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“Okay…”

“Now, I think, if loving you makes me crazy, I don’t want to be sane?—”

It takes me a moment to realize what he’s just said. “Loving?”

He looks at me for a moment. The canyon moving behind him. “You heard me.”

From the backseat, Meatball whines in his carrier as if to say,Say it back, Evie. You know you want to.

“That’s… too much.”

Another whine from Meatball:liar.

“I can’t process that right now.”

Dom’s expression gets dark as he nods. “I shouldn’t have said it.”

“Did you mean it?” I ask.

“I think sanity is overrated,” he grunts. “We’ve just got to pick our own flavor of crazy.”

I touch his hand. “We’ll talk about this when this is over.”

Which will, hopefully, be soon.

“What’s the next step?” I say.

“Father wants to meet us in a diner before he gives us the go-ahead.”

“I can’t believe I’m meeting your parent already.”

Dom winks at me, but I can tell he’s still a little hurt. “Moving fast is our flavor of crazy, Keepsake.”

CHAPTER 23

DOM

The diner sits at the edge of the city, surrounded by black sedans, men in suits standing outside the vehicles with earpieces attached to their ears and guns on their hips, clearly ready to fight if Father commanded it. As I stop, Evie lets out a shudder, her arms wrapped across her middle.

I look at her for a moment, thinking about what I said: about crazy and love and not wanting to be sane. She didn’t say she didn’t feel the same. Instead, she made the mature decision to talk about it once this is over.

Can I blame her?

I push those concerns down so I can focus on the matter at hand.

“The diner looks empty,” Evie mutters.

“He won’t want anybody overhearing this conversation.”

“Why?” she asks.

“I haven’t seen him for years. He might get angry or emotional, so he won’t want his men seeing that.”

She gasps. “Years?”

“Every time I saw him before, he tried to get me to join the Family again. It became easier to just avoid him at a certain point. I had no desire to deal with his guilt tripping.”

“But you’ll do it for me.”