I looked at him and suddenly felt the same crazed rage I’d felt in Grace’s house. This piece-of-shit Irish Mafia killer was getting self-righteous with me? While Grace and Mae were holed up in some FBI bunker in Nebraska or someplace with Grace’s career in ruins? While Kara Rider lay in the ground and Jason Warren lay in pieces and Angie lay in a hospital bed and Tim Dunn was stripped of his clothes and shoved in a barrel?

I’d spent weeks standing by while people like Evandro and his partner and Hardiman and Jack Rouse and Kevin Hurlihy wreaked violence on innocents for fun. Because they enjoyed the pain of others. Because they could.

And suddenly I wasn’t just angry at Jack or Kevin or Hardiman, I was furious at every person who practiced violence willingly. People who blew up abortion clinics and bombed airliners and butchered families and gassed subway tunnels and executed hostages and killed women who looked like women who’d spurned them in the past.

In the name of their pain. Or their principles. Or their profit.

Well, I was sick of their violence and their hate and my own codes of decency, which may have cost people their lives in the last month. Sick to fucking death of it all.

Jack was staring up at me defiantly and I could feel blood roaring in my ears and still hear Kevin hissing in pain through clenched teeth beside me. I met Bubba’s eyes and saw a gleam in them and it invigorated me.

I felt omnipotent.

I kept my eyes on Jack and pulled out my gun and rammed the butt into Kevin’s gritted teeth.

The shriek he sent out into the atmosphere was one of complete disbelief and sudden, utter fear.

I grabbed his hair in my hand, my eyes still on Jack, and the hair felt slick and oily between my fingers as I rammed the barrel into his temple and cocked the hammer.

“You have any feelings for this guy, Jack, talk.”

Jack looked at Kevin and I could see it pained him. I was once again surprised by the bonds that could exist between two people who knew so little about love.

Jack’s mouth opened and he looked so, so old.

“You got five seconds, Jack. One. Two. Three…”

Kevin moaned and his broken teeth rattled against the wire in his mouth.

“Four.”

“Your father,” Jack said quietly, “burned Rugglestone from head to toe over the course of four hours.”

“I know that. Who else was there?”

His mouth opened wide again and he looked at Kevin.

“Who else, Jack? Or I start counting again. From four.”

“All of us. Timpson. Kev’s mother. Diedre Rider. Burns. Climstich. Me.”

“What happened?”

“We found Hardiman and Rugglestone hiding out in that warehouse. We’d been looking for the van all night and that morning, we found it right in our neighborhood.” Jack licked his upper lip with a tongue so pale it was almost white. “Your father came up with the idea of tying Hardiman to a chair and making him watch while we did Rugglestone. At first, we were just going to take a few shots each, then work on Hardiman, then call in the police.”