,” he said, and if there was ever code for fucking, that was it. But now was not the time for razzing his brother.

“You told me something the other day, about visiting Marcus at the convenience store,” Colin said, reminding Ryan of a conversation they’d had earlier in the week. It hadn’t seemed like much at the time, but now he was examining every possible connection. “The kid mentioned a guy who’d been there?”

“Yeah. He got some weird vibe from him. Thought he reeked of Royal Sinners. Said he had a goatee and was bitching about not having an iPhone.”

“And that made him think he was a Sinner?”

“More like Marcus had a gut reaction to him. And he said his dad has always been worried about those guys coming after them.”

Colin snapped his fingers. That was it. Instinct told him the warnings Elle had received weren’t about Colin—but they might very well be about Marcus.

Elle wasn’t only involved with Colin. Elle was involved with the local community. Elle was involved in helping the kids at the center. Elle had been deeply involved with helping Marcus. And Marcus’s father had been worried about gang members targeting his family. Were they targeting Marcus through Elle?

In the morning, he called Marcus and asked him for help.

“Tell me everything about the guy who came by your store the other day,” Colin said, and his young brother described the guy in detail, right down to his hands.

* * *

After Colin finished a training swim at lunch, his phone buzzed as he left the gym. He’d set up an alert for any new photos from the Instagram and Facebook profiles he’d check-marked as likely belonging to the Royal Sinners. The account that had pinged was called Don’t Mess With, and it often featured snapshots of stolen goods.

As he walked across the parking lot to his car, he scrolled through the new set of photos in the feed.

Boatloads of iPhones.

In some of the pictures, a guy pointed at his stash, his fingers in the shape of guns. The guy’s face wasn’t in any of the pictures, but Colin punched the air when he read the caption.

Looks like Wicked Jack is gonna make a cool couple of Gs on this haul. Burner phones are the shizz, but iPhones are the biz. $$$$$$

“Wicked Jack,” Colin said out loud. “WJ.”

Anger rolled through him, and he slammed the door on his car. Who the fuck was this guy harassing his Elle because of Marcus? What did Marcus have to do with the Royal Sinners? Was it because he was in the Protectors? He couldn’t imagine gang members caring that much about a guardian angels–style group of volunteers, especially teenagers. The Royal Sinners trafficked in guns and drugs and stolen goods, so why would a group of unarmed vigilantes bother them? And why would they care that Elle was talking to Marcus?

Outrage filled his chest, but he forced himself to let it go, and set to work.

The thing about gang guys was they didn’t always realize that some types of technology were highly traceable. They might have mastered the burner phone and made its anonymity their ally. But Instagram? That social media service was like a dog with a microchip.

Every picture had a location attached to it unless you turned off the geotagging feature, and not everyone knew to do that. Or chose to turn it off—because street gangs tagged. They left their mark. They bragged.

Colin wanted to kiss the original investors in Instagram and thank them for the geotagging technology that made it possible for braggarts to be found. In a few minutes, he had a longitude and latitude. As he looked at the picture one more time, something else clicked.

“Wicked Jack’s” fingernail was black and blue.

It matched the description of Marcus’s convenience store visitor.

* * *

Her nerves were frayed and worn thin. They were nails bitten to the quick. As she dressed for Ryan and Sophie’s proposal celebration, slipping into a dress and fastening a necklace, her stomach dived. Twenty million times. She ran a brush through her long hair, tugging, pulling, and yanking. Punishing it. She tossed the hairbrush in a basket on the bathroom floor, left her apartment, and took her son to her mother’s house. “I’ll pick you up later.”

He shrugged. “Okay.”

There it was again. The dead voice. The empty tone.

She wrapped her arms around him and gave him a hug. “You always come first. You know that, don’t you?”

He managed to quirk his lips up in a small smile, then she said good-bye. Even if he didn’t believe her now, she’d prove it to him.

* * *

The second the call came from Marcus, Colin pounced on it.

“Talk to me,” he said, then glanced at the time on his wrist. He needed to leave the office any second to make it to Ryan’s event.

“I went in early for my shift, and I found the video from the other week,” Marcus said. “I just played it on the work computer in the back office and shot a video of it with my cell. You should have it any minute. I emailed it.”

“Let me see if it’s here.” He switched to his email program on his laptop, clicked on the new message, and hit play. The video was black and white, and the conversation was barely audible.

“Do you know who he is? You think this is the guy who’s sending harassing notes to Elle?” Marcus asked.

“I don’t know for sure,” Colin said, then zoomed in on the guy’s hands. Lo and fucking behold, there it was. The messed-up fingernail. A chill ran down his spine. “It has to be the same guy. The comments about the phone in his Instagram, then this stubbed fingernail, then the location. I just don’t know his name.” He crooked his head against the phone as he grabbed a screenshot and dropped it into a reverse image search. “But I’m going to call the detective after I plug this into a—”

His heart stopped beating. His blood froze. That last name. It echoed in his nightmares.

“You still there?” Marcus asked.

“Yes,” he whispered, his voice a hiss.

“What is it? Who is it? What did you find out?”

The photo had taken him to a Facebook page for Jerry Stefano’s teenage son. The photos matched the ones he’d found on Instagram.

“Lee Stefano. The shooter’s son. And it looks like he’s following in his father’s footsteps. He calls himself Wicked Jack, and he’s in the Royal Sinners.”