He’d formed this team when he took a job everyone in the city turned down. Even the Red Guard had bowed out. The Four Horsemen, the Guild’s best team, straightout called it suicide. Curran and I took the gig, Eduardo threw in his lot with us, and somehow the Guild coughed up nine people crazy enough to join us and good enough to live through it. We got the job done, the Guild’s gigs doubled overnight, and the ten of them got a certain reputation. They were the Guild’s best of the best and after that job, they would die for Curran.

Neither of us had a good feeling about the upcoming conversation with Roland. Curran would stay behind. First, it would make the negotiations easier. Things would get heated, and given that my father and my fiancé got into pissing matches over which way the wind was blowing, it would be better to handle this one by myself. And second, if something happened to me, Curran was the only one who could hold the city and possibly get me back out.

He would try. If things did go sour, he would sprout fangs and claws and march his team of hard cases brandishing savage weapons into Lawrenceville to try to pry me loose from my father’s grasp. I had to make sure it didn’t come to that, because it wouldn’t end well for everyone involved.

I leaned over to Curran and kissed him. His arms closed around me and he squeezed me to him for one bone-crunching second.

“I’m off.”

“I’ll be right here,” he said.

“Have fun with your A-team. Sharpen some knives. Clean some guns. Don’t kill anybody while I’m gone.”

“I can’t make any promises.”

I climbed into Cuddles’s saddle. The black and white mammoth donkey twitched her ears.

“I’ll tell dear old Dad you’re sorry you missed him.”

Behind Curran, Eduardo snorted.

Curran bared his teeth. “Not as sorry as he’ll be if I have to come and see him.”

“Hey, Daniels,” Ella called out. “Bring us back some cookies.”

“What makes you think there will be cookies?”

“When I go home to see my parents, there are always cookies.”

If Roland did have cookies, they’d probably make me spit fire. “I’ll see what I can do.”