I’d still been hoping, somewhere deep inside, that Lena had been an accomplice, afraid or cowed or under Brady’s spell. Because I could see her standing at the doorway with a pitcher of margaritas, still feel the freedom when she hurled a glass in solidarity, still somehow credited her with lifting the depression I’d been under. And she wasn’t dead, but now I didn’t know if that was better or worse. Because she was absolutely a killer. She knew my maiden name, so I couldn’t let my parents go back to their house again. She knew I’d been fired from the Martina V. Umana. And she knew how badly Aimee had hurt me.

My phone vibrated with another incoming text. I scooped it up. This one was from Rahmia, with a link to a local news story.

I clicked on it, and a rushing sound filled my ears.

The story, titled “Army Veteran’s Struggles End in Tragedy,” was an in-depth profile of one of the victims, Marcus Fontenot, an older man in a military jacket. The pullout quote from one of the man’s daughters read, “We never stopped looking for him, trying to bring him home for good.”

I knew that man. In the photo, he was standing against a pale-blue background in a professional photographer’s studio. But I could still see him half in shadow, no medals on his distressed green jacket, a jacket that was too warm for the Houston humidity, even in the shade of the underpass.

And then I shuddered with a cold that radiated outward from my bones. I’d seen him with Lena. Not with Brady, just with Lena. She’d noticed his army jacket. I’d given him my tacos. His eyes had looked so much like my father’s.

He’d been slaughtered.

I read the words dismembered and decapitated and disposed, horror blurring the screen of my phone. This man, the man I’d seen with Lena, had been carved into pieces and discarded in the bayou. He was dead, worse than dead. Had I drawn Lena’s attention to him? Maybe I was the reason she’d plucked him from the street.

My phone vibrated again with another text from Rahmia: Be safe. She’s dangerous.

Shaking, my stomach roiling, I sat down on the edge of the bed. Lena was dangerous, I knew that; some part of me had always known that. Wasn’t that why I’d wanted her on my side? Wasn’t that the feeling she’d given me, that I was powerful, could be dangerous too? I’d been so scared—of Aimee, what she’d said, what people would think, what people might post. Now all that seemed like playground gossip.

And my friendship with Lena left me feeling like an accomplice.

Working on another surprise for you.