Eddie met her stare head-on. “Devina can be everywhere and anywhere, so the answer for keeping you safe is freeing Vin—we get her out of him, then by definition you’re off her radar, because you are not the one she wants or has claimed. She only has eyes for him—and anything that keeps him from her.”

Adrian cursed. “Bitch only cares about people she’s put her name on. It’s one of her few virtues.”

“Maybe the only one,” Eddie seconded.

“So let’s do it,” Vin cut in. “Right now. Let’s go to the house and take care of this, because Devina left in a hurry for God only knows what. I don’t want her coming back here and—”

“She’s going to be tied up for a while. Trust me.” From across the way, Adrian smiled like a motherfucker. “She hates messes, and I’m really fucking good at making them in her drawers.”

Vin frowned. “Watch your mouth.”

“No, not those kind of…you know…” Adrian held up both his palms. “I mean dresser drawers—”

“Did Vin give you back your earring,” Jim said abruptly to Marie-Terese. “The hoop that you lost outside the Iron Mask.”

“How did you know that I…” Marie-Terese frowned. “Well, yes, he did.”

“So where is it.”

Her hands went up to her earlobes. “Oh…no. I lost that thing again.”

And she’d had it on when she’d walked into the duplex, Vin remembered.

“The bed,” he said, on a wave of dread. “Upstairs. The bed—Devina took something off the bed. Goddamn it.”

As Vin rushed upstairs with Marie-Terese behind him, Jim supposed he should go help, but he felt like someone had Super Glued both of his ass cheeks to the couch.

Adrian put his beer down and headed out after them. “If Devina’s got a gold earring of that woman’s, we’re further into the shitter.”

Jim put his Dogfish back up to his face and let his head go lax on the pillow behind him again. Closing his eyes was dangerous because he was dizzy, so he kept his lids as low as possible while still being able to see a sliver of the once perfect, now trashed living room.

Man, wrecking things was so much easier than cleaning them up, wasn’t it.

“She was a virgin, wasn’t she,” he said softly. “The girl over that tub.”

“Yes.”

“Part of a ritual.”

There was a pause. “Yes.”

God, and he’d thought what he’d seen in the military was ugly. What he’d found this afternoon, though, had been downright tragic: A young girl like that should have been out at the mall or something, but there were going to be no more high school notebooks or biology classes or boys at dances for her.

“What’s going to happen to her body?” he asked.