I squeezed him around his waist. “You’re helping Bee fix my house.”
“Duh.”
I allowed a few tears to fall. “Don’t ever keep us in the dark like that again.”
“It was the only way t?—”
“It wasn’t, and you know it,” I said as I released him and took a step back, glaring up at him. “Don’t give me that ‘secret balls club’ bullshit. You could have told us, and you know it.”
He stared down at me for a little while. “It was the only way we would know, one hundred percent, that you girls were safe from any backlash from the arrests and raids that we knew were coming.”
“What did you know exactly?” Ariel asked as Cap trailed behind her.
The man looked like a hit dog on a leash.
“Answer her,” I said when my brother didn’t initially respond. “What exactly was the plan? Because I put a bit of it together when the spaghetti dinner was served to all of us. That’s when I knew that maybe, just maybe, this was all part of some grand plan.”
“I want to know what the plan was,” Ariel said with a heat in her voice I’d never heard before. “So someone better start talking now.”
Cap’s lips moved a million miles a minute. “For the last forty-eight hours, the DOJ has been in town conducting the raids. We were concerned about backlash, seeing as how they were going to be doing that for a while.”
“Splinter groups. Factions. That sort of thing,” Bee said behind me.
King continued. “We were all concerned about backlash against you guys, especially since a couple of you are runaways from their rings.” He pulled Char close to him. “No way in hell we were putting you guys in danger any longer. So when the DOJ suggested arresting us just in case we were being watched, we agreed to the plan.”
“A raid in the middle of the night, just like with the ring,” Bee said.
I peered over my shoulder at him before Jasmine piped up, walking over with Ghost. “It’s actually a pretty ingenious plan, outside of the fact that we didn’t know about it.”
I shot her a look. “You’re okay with this?”
She grinned. “I didn’t say all that now. But plans like these are pretty common.”
That relaxed me, but only a smidge.
“Did it work?” I asked.
One of the DOJ officers nodded and stepped back down the hallway. The room went quiet enough that I could hear Char breathing against my brother’s shoulder.
“It’s done,” the officer said when he came back. “All seven installations. Thirty-two men in custody. The raids wrapped up about an hour ago.”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Thirty-two men. I didn’t know what I expected that number to feel like. I thought maybe it would feel like relief, or triumph, or something big and obvious. Instead it just sat there in the hallway with the rest of us, quiet and final.
Ariel made a sound beside me. Cap got an arm around her before she could fully fall apart.
Char pressed her face harder into my brother’s chest.
Marla reached for Ranger’s hand and he gave it without looking down.
I turned back to Brutus. He was already watching me, that steady, patient look on his face that I’d spent weeks learning how to read. I pressed two fingers against his chest, right over his heart.
“You’re still in trouble,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
“My house.”
