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I honestly just wanted to go home, give Mom this half remedy, and deal with her utter disappointment at what I did.

I had three very drunk boyfriends to deal with.

And I couldn’t even get that angry with them when I saw how terrified they were.

If I hadn’t been so scared about losing Mom, I might have been more concerned about my own safety.

Because it finally hit me—the reason they were so terrified. It wasn’t against the law to pretend to be a different gender, even outside of Guttertown. It was looked down on outside Guttertown. They’d try to beat it out of you, but there was no law against it.

But no one had ever tried to get out of the Baron’s blackmail by doing that and the Barons overstepped the king all the time.

They could make it a law by taking my head for the deception.

They liked to pretend they were the smartest men in the realm and they didn’t take kindly to people making them look like fools.

Even though technically forcing me out of a business I owned and was good at, to work at the brothel while giving them most of my earnings made them look much worse.

Fuck.

Neco was being weird, and he had been watching everything. And I knew that look on his stupid face. There was no reason for them to shut down the tavern and get that drunk over me joining the army.

We weren’t at war. The shifters didn’t seem to want another one. At most, I’d be cracking heads when the Barons wanted to bully someone or collect their stupid taxes. I got why they were scared, but if Neco hadn’t been lurking, he never would have seen it.

“Come on. You’re sleeping at my place tonight, so I can sober you up. You owe me, so you get to be my buffer when Mom tries to murder me for going to my father.”

Neco was staring, and he cocked an eyebrow at me.

Fuck me. He was going to start digging and I couldn’t avoid him like I usually did.

I needed his help to catch the Ghoul. He’d helped by dragging me with him to Trevils so I could find out about the crime scenes, but if I really wanted to understand it, I needed to talk to another killer.

And I hated Neco Argent, but I also missed him. He hated me, too, and there wasn’t much I could do about that.