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“What would you have done if you’d walked in and I had a girl tied up?” Beau asked.
“This isn’t funny,” she said, shoving at his shoulder.
He held up his hands. “You’re right, sorry. Just ... what was the plan, Shay? Asking me to stop torturing my victims and tattooing them and leaving them in random fields all around the city?”
“I didn’t have a plan,” Shay admitted, and Beau rolled his eyes at the obvious statement. “I’m trying to help you, dumbass.”
“I know.” Beau sighed. “That’s what I hate about this.”
Before Shay could say anything else, the front door opened.
She met Beau’s widening eyes, panic slipping into her own veins at his expression.
“Go,” he mouthed.
But before she could get her feet to move, a silhouette emerged from the hallway, taking the shape of a person.
The man stepped into the room, and Shay inhaled sharply as she recognized the craggy cowboy face of Xander Pierce.
They all ended up at the FBI field office, the darkened house ruled too much of a liability to stay at with all three of them there.
“Okay, tell me what’s going on,” Shay demanded once Pierce had shepherded them into his office. “Isn’t there a crime scene you should be supervising?”
“Yeah, I had to step away,” Pierce said, tapping at his phone as if there were a flood of updates. “This was important, too.” He checked his watch even though he’d probably seen the time on his phone. “I can’t be gone much longer.”
“So, did I interrupt a lovers’ rendezvous?” Shay asked, so baffled at what this could be that she wouldn’t be surprised if that hit the mark.
Beau flushed, and Pierce raised his brows at him before answering, “No.”
He didn’t sound offended, but there was a definite finality in his voice. So, they weren’t covering up a tryst.
The blood. It had something to do with this—she was all of a sudden very sure of that.
“Look, when you started dating Callum, Pierce became interested in our family,” Beau said.
Pierce had the good grace to look somewhat guilty, but his chin also tipped up in defiance. “I’m not just going to let him—”
“Slum it with a bartender?” Shay asked dryly, their conversation at the Christmas party all of a sudden making so much more sense. He hadn’t been hitting on her; he’d been trying to drive a wedge between them. “Can’t have that.”
“No,” Pierce said again, the guilt gone. “We had just stumbled onto a serial killer who Kilkenny profiled as being someone who would want to find an in on the investigation. Then he met you and the family you came with.”
“People like us can’t be trusted, huh?” Shay said, snide and mean with it. She knew she hadn’t liked him.
“Shay, sheath the claws,” Beau murmured. “He wasn’t wrong.”
“The more I dug, the more I found out about Hillary Baker.”
“What? What does our mother have to do with this?” Shay asked, thrown for the first time. She had genuinely expected him to throw Max’s past in their face, had been bracing for it so that she didn’t accidentally reveal that Beau was the guilty party instead.
“She’s into some bad stuff now,” Beau filled in. “She keeps her head above the mess, but her boyfriend is shady, and we’re pretty sure Hillary’s hands aren’t as clean as she wants law enforcement to believe.”
Shay stared between the two of them. “Are you ... Is this a sting? For Hillary?”
The idea was so far from what she’d been imagining that it took her a moment to rearrange her world. Beau wasn’t the Alphabet Man, and for that matter, neither was Xander Pierce. She’d never really contemplated the latter, of course, but still, it was now a fact she knew.
“This has nothing to do with the serial killer?” she clarified.
Pierce’s eyes went a little wide at that. “No?”