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I threw a chair.

“RAVEN!” Ace’s voice.

I rushed the attacker, too slow.

A kick swept my legs?—

I hit the ground hard.

I wasn’t fighting for my life.

I was fighting for someone else’s.

“Are you hurt?” Ace knelt beside me, water dripping from his hair onto my arm.

“Are you naked?” I blinked up at him. “And afraid?”

“You hit your head.”

“You’re real.”

“You’re delirious.”

I glanced down at his nakedness getting more of a clear view. “Huh, one does wonder

“What? One wonders what?”

God, my head was spinning. “Just wondering how you’d get the peanut butter off that without a serious tongue cramp.”

I laughed at my own joke and promptly faded into the darkness.

11

ACE

Touch the dial and die. Volume is for losers.

Ican hear the TV from my room downstairs; it’s loud enough to wake the neighbors, and I need to be listening for more intruders. I’m still confused how they got by my security unless they knew how to get in or had an inside person.

More mysteries.

Couldn’t wait.

I wondered how much caffeine I’d need in order to put up with this for the foreseeable future. People would always be out to hunt the five families—but this felt different, this felt like a threat from the inside, and why her of all people?

They could have attempted to attack anyone. Dante might be a powerful boss, but going after him meant going after the entire Alfero and Abandonato family, not to mention the rest.

We knew we had a few plants within the families—but we allowed it so that those who thought they were smarter only got the intel they thought they needed. Then we used that same information against them. It worked for us, and it was always smarter to keep some of the more intense enemies closer.

I didn’t want to complain and ask how long I would be on this assignment, but I guessed it didn’t really matter whether I died protecting her or died protecting the families themselves. It was really my only future now, the only thing I truly focused on was doing my job and doing it well.

Putting hope or stock in other things only set people up for failure, and I wasn’t sure my soul could handle more of that.

At least not after what I had gone through.

I put on a pair of gray sweats and took the stairs two at a time. There were three stairs left, I took two more and stepped over the last.

I really did hate odd numbers.