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“Fuck!” Lindsay shouted.

“What are you doing?” Ryan said beside her. “We need to stop the bleeding!”

“I know. I am–I was–Red Cross,” she said, tersely. “Help me get his shirt off. And light a goddamn match.”

She and Ryan pulled Lindsay forward into a sitting position with another groan of protest while they maneuvered him out of his shirt. She wadded it up and pressed it against his wound with as much pressure as she could, in spite of his protests.

“The good news is,” she said in as steady a voice as she could manage, “shoulder hits are one of the easiest to survive. If nothing vital was hit.”

“That’s a big fucking if,” Ryan said between gritted teeth.

“We need to get somewhere where I can really have a look at him,” she said.

“Alex will take us somewhere safe,” Ryan said, looking down at Lindsay and then back up at her.

Something passed between them, though she couldn’t have said what it was.

“You came back,” Ryan said again, his voice full and gravelly.

“I hope that wasn't a mistake,” she said softly.

“Shit,” Ryan said, and dropped the match that had burned down to his fingers, throwing them back into a darkness punctuated by the chug of the truck’s engine and the sound of Lindsay gasping.

Chapter twenty

Roberts

“I told you, I don’t know anything.” The redhead was sitting in a chair with Andrews standing right behind her, a revolver leveled at the back of her head. She was shaking like a fawn and her eyes were rimmed red, but the look of contempt never left her face. Roberts had to give her marks for bravery.

They were in the drawing room on the upper floor of Stanley’s mansion that overlooked the Arkansas River.

“So you say,” Stanley said. He slowly shrugged off his jacket and tossed it aside onto one of the absurdly expensive chairs that furnished the room.

The whole situation with this girl was making Roberts itchy with anxiety.

He could have left already, gone home and washed his hands with nothing to worry about but his conscience wouldn’t let him do it. Stanley was getting out of control.

It was one thing when he was picking fights with his fellow scum bags, getting into dust ups, bribing guys on the Force to look the other way. But this whole Evelynthing had ignited a whole different level of ruthlessness in the man. It was slowly dawning on Roberts that he was somewhat to blame for this monster becoming what he was.

Mutually assured destruction was a hell of a way to have a professional relationship.

He watched in nervous silence as Stanley slowly crossed the room to the crystal decanter that held the cognac that he was so fond of drinking. Exported to Mexico from Europe and smuggled up over the border through Texas. Roberts didn’t even want to know what kind of tax that long, treacherous journey added to an already absurdly expensive product.

With his deft fingers, Stanley poured a splash of cognac into a glass and then took a stiff drink, rolling his scarred lips before he turned back to the girl.

“But I think you do,” he said, at last. “I think you know a lot.”

“I don’t have anything to do with the family operation,” she said, leaning back in her chair as Stanley drew closer. “I don’t know anything about what they’ve been up to. I don’t know anything about this Evelyn woman. I’m a fucking journalist for Christ’s sake.”

Stanley eyed her knickerbockers with scorn. “A Suffragette like you? I’m shocked. Trying to make it in a man’s world, little girl?”

The young woman made a derisive sound. “I’m trying to make it in the world. It doesn’t belong to anyone.”

Oh, Christ. Was he really going to have to sit through a tired philosophical political debate while the anxiety-induced ulcer in his stomach threatened to kill him?

“A woman has one place,” Walter Stanley said, staring down at her with his cold, impassive face. “And that’s where I want her.”

“Oh please,” the redhead said, tipping her face away. “Men don’t run the world. They only think they do.”

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