Have you told her the plan?” Chase asks.

I work my lips to the side, wincing a little. “Planned on it,” I say.

We’re downstairs in the club while Luke and Angelo are upstairs with the girls, keeping an eye out. It’s early afternoon, so the only people in the club are the staff, who are preparing for the action tonight.

“But?” asks Gino.

“But it wasn’t the right time,” I say, making sure my tone explains that I don’t want to go into details. The truth is, I’m afraid she’ll try to talk me out of it. I’m not going to admit that to them, though. Better that they still don’t know how desperately tight she actually has me wrapped around her fingers—and even better that she doesn’t know it, either.

Gino nods. “You talk to her dad’s witness yet?”

“That’s what I did yesterday,” I say. “Wasn’t easy tracking him down. They already have him in witness protection.”

“Did he cooperate?” Chase asks. There’s a note of worry in his eyes, like he thinks I might have tortured the guy if he didn’t talk to me willingly.

“He didn’t give me shit,” I admit.

“Damn,” Gino says. “So we have no idea how bad it could be for us if we let Crowley push his case through.”

“Right,” I say.

“You wouldn’t just be fucking over the old man,” Gino says. “You’d probably land half the family in jail.”

“No,” I say. “Not necessarily. I still have a backup plan.”

Neela’s father watches me warily from across the table. He agreed to meet me in a coffee shop near his work, but from the look on his face, I can tell he’s not at all happy to see me.

“I’m going to start off by being honest with you,” I say.

He says nothing, only watches me with a dark expression. I’m not sure how someone so delicate and sweet as Neela came from such a mountain of a man. He has thick, overgrown eyebrows and a heavy mustache. His hair is styled in a no-nonsense kind of short-cropped buzz.

“Neela and Jess aren’t on vacation with their friends. They’ve been with me.”

I hold up a hand when it looks like her dad is about to jump over the table and try to strangle me.

“Willingly,” I add. “And they are completely safe and healthy.”

He sits back slightly, but is still seething, big chest heaving. “Tell me why I shouldn’t drag you in right now. You promised—”

“Just hear me out. There were some… developments,” I say carefully, not knowing if Neela has told him about the pregnancy yet or not. “My father found out where Neela was, so the best way to keep her safe was to take her somewhere I could keep an eye on her.”

“I’m a fucking executive director of the FBI. You don’t think I could’ve kept her safe better than you?”

“You could’ve put her in witness protection. But I know my father better than you. I knew I could keep her safe.”

“You’re running low on time to convince me,” he says quietly, which is actually more threatening than when he was raising his voice.

“I have a plan to put an end to all of this, but I’ll need your help.”

"How about you give me my daughters back and I don't break you in half. Then I'll give you a one-minute head-start before I bring the weight of the entire fucking bureau down on you and your family. You fucking promised your family would stay away from them if I delayed the case, and I've delayed it."

“I know,” I say. “But I didn’t have time to contact you and get you involved. It was a matter of hours, maybe less, between me taking them in and my father’s men taking them in. And trust me, if my father got them, he wasn’t planning to negotiate this time.”

"What more do you want? I've already got the case on ice." He sounds more reasonable now, but there's still the glint of violence in his eyes, like he'd happily beat me to a pulp if given half the chance.

“I want you to push the case through, as fast as you can.”

Crowley raises one of his big eyebrows. “What?”

“I don’t know what your witness knows, but my father has his hands in so much shit that there’s no way he’d miss a long, long prison sentence. It’s the only way to get him out of the picture and keep Neela safe without a bloodbath.”

“And what about you?” he asks. “You think you, your brothers, and your friends are going to come through this clean?”

“That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about…”