I can’t swallow. “Fuck you,” I hiss. But he just laughs, a sound with no warmth.
“You were chosen for this, Evan. Don’t insult us both by pretending to be a martyr. Get close to the girl. Get her talking.”
Chosen. What a fucking joke of a word.
I was chosen because my sister is an easy target and I was a fucking nomad with useful connections and no club to back me up.
“I am doing that.”
“You’re playing nice.” Midnight tuts. “Nice doesn’t get you into the Devils’ guts. Nice doesn’t get you keys and codes and schedules. Nice doesn’t get you your sister back. Molly Rogers is a locked box. It’s time you crack her open.”
Something ugly churns in my stomach. “She’s not—”
“She’s a means to an end,” he cuts in, sharp. “You want your sister alive? You bring me something useful by tomorrow. Something I canfeel.Or I get creative with your sister’s anatomy.”
My throat closes. “Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.”
The call ends. Click. No warning, no time to brace.
I’m left in the car, staring at nothing, the blood pounding so loud in my head I almost miss the fact that I’m shaking. My whole body’s buzzing and cold and hot at the same time. I wantto vomit. Instead, I just sit. The car’s cabin shrinks around me, until I’m a bug in a jar, fighting for air.
I hurl the phone into the passenger seat hard enough that it bounces off, clatters to the floor mats, and slides beneath the empty coffee cups and stray receipts at my feet. My hand stays suspended in the air for a second, the bones buzzing.
“Fuck,” I whisper. “Fuck.”
I should go inside. I should sleep. I should do a hundred things that resemble sanity.
Instead, I climb out and stand there in the parking lot, staring up at the apartment building like it has answers.
My sister’s voice still echoes in my ear.
Evan…
I go upstairs on autopilot. I flick on the light and the kitchen snaps into harsh relief. The countertops are bare except for a chipped coffee mug and a pile of unopened mail. I drop my keys into the bowl and they rattle against the loose change. I crack a tallboy the second I’m inside because my hands won’t stop shaking and I need something to steady them. The first swallow tastes like bitter water.
I don’t sit. I can’t. The adrenaline is still in my system, and the apartment is too small for it. I pace the length of the living room and back, counting the steps, listening to the sound of my boots on the laminate. I picture June, wherever she is right now, and try to project calm and hope and some kind of cosmic reassurance. But it’s a one-way transmission. All I can do is keep moving and not let myself think too long about what happens if I don’t deliver.
The building hums with normal life — pipes, footsteps, a distant TV, someone laughing on a balcony like the world isn’t a knife pressed to my throat.
Minutes pass. Maybe an hour. I lose track. The only thing that snaps me out of it is the sound from the hallway — a door downthe hall, then footsteps, then the unmistakable jingle of keys and the thud of a bag hitting a wall.
She’s home.
My chest tightens. My mind runs through options, through lies, through pleas, through every way I could earn more time with her without breaking her. Without making her hate me.
But Midnight’s voice is still in my skull.
Crack her open.
I set the beer down, then I go to the closet and pull out my toolbox. It’s heavier than it should be, like it knows what I’m about to do.
I hesitate with my hand on the handle, because this is the moment where I decide what kind of man I am. Am I the kind who lets her live a normal life? Or the man who protects his family?
My jaw locks.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur to an empty room, and I don’t know if I’m talking to Molly or June or the part of myself that used to believe I could get out of this clean.
