“I didn’t. I swear. But Edwin was passed out in his bedroom all night, and no one can account for me.”

“I can account for you.” Jack’s voice was steady. Calm. “I’m happy to be your alibi, Belle, because I was with you all night. It’s not like you’re asking me to lie.”

Belle counted to five. Ten. Seventeen. “Why are you helping me? You should hate me, after what I—”

“I do hate you sometimes,” Jack admitted. “But I love you too. That’s how it is with family.”

Belle smiled. She was still crying, but she wasn’t alone, and it made all the difference. Jack was her family. Raven, too, before he went away. For years the three of them had taken care of one another because the world had betrayed them. Their parents had betrayed them.

Together they’d been unstoppable.

“Listen, you don’t know how much this means to me,” Belle began as the officer stepped toward her. He wanted her to hang up the phone. But she needed to say this before she ended the call. “I thought I understood what happened three years ago, but I never asked you—”

“Don’t say anything,” Jack interrupted, her voice still calm. “I’m coming down to the station and I’m getting you out of there. Okay? By tomorrow this will all be over. Try to stay positive.”

“How can I stay positive?”

“Because,” Jack said, and a chill unfurled at the base of Belle’s spine, “even though you’re innocent, you got what you wanted. Raven can come home.”

2 Jack of Many Trades

Poppy Jacqueline McClain was known, to her closest friends and greatest enemies, as “Jack.” It was a fitting name. She was a jack-of-many-trades, a talented sword fighter, and a climber of tall trees. She knew how to bring a fully grown man to his knees. Still, of all her skills and talents, Jack had never claimed one particular ability:

Telling the truth.

She sat at the police station, stuffed into a plastic chair, waiting for Detective Frank Medina to return from the field. She’d been there since eight in the morning. When he finally strode through the doors, well after noon, he took one look at her and sighed. “Miss McClain.”

“Detective,” she replied drily, wrapping her arms around herself. “Call me Jack. Please.”

He pulled back his chair, studying her for a minute. He wasn’t wearing his mirrored glasses. That would’ve been overkill in the brightly lit station with the overhead light flickering. Unfortunately, without the glasses, there was nothing to protect her from his shrewd brown eyes.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” he said, sliding into his seat. He was wearing a blue blazer and jeans, but she could see his gun poking out beneath the blazer’s hem. “Where were you between the hours of eleven p.m. Saturday night and one a.m. this morning?”