“I’m telling the truth about all of it!” Dorothy insisted, though she was no longer holding on to hope that her words carried any weight here. Maybe there wasn’t a chance for any of them to be close again. Well fine, she could find a way to deal with that. But she had to make them trust her on this. If not for herself, then for Ash.

She pinched her nose between two fingers, chest tightening as she thought about Ash’s motorboat floating in the open sea, the waters stained red with his blood.

Her throat closed up.

“Look,” she said, when she could speak again. “We all seem to be in agreement on the fact that something terrible has happened. And I’ll be the first to admit that it appears that I must’ve . . . I don’t know, come back from the future and—and attacked him, for some reason. But I’m telling you all the truth when I say that I don’t know why I came back, or what, exactly, I did to him. I wouldn’t have, I would never . . .” The words kill him felt stuck in her throat.

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and tried again. “A few hours ago, Mac put a bounty on Ash’s head. Right now, every Cirkus Freak in the city will be out looking for him. Perhaps whatever happened to him has something to do with that.”

“Why would Mac Murphy care about Ash?” Willis asked, frowning slightly. “He’s never bothered with us before.”

“That was before Ash and I broke into his brothel and shot him in the leg,” Chandra said.

Dorothy blinked, taken aback. “I’m sorry . . . you shot Mac Murphy in the leg?”

For the first time since Dorothy arrived, Chandra looked at her with something like her old warmth. “It was awesome,” she said, grinning. “Ash was all, where do you keep your girls, and then Mac said—”

“Off topic,” Zora murmured, cutting off Chandra. Turning to Dorothy, she asked, “Is that why Mac put a bounty on Ash’s head? Because of the thing at his brothel?”

“What?” Dorothy shook her head. “No, that’s not it at all. Mac needed someone to take the fall for—”

Dorothy stopped talking abruptly. Roman’s death felt like it had happened a lifetime ago, and yet the memory of it played in her mind like a movie waiting to be cued.

She saw Roman’s chest blossoming with blood. Roman falling to the ground, his eyes going distant. And Mac’s hand on the trigger. She had to close her eyes for a moment to stop tears from spilling on to her cheeks. Oh, Roman.

It was too much, all this pain. Just when she thought she’d gotten a handle on herself, some other memory roared up inside her mind, threatening to ruin her.