I hadn’t done a window jump out of the Basement in twenty years, but there was no time like the present.

When your choices came down to scaling a building or walking into a bullet, there was only one option: out the window we went.

Unlatching the window, I slid the plaster sill up and thanked God that Nat hadn’t moved from the French Quarter into a nineteenth-century residence. No, Whiskey Bay could be found in an old cereal-making factory, and the windows were both tall and wide. I shoved it up, leveraging my shoulder beneath its weight so I could re-hinge the latch.

Then I turned to Avery, my palm held out.

“This is the ‘back way’?” she asked, and I didn’t miss the way her voice hitched on the word. She was nervous, and I understood that, but there was only one reason why Josiah Templeton would have teamed up with someone who wasn’t the NOPD, and that meant my ass was on the line.

And because I’d been idiot enough to get caught almost-kissing her against the precinct, now my old boss believed that Avery meant something to me. Collateral, at its finest.

I just wished I hadn’t been so blind tonight to see that it’d all been a setup.

The craps table winnings being doled out an hour earlier.

Zak Benson on Stage One, instead of seated at the gaming tables.

Nat rushing me to sit with Avery, when she hated my guts with every fiber of her being . . . and had never, not once, lifted a finger to help me in my entire life.

Laurel.

The name sprung to mind, and I shoved it away. We had to go—now.

I swung my arm around Avery’s waist, hauling her onto the windowsill. “Move your legs there,” I instructed, pointing to the fire stairwell just three feet beneath the ledge.

When she spoke, her voice was ten layers of annoyed. “You let me believe we were literally jumping out of this window.”

“It was a joke.”

“You don’t make jokes,” she quipped, dropping her feet onto the platform.

Eyeing the door to the room—and hearing Templeton calling my name—I followed her through and slammed the window shut. “Seemed like a good time to start,” I muttered, angling her so that she could file through the narrow path that led us down along the building, some forty feet up in the air.

Her gait incredibly uneven, she tossed back, “I’m pretty sure I liked you more when you were all brooding and surly.”

“Don’t worry, that Lincoln will be back soon enough and then you’ll remember how much you prefer me cracking jokes.”

“Just in time for you to kill someone off that list of yours.”

Hearing the fury in her tone, I snapped, “What the hell are you even talking about?”

At the end of the building, we turned down, stepping onto the circular stairwell that would lead us to a small, grassy bank just next to the Mississippi River. If it’s even still there. Christ, if it wasn’t—if the river had assumed that spot of land—we were screwed in every meaning of the word.

Avery’s stilettos echoed like pin drops with each wobbly step she took. “Your list. Josef Banterelli—dead. Micah Welsh—dead. Tom Townsend, missing.”

I stared at the back of her head, my heart pumping blood that seemed to skip my head completely and head straight south to my legs. They were frozen, unable to move, and I snaked out a hand to grind Avery to a stop, too.

Her right arm flung backward as she turned to me, her nostrils flaring. A second later, her precious taser was trained on me—aimed right at my crotch. “Don’t touch me.”

On anyone else, that might have worked.

On me, she didn’t stand a chance.

I gripped her wrist, popped the taser free, and dropped the damn thing over the side of the stairwell.

It took ten seconds for me to hear the plop! of it hitting muddy river water.

Only a second after that for Avery to lose her ever-lovin’ mind.

“Are you insane?” she hissed for the second time tonight. “You tell me to keep that on me and then you . . . you—” With sharp jabbing motions, she gestured to where it’d fallen below. “That! You did that!”

I hooked a hand on her shoulder, turning her back around, and began to march her down the metal steps. “It was safer than you shooting me with it.”

“Says who? You?”

“You’re fucked without me, sweetheart. What are you going to do, tell Templeton and his lackeys to hold off a second while you wait for a cab to drive you home? Because, yeah, that’s going to go over real well.”

Her silence was a personal win, until she cut back with: “Because your car is going to work any better? Like they don’t have it completely swarmed already?”

“Ah,” I murmured, my tone laced with sarcasm, “but I didn’t park in the lot with everyone else.”

Shoulders twitching under my hands, she glanced back at me. “Was Zak Benson here tonight?” Her gaze was steady as she waited for my answer, and I had a feeling that no matter which way I answered this for her, she was going to be disappointed.

Surprise trickled down at my spine as I remembered what Ambideaux had told me—about how he’d stashed another list in my desk drawer as a way to incriminate me if needed.

Apparently, Avery Washington had filched it when she’d been in my office the other night.

If I weren’t so furious, I’d applaud her.

As it was, I just wanted to keep us both safe long enough that we could hash this out somewhere else.

“Number four,” she said, a little more forceful this time, “was Zak Benson here tonight?”

I didn’t know what possessed me to tell the truth when I so rarely did in my life. Maybe it was the way she stared at me or maybe it was that I was so damn tired of the lies and everything else. Either way, as soon as I opened my mouth, I should have known it’d be a big mistake:

“He was the guy on Stage One. The one we watched for close to an hour.”