Her stomach lurched and a mangled cry lodged in her throat. She slammed the door shut once more, threw the bolt and scrambled well out of reach.

This was bad.

Very bad.

Wiping her hands on her hips, she paced to the open side window, scanned the street outside and pulled the blind back down.

Okay. She just needed to think things through. Figure out the right thing to do.

“The cops,” she said to the empty room. “Everyone calls the cops.” She hustled for her phone in her backpack, pulled it out and fired up the screen.

Um. Tiny problem there, hot rod. This is your dad and Kevin we’re talking about. You call the cops and there’s no telling what trouble you’ll bring down on them.

She stared at the phone a beat longer, punched the button to put it back to sleep and dropped to the spot she’d cleared out for herself on the sofa. Even if she did risk it and call the cops, they’d probably rope her into the mess as well—guilty until proven innocent and all that.

Hell of a predicament when you couldn’t call the people who handled shit like this for a living. Talk about your damned if you do / damned if you don’t situations.

Jaw clenched, she planted her elbows on her knees and glared down at the bag lying between her feet. Cops weren’t an option. Kevin’s buddies weren’t an option. Neither were her dad’s. The only people she knew outside her family’s friends were good law-abiding people who’d be scared to death to step foot in this neighborhood.

She let out a slow, steady breath and forced the muscles in her shoulders and neck to relax. Between the open zipper of her backpack the corner of the laptop Cassie had given her peeked out, the brushed aluminum an almost space-aged touch compared to everything else in the room.

Hold up.

Maybe there was a non-law-abiding option.

Not Cassie. She was as good and sweet as they came. But Cassie’s new man, Kir—and the freakishly hot badasses he ran around with all the time—were rumored to be mobsters. Russian ones at that. Surely one of them would know what to do in a situation like this.

Of course, she’d have to call Cassie to get one of them to help, and calling Cassie meant exposing the ugly side of her life. Not an ideal plan considering how far she’d gone to hide it from her new friend. Even if she dared to let Cassie see where she hailed from, didn’t calling on the mob always end with a debt being owed?

She stood, paced to one side of the living room and back, all the while eyeballing the blood smeared on the ivory paint around the door. There had to be another option. Something that fell between bringing cops into the equation and making deals with mobsters.

Stopping mid-path, she planted her hands on her hips and glared at the bloodstain. Really, the only other options were to walk away completely and leave her family to fate, or to venture out on her own to figure out what happened—neither of which were likely to generate results.