Val felt that same little bite that nipped at her when she thought about her career gone sour. She wanted to argue and defend herself, to tell Freya that she’d been a good cop, but the effort would have been futile. A gust of heavy wind slipped through the open window, rattling the blinds, reminding her how she’d screwed up. “Well, I don’t have to worry about that now, do I?”

“Hey, I didn’t mean—”

“I know.” She waved a hand in the air, as if swatting a lazy fly. “Don’t worry about it.” But it was a sore subject, one that burned a hole in her brain and kept her up at night. She slid the window down and caught a watery image of herself: pale and ghostly skin, cheekbones high and sharp, wide mouth turned down, and worried hazel eyes. Her curly auburn hair was scraped back into a drooping ponytail. God, she was a mess. Inside and out. Rain skewed her reflection as she latched the window tight. “Anyway, you’re right. I do look like hell.”

“Nothing seventy-two hours of sleep won’t cure.”

Val doubted it.

“Anyone ever tell you that you worry too much?”

“Just you.”

“Then you should take it as gospel. Quit dwelling on Cammie, okay? So she’s doing the running-off-to-a-nunnery thing. It’ll pass.” One side of Freya’s mouth lifted. “I’m surprised she hasn’t already been thrown out.”

If you only knew, Valerie thought, sipping her tea and glancing out the window again into the thick night where the spire of St. Marguerite’s cathedral was cloaked in darkness, invisible.

Oh, God, Freya, if you only knew.

Slade Houston squinted into the darkness. The tires of his old pickup hissed over the slick pavement, and the wipers were having one helluva time keeping up with the torrent as he drove across the state line into Louisiana. His old dog, Bo, a hound of indeterminate lineage, sat beside him, his nose pressed to the glass of the passenger window. Every once in a while, Bo cast a bald eye in Slade’s direction, hoping for him to crack the damned thing.

“Not tonight, boy,” Slade said as he fiddled with the radio, which crackled from interference. He found a station playing an old Johnny Cash song, but the lyrics couldn’t keep his mind from returning to his reason for driving in the middle of the night. A fool’s mission, at least according to his brothers, Trask and Zane, who’d let him hear it while he was packing up the Ford just before dusk.

“Why the hell you want anything to do with that woman is beyond me,” Trask, his middle brother, had muttered under his breath. “Only gonna bring you grief.”

“More grief,” Zane, the youngest, had added.