“Yes,” Gretchen replied, a note of pride mixed in with all that crazy. “She was a stuck-up little bitch. Thought she was too good for my Freddie. I wasn’t going to let her get away with what she did to my boy, any more than I’ll give you a pass, after all you did to mess up my son’s life!”

Out of the corner of his eye, Eli saw, through the pain and the blood and the gathering darkness, that Gretchen was holding the snow shovel he kept on the back porch.

It dripped red.

He heard the dog, whimpering now. Defeated.

He heard a siren, distant, then closer, and closer still.

The squeal of brakes followed, lights blared.

“Police!” yelled a familiar female voice. “Drop your weapon or I will shoot!”

Melba. Eli would have smiled, if he hadn’t been losing consciousness.

He sensed, rather than saw, Gretchen raising the shovel for a hard swing.

There was a single shot.

And then Eli fell end over end into the darkest of darkness.

As he tumbled, one persistent glimmer shone in all that gloom; oddly, it was not an image, but a name.

Brynne.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

HE WAS ALIVE.

At first, Eli thought he was still in his backyard, face down in frost-hardened snow, bleeding like the proverbial stuck pig, but then he flash-focused on the ceiling tiles and realized two things: he was lying on his back and he was inside.

Make that three things: he had a headache and it was epic.

His vision blurred again, and he groaned.

The beep-beep-beep sound of medical equipment finally brought it all together in his beleaguered brain: he was in the county’s one and only hospital.

He felt a smaller, smoother hand curl around his, pressing something cylinder shaped into his palm.

“Push this button when the pain gets bad.” The voice was Sara’s.

He thumbed the button and, sure enough, after a few seconds, his head hurt marginally less than it had before.

“What—?” That single word was all he could manage, and it came out as a ragged croak.

“Gretchen Lansing clocked you with a snow shovel,” Sara replied, guessing the rest of the question he hadn’t managed to complete. Her voice quivered with tears she was probably too proud to shed. “She would have killed you, if it hadn’t been for Melba.”

Flashes of the attack flickered colorfully on the inside of his forehead. “Festus,” he said, trusting his sister to fill in the blanks.

She laughed softly, sniffled. “He’s fine. Melba brought him to us as soon as you’d been loaded into the ambulance.”

He was silent for a long time, trying to scrape up the energy to ask for more information. The effort exhausted him.

“Brynne is here. So are Cord and J.P. Marisol issued an edict—one visitor at a time. Right now, I’m it.”

“Melba?”

“She’s here, too.”

“Am I—?”