“You’re human. We all got shit we need,” Joey said, kissing her softly. And then she began doing things to Michelle. Things that Juliet and Michelle had never done the entire time they’d been together. Joey brought her so close and then let Michelle hover just below the edge.

And then, Michelle was falling and something broke open inside her. While she was still a bit hazy, Joey said softly, “The world is a shitty fucking place and sometimes you need to be selfish.”

Michelle grabbed Joey, rolled her over, and began kissing her and yanking Joey’s clothes off as fast as she could. For this moment, she was selfish. And she knew that this was what she’d needed for a long, long time.

Mollie left her dad and older brothers—Brent, Jim, Mick, and Troy—banging away at two dozen Kazakh slot machines while she crept deeper into the casino in search of more loot. The goons’ attempt to break into the teller drawers had made her less skittish: Baba Yaga’s people had been hired to make sure nobody tried to steal from that terrible old witch, and nobody in their right mind would dare betray her while the hag was still around. Probably, then, she’d gotten plugged during the fight in the casino while the jokers escaped. And good fucking riddance.

So Mollie figured she was free to explore. Others were doing the same. Some looters kept their distance from one another, but others had apparently decided it was easier to let others do the hard work and then kill them.

Some were in it for money. Others for the wonton joy of destruction, from the sound of it. The casino echoed with crashes, bangs, random pops of gunfire, and drunken laughter. More than one lost soul wandering through the abandoned casino carried a bottle; they’d probably raided the bar first thing.

Jamal’s wasn’t the only body. Others had been beaten, or shot, or stabbed, or pulled apart during the chaos of the jokers’ escape. Some of the dead were the joker gladiators themselves, probably cut down during the attempt to escape. One guy lay beside the overturned buffet trays. He had to be well over seven feet tall; his skin looked like armor. It was the guy who’d killed Jamal, no mistaking him, but the bloody hole in the side of his head made it look like he’d tried to clean the wax from his ears with an auger bit. He’d been full of murderous intent, and almost gleeful about it, when he pulverized Jamal’s head. The flickering lights glinted from a sheen of oil on his horns.