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“Seventy-two more hours of rain,” the radio crackles. He sounds like he’s inhaling from a cigarette or a blunt. “Grab a boat and some critters, because Forsyth is going biblical. If it doesn’t wash away our sins, they’ll probably bob to the surface and start floating down the Avenue like discarded Scratch baggies. If that worries you, then you’re a Royal. If it doesn’t, then congratulations. You’re nothing. Can you think of anything better to be?”

Through the fog of the windshield, I see Nick Bruin and Remy Maddox just standing out beside their car, not even caring about how soaked they’re getting. Their King, Sy Perilini, is smarter, waiting in his own SUV.

I twist to look at my brothers in the back seat. As I fully expected last night, Wicker looks miserable, his pallor a touch green. He’s wearing a pair of designer shades, as if the sun would dare peek through the thick, gloomy clouds. “Go check the supply,” I tell them.

Without a word, Pace raises his hood, wrenching his door open. He’s been quiet since last night—or, come to think of it, since yesterday morning.

He doesn’t even give Verity any parting words.

Wicker groans, wrapping his hand around a white umbrella. “I’m too hungover for this shit,” he grumbles, opening his own door. I could tell him it’s his own fault, but it’d be pointless.

When their doors shut, Wicker battling with the umbrella outside the windows, I turn to her, noting the dark circles under her eyes. She’s not the only one fighting through the exhaustion of a restless night. I made her ride shotgun this morning, just so I could steal glances at her belly.

A boy.

I hadn’t really given much thought to it one way or another, only now that I know, it feels absolute, as if it could have never been any other way.

Now, I cut the engine, nothing but the low volume of the DJ’s rant and the sound of the rain pelting the roof to disturb us. “That’s for you,” I say, nodding to the cup of coffee in the center console.

Her eager green eyes jump to it. She was in the car when I made the order and picked it up, but she’s waited, strangely obedient about the process of my giving it to her. “Thank you,” she whispers, reaching to take it. For a long moment, she just clutches it close, letting it warm her, and there’s a curl to her lips that I’m not used to seeing.

Odd how she latches on to such a small pleasure.

“Why did you do it?” I don’t want to ask the question. It’s not how I work. I’m a studier; the kind of person who’d rather solve a mystery than ask for the answer. But I find myself suddenly needing to know. I jerk my chin toward Wicker, who’s trying very hard to saunter up to the boundary line, but mostly just looks like he wants to double over and barf. “Why did you tell them his secret? You clearly don’t like him, and he probably treated you like shit during the deposits, but you don’t want to see him dead.”

“Wicker?” she asks, expression souring as she watches him lope up to Bruin. “What if I do?”

My reply is matter-of-fact. “You don’t.” This is what’s been bugging me. Hatred is easy. Forsyth is drowning in it, body after body, and it doesn’t need a calculation. Survival is easier; animals just wanting to come out on top to see another day. But Verity told the Duchess about Wicker being a Kayes, and I need to know.

I need to know which it is.

“Was it revenge?” I press. She had a million ways of getting back at us over her weeks in the palace that wouldn’t have left a trace. Why that one? I gesture out the window. “You sleep with him. You let him hold you. You might hate him, and you don’t let him fuck you, but you don’t want to see him killed over what you did.”

She scoffs. “How do you know?”

It’s been bothering me, the fact that I do. It was her wide, glistening eyes as she took him in that day he got beat down on the ice. She was careful, so fucking gentle as she straddled him, drawing his deposit out of him like a thorn, all because she didn’t want to be the cause of someone’s pain.

Not even his.

Looking at the Dukes, Maddox hauling a crate from the vehicle, I wonder, “Or was it just allegiance? You’re that loyal to them?” It doesn’t really hold up, either. Someone that loyal would have fought tooth and nail during negotiations, and I’ve seen the footage of it. She basically let her mother negotiate on her behalf. She wanted to go home, but she wasn’t willing to go to war over it.

“That’s between me and him.” She glances at me, eyes hardening. “Why does it matter? What’s done is done.”

That’s the crux of it. Truthfully, any one of those reasons would be valid and sensible. “Because I need to know what the mother of our son is capable of.” That’s the cause of my sleeplessness: that this wild, heavy, aching thing in my chest has attached itself to the baby she’s carrying, and I don’t know if she’ll love it for being hers, or hate it for being ours.

Her gaze snaps to me, flashing in outrage, and in that second, I have my answer. “Why didyoudo the cleansing?” she asks, the fire in her eyes hot enough to boil the flooded streets. “Because I know just what the fathers of my son are capable of, and it’s far worse than locker room gossip.”

This is easy. “Because it’s not just between you and him. That’s not how we work.” When she looks away, I reach out to touch the tense line of her jaw, drawing her gaze back to mine. “You understand that now, right?”

Her green eyes blaze into mine, but it’s not just anger I see. “I understand that every time you fuck me in the dark, all I can see is the way you held me down and hurt me.”

I jerk my hand away from her like she’s lava.

“What I did…” She gives a grim chuckle, glancing out at the trade-off presently happening. “This may come as a shock to someone like you, but I didn’t actually do it to hurt Wicker. I didn’t do it to hurt any of you.” Reaching down, she grabs her bag, voice thick with unshed tears. “That’s all you need to know about the mother of your son. That she’s human and has a soul, which is more than she can say for his fathers.”

Gripping the wheel, I say, “That’s not fair.”

She explodes, “Nothing about this is fair, Lex!”