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The same surety they possessed after she asked for a hundred dollars and left me standing in that graveyard alone last year.

She’s an easy target, standing out in her white dress in a sea of people wearing red or black.

She’s filled out since the last time we crossed paths, her once gaunt frame ample enough to stretch the snug material draped over her to its limits.

My eyes take in the shape of her, the fluidity of her movements and the slight sway of her shorter hair around her shoulders.

What is she doing here?

Victor stands beside me dutifully, following my gaze until the woman disappears around a corner.

“Should we go upstairs?”

Distracted, I blink to refocus, turning back in the direction we were headed.

Without a word, I nod and stick close to Victor’s side as he does a preliminary sweep of the first floor before we take the back staircase up to the second floor.

It doesn’t take long to spot Weston. His grimy face is slick with sweat and his beady eyes won’t focus on anything for more than a frantic beat before he’s moving on to something else.

His suit is too small. Wrinkled as fuck. And the way he keeps checking his watch has me believing he knows coming here was a mistake.

He hasn’t been seen anywhere in months. Whenever I tried to pop up on him in the last six months, he had convenientlyjustleft the premises.

The house he’d grown up in would sit empty for weeks while my men camped out, trying to collect my debt.Which makes me even more skeptical about his sister being up for auction tonight.

A pit forms in my gut when the woman in the white dress—theonlywoman in white tonight—stops in front of him.

About twenty feet away from them, I can’t make out their conversation, but I can read the trepidation on her face. In the way her hands fist in front of her and the plaintive tilt of her head.

She’s scared.

No,terrified.

And he’s grinning at her, unfazed by her show of emotion.

The puzzle pieces click in place a second before he closes his hand around her wrist and pulls her to a room away from foot traffic.

“I can’t believe she’s a fucking Rose.”

It’s muttered under my breath, but Victor doesn’t miss a beat. “Something wrong, Mr. Samson?”

“I—no. Everything’s fine. I’m going to give him five minutes, then we’ll have a talk.”

That wasn’t the plan. I planned to find him and immediately shove him into a room with my Beretta jammed against his jugular, but fuck, I need a minute because there are too many things dancing around my skull to make sense of anything right now.

Probationary period.

Another sacrifice.

His sister’s virginity.

Fuck.

“My father was a pretentious man…if it wasn’t for his gambling addiction…”

Shit. She’s one of them.

And now I might have to kill her too.