Stan: Always
Stan: I fucking love you, Kitty
Stan: You hold on
I didn’t go into the messages, half-ignored the banners that popped up on the screen, and watched his dot move ever nearer to mine.
When the two merged, I gasped as the door handle twisted.
Terror flooded me.
It was too soon for that to be Stan.
THREE
STAN
FORTY MINUTES EARLIER
Playlist recommendation:
Love in the Dark - 3slow2
When Dead To Me jumped into our SUV, she wasn’t a blank slate.
For the first time ever.
I’d seen her in many different guises, covered in the dirt from our enemies’ graves, wearing that godawful makeup that fucked with facial recognition software, in military fatigues as she prepared for a showdown…
But this was different.
Nicks on her face, cuts and bruises on her throat and hands, she looked battered to fuck—still, the hellfire in her eyes was what caught my attention.
It made me realize that I only thought I’d seen her stoked for battle before.
“Lucinda, nice of you to join us,” I greeted, my voice like gravel.
“Drive,” she intoned. “You’ll need men.”
Luciu’s study of her was as thorough as my own. “You don’t know where we’re going.”
“Sure I do—where I tell you.” When she rattled off the address of the Albanian brothel in Nolita, she wafted a hand at us both. “Drive!!”
“Luigi, you okay behind the wheel?” I asked, even as my blood pressure spiked.
“Yeah. Whiplash is good for the soul,” he groused, but we set off.
And an internal timer began to tick away to the beat of my goddamn heart…
Luc leaned forward. “How many men?”
“Two dozen. Minimum.”
I sent out a call for thirty foot soldiers, preferring to be on the safe side. With the men I had surveilling the brothel anyway, that should have been enough of a force to make an impact.
Me: Any sighting of this woman?
I forwarded the picture I’d airdropped from her phone to mine the other night—the one of us on the plane to Mexico—to my men.
