He met her gaze, laughing self-consciously. “Sorry. That was way more than you wanted to know, right?”

“No,” she said softly. She moved a little closer to him. “I absolutely wanted to know all that.”

He smiled, covering their intertwined fingers with his other hand. “Thanks, Maisie.”

She wanted to know more, actually. Part of her wanted to say, No, keep going. Tell me everything about you because I think you’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met. She wasn’t sure when she’d become so deeply curious about him, but she was suddenly dying to know it all.

“Hey!” It was Beto’s voice, from across the room. “Maisie!”

She tensed. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know why Beto was here. With Declan.

“You’re being summoned,” Lennon said. She saw him take a quick glance at her lips, like he was thinking about kissing her, and she didn’t want to move.

“Yeah, but it’ll piss him off if I just ignore him for a while, and I can’t let that opportunity pass me by.”

He laughed, squeezing her hand.

“Maisie!”

“You want to come with me?” she asked.

“Yeah, okay.”

She was slow to get up, waiting until the last minute to drop his hand. She glanced at her watch as she stood. Eighteen hours to go.

“Mais—”

“Yeah, I’m coming, shut up!” she yelled, cutting him off. She strode across the room, Lennon falling into step beside her.

Beto sat on the floor, handcuffed, five Vals surrounding him. His eyes were still red from the smoke, and blood dripped from a cut on his eyebrow.

“What the hell are you doing here, Beto?” she asked. “With Declan? The man just killed your father.”

“He doesn’t know I know that,” he muttered to the floor. “And it was all I could think to do. If I just sat back and let him come up here and take those shipments, the Lopez family is done. We’ll lose control of the south. The Reapers were already starting to make moves before I left.”

“The Lopez family is going to be done anyway, because you’re all going to be dead after you start a war with the north. What’s he doing with those explosives?”

He looked up at her. “I swear I didn’t know that he was after those. He said that we had to grab you before you did something stupid and—”

“Before I did something stupid?” She laughed. “I’m pretty sure that y’all have the market cornered on stupid.”

“He knows about Pierce winning the election and he said that we needed to keep him here. And he’s right, honestly. With the son of the president in here, they’re going to make damn sure that nothing happens to the Q.”

She had no response to that, because he was right. Lennon had promised to advocate for them on the outside, but it was certainly true that there were benefits to keeping him in.

“Keeping him here against his will is going to cause a whole host of other problems,” she said, avoiding Lennon’s gaze.