The name didn’t seem as ridiculous as it had on the drive up.

“Well . . .” Lily prompted primly. “Ask me again.”

“Ask you what?” I played dumb. She’d shushed me. This was the price of shushing.

“Ask me what’s going on.” Lily came to stand beside me in the window and held up a long, flat box—too big for jewelry, but too narrow for almost anything else. “Ask me,” she instructed, “what this is.”

I took the box from her outstretched hand. It was matte black, with a card stuck to the middle. The card was made of a thick off-white paper—the kind I associated with wedding invitations—and a single word had been embossed on it in raised black cursive.

Lily’s name.

I went to remove the top from the box, but Lily stopped me. “Don’t open mine.” She nodded toward one of the beds. “Open yours.”

A second box—this one bearing my name—sat near the pillow. I crossed the room, picked it up, and opened it. Nestled inside, I found a single elbow-length white glove. Pinned to the glove, there was another note, this one written on thinner paper in blood-red ink.

The Big Bang, 11 p.m., back room.

“Lily,” I said calmly, “don’t take this the wrong way, but is this an invitation to an orgy?”

“A what?” Lily Taft Easterling did not, as a rule, shriek, but this time, she came close.

“The Big Bang,” I replied. “Doesn’t exactly sound PG to me.”

Lily glared at me. I grinned. Sometimes getting a rise out of her was just too easy. A pang came after a brief delay, and the grin froze on my face.

I could lose this. Lose her.

Putting those emotions on lockdown, I examined the contents of the box more closely. The pin holding the note to the glove was made of silver. Carved into the end, there was a small rose, and wrapped around the rose’s stem, there was a snake.

“An orgy,” I repeated, forcing a grin and trying to get the moment back. “With serpents.”

Lily rolled her eyes. “When you’re done repeating that word ad nauseam, I’d be happy to inform you that The Big Bang is a local establishment.”

“A brothel?”

“They sell hot wings,” Lily said defensively. “And beer. And… other beverages.”

“So you’re saying it’s a bar.” I’d grown up in a bar—almost literally. My mom and I had lived over The Holler until I was thirteen. “Someone wants to meet the two of us in the back room of a bar at eleven p.m.?”

I was skeptical. The world Lily had grown up in—the world I’d reluctantly taken my place in this past year—was a place of charity galas and twin sets and pearls. A bar wasn’t exactly the natural habitat of an Easterling or a Taft.