Vin waited at the foot of the driveway while the garage door went up and she drove inside. As the panels trundled shut, he hoped he would catch another glimpse of her, but she stayed in the car.

Which was no doubt safer, and therefore a very good thing.

He waited some more.

And then there she was at the window in the kitchen, lifting her hand in a wave. Returning the good-bye, he waved and put his hand over the horn to give a little beep…but then stopped, figuring she wouldn’t appreciate any attention being drawn to her.

He headed off with a frown cranking his eyebrows together, her situation chillingly obvious. She was still running from that ex-husband of hers…running not just scared, but terrified, and expecting at some point to be found. For God’s sake, she wasn’t even chancing it by opening her car door until she was locked in the garage.

His first thought was that he wanted to build her a fortress and arm the fucking place with a platoon of soldiers like Jim.

His next was of the way she’d answered his question before she’d left his car:

Can I see you again?

I hope so.

She was going to bolt. Whether or not those two deaths last night had anything to do with her, she was going to pull a runner. And the idea of never seeing her again, of not knowing what happened to her, of not doing anything to help, panicked the shit out of him.

About fifteen minutes later, he pulled into the Commodore’s garage and parked next to his black Range Rover. For some reason, as he got into the elevator, echoes of the nightmare he’d had about Devina came back and he heard that voice again:

You’re mine, Vin. And I always take what is mine.

On the twenty-eighth floor, he stepped out into the corridor—

Vin stopped. The door to his duplex was open and voices were coming out of his place. A number of them.

It was hard to believe Devina had gotten movers to come over this late—it was past midnight, for fuck’s sake. So what the hell was going on?

Striding over, ready to give whoever was in his digs a hard time and then some, Vin burst inside with all proverbial guns blazing.

Cops.

There were four cops standing in his front hall, and they all looked over at him at the same time.

Holy shit, it had finally happened. All those bribes to city officials, all the misrepresentations, all the tax evasions…it had finally caught up with him.

“Can I help you, Officers?” he said, going total poker face.

“He’s here,” one of them called out.

As he wondered how many were in his study, his eyes shifted to the living room—