Horns. Oh, shit. She remembered this guy. It seemed like a million years ago. He’d looked so badass, but she could have sworn he sounded like a little kid. He’d actually cried in the van, whimpering something about his ailing mother, pleading with them not to take him away and leave her alone … But they did, and then he became a murderer, and then he was murdered. She wondered if he really did have an ill mother, and whether—

NO. It’s not my fault. None of this is my fault. They forced me to do this, Baba Yaga and Berman. This blood is on their hands. Not mine. I’m as much a victim as the gladiators were.

Mollie might have been a criminal, but she knew right from wrong. And the forced death matches, well, that was some sick twisted shit. She’d witnessed part of one match and from then on had made a point of never seeing another.

She shook her head, hard, as though she could shake away an unpleasant memory. But it clung to her like a cobweb. Sometimes it felt like a miracle she could move at all, dragging along so many sticky memories as she did.

Anyway. If she hadn’t skedaddled when she had, the big guy would have done in her and Franny, too. She’d probably be dead right now if she hadn’t picked the lock on the cuffs that baby-faced Boy Scout had used to chain himself to her. She’d done him a favor, too. If he’d thought about it for half a second he’d have to realize she’d made it a lot easier for him to defend himself. And since she hadn’t found his body next to Jamal’s, he probably made it out of the casino. So, really, Franny was lucky Mollie got away from him when she did. She hoped he saw it her way.

“Michael fucking Berman. Franny fucking Black,” she muttered to herself while crawling under a roulette table to wrench out the cash box. “Noel fucking Matthews. Baba fucking Yaga.” So preoccupied was she, muttering the names of those who’d made her life such a piss parade, that she didn’t hear the crunch of footsteps on broken glass. But then she caught a whiff of the medicinal stink of cough medicine. She scurried from under the table on all fours, to find an oily joker standing over her. She banged her head trying to scramble to her feet.

“SHIT!” she yelled, rubbing her scalp. “You scared the piss out of me.”