Page 119 of Wicked Sin

I start sobbing again, which is why I’m a civilian and she’s a cop. “I thought maybe his phone just died, but I knew that wasn’t the case. Oh my God.”

“I know.” She wraps her arms around me, and holy fuck, I’ve been hugged more times in the last week than I have in my entire life, and it’s really fine.

Luke broke me.

In a good way.

And now he’s locked in his house with a crazy person. “Who is it?” I whisper. “Tell me. You know, right? He told you in code?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know. We’re negotiating with him via notes right now. I want you to stay out of sight, though. He can’t know you’re here. You get that? It will fuck him up. He thinks you’re at home, asleep. We did not tell him you called 911. We’ll do that once he’s safe. He’ll be fucking proud of you. You did the right thing.”

My heart wrenches hard.

She leads me back to Cole, who fires a bunch of questions I don’t really follow. Then he takes me firmly by the arm and leads me back to his vehicle.

The next two hours drag by. At quarter to midnight, there’s a flurry of activity, and I go to leap out of the SUV, but the goon stops me.

“I’ll go find out,” Cole says, his brows slashing across his forehead in a stern, don’t-fuck-with-me expression. “Stay.”

I can’t believe my sister likes this man.

I throw myself back against the seat and pout until he returns three and a half minutes later. I timed him.

He jerks his thumb at the goon. “Take a walk for a few,” he says before climbing into the back seat with me.

“What is it?” I ask as he rocks his jaw back and forth. Clearly something went wrong. “Cole…”

“You’re not going to fucking believe it.”

“Try me,” I say faintly.

“It’s your crackpot mother.”

“What?”

“Inside with Luke. It’s yourfucking mother.Amelia has come unhinged, clearly, and thought she could kill Luke without anyone finding out. Now she’s trapped in the house with him.”

“My—” I’m speechless. Absolutely, what-the-fuck-do-you-mean-my-mother speechless.

“I know.”

“She’s dangerous,” I whisper. “And connected. Cole, we need to make this stop, now. She has the power to summon mercenaries here.”

“She must not anymore. She wouldn’t be doing this if she could have sent mercenaries to do it, Taylor. Think about it for a second. I don’t know what kind of changes have gone down in PRISM, but maybe she’s been booted from the council because of your father’s criminal indictments.”

“But if she— I mean, why would—” My mouth goes dry. “To hurt me. To shut me up.”

We’d considered it a possibility with the car bomb. I should have known that if my mother wanted to hurt me, it wouldn’t be a near miss like that.

Amelia Dashford Reid doesn’t miss.

But now she’s in a hostage situation with the LAPD, and maybe she doesn’t know how to end this in a Dashford kind of way.

She’s gone off the deep end.

Maybe she was always there. But this is bonkers mad. What was she thinking? Whatisshe thinking?

My brain spinning, I grab Cole’s arm. “You need to tell them to tell her that someone has called this whole thing off. Not my grandfather. Someone else…” A Rolodex of powerful people spins through my mind. The President would be too obviously a false promise. She wouldn’t believe that. “The Attorney General has intervened. Tell them to tell her that. They are friends, but not really. And she has dirt on him.”

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