“A GoFundMe, like we haven’t tried that,” he scoffs, rolling his eyes. “Last time I looked there were six of those things, and maybe we scrounged up enough money to pay for three months of treatment, and then what? On the fourth month her body rejects the lungs, and it’s a death worse than what she’s going through now.”

“There has to be something I can do.”

Sebastian shakes his head, gestures to the empty chairs on either side of me. “You can stop acting like you give a shit and get in the damn chair. Cam will be here any minute.”

The panicky feeling returns, a vibration in my bones, a hot itch just under my skin. “Sebastian, please. Please let me help you.”

I stare up at him, and it’s so obvious to me now, the violent loathing in his eyes. The ugly anger, a hatred that all afternoon I thought was meant for me, but it’s not really. It’s for Cam. And the second he gets here, the instant he barrels up those stairs and into this room, the bullets will start flying.

And Sebastian won’t be aiming for Cam.

He’ll aim at me. At Beatrix.

An eye for an eye. Our daughter for his.

Today—all of it—it’s about getting even.

C A M

6:54 p.m.

“Where’d your colleagues go?” I squint into the rearview mirror, hoping to pick out the two big bouncers in the car on my bumper, but the rain is really coming down now. There’s nothing but glare in the glass. “Is that them behind us? I can’t tell.”

Nick twists around on the passenger’s seat, checking the back window. “Not unless they suddenly turned eighty and white. They passed us ages ago.” He wriggles his cell from a pocket on his leather jacket. “Lemme see where they’re at.”

While he makes the call, I stare into the line of traffic snaking up Peachtree Dunwoody and my heartbeat goes berserk. Two lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic going well under the speed limit, with nothing on either side but bushes and ditches. I’m stuck, nowhere to go but forward.

Come on, come on...

Nick pulls his cell away from his ear. “Darius says they’re almost there. He also says we’ve got a problem. That video footage you’re watching? He’s watching it, too. Apparently, those nanny cams of yours are streaming on YouTube, maybe some other places, too.”

I think about what this means—that someone hacked into the video feed, that others might be watching as well—but my mind moves like sludge. I can’t do the math, can’t ferret out if this is a good thing or bad. What I know for sure is that I need to get to the house and fast.

“Darius wants to know our ETA.”