“Gavin, it’s me you want. I’m responsible for your sister’s death. So let’s handle this as men, just us. Let everyone else go. All right?”

Thanks to Silas, Lily had the shot, but she couldn’t take it until someone said where Mickey was. What if she was hidden away? What if she shot him and they never found out where?

“How very caveman of you, Silas!” Gavin whooped, his frustration showing in his seams. Lily had thought of him as patient, once. “No, I don’t want to shoot you. That’s not part of the plan.”

“Are you sure? I would, if I were you.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Gavin said, using the muzzle of the gun to scratch the stubble on his neck. “I want you to hurt. But killing you isn’t good enough. I want you to suffer like I did. And if Ruth here had followed through on the one damn thing I’ve ever asked—”

“Just let them go, and then you can do whatever you want to me.”

But then there was a sound from out on the lake. A sound Lily wouldn’t trade for anything.

“Mom?”

As soon as she heard it, she pulled the trigger.

PEYOTE

“WHAT THE FUCK WAS that?” Cal asked when we landed back in the office, my wet shoes squeaking on the linoleum as I went straight to my desk to check my monitor.

Mickey was still alive.

“Seriously, Pey, what did I just watch? Did you just kiss that mark on the forehead? And I thought my thing was weird.”

I hit Refresh, lake water dripping from my hair into the cracks between the keys of my keyboard.

Still alive.

I shrugged off my button-down and wrung it out over the trash before putting the lockbox down on my desk.

“What do you want to do with this?” I asked, ignoring her look, which demanded an answer. “I have an idea, but it’s up to you.”

Cal touched the edges of the metal, ran her fingertip along the hinges.

“If we don’t give them the key, we lose the deal and get sent back Downstairs.”

“Not if my plan works.”

I expected a laugh, a glower; an eye roll at least. I expected questions I couldn’t answer, especially not in that moment, with Mickey and everything the Harrisons represented on such a precarious ledge. But instead, she just nodded. So I went on.

“We give it all to them, the films and the key. We give them the truth along with what they asked for, and let them make their own decision. Hopefully, they will decide to walk away, and the deal will be void because—if my plan works—we won’t be here.”

It was only then that I remembered my results were still in my pocket.