I didn’t believe in coincidences. I never had, and all the close calls, deadly schemes, and tangled webs I’d navigated through ever since I’d killed Mab Monroe had made me more suspicious and paranoid than ever before. So I couldn’t help but wonder if the woman at the Pork Pit could somehow be connected to Benson and his drugs. But I didn’t see how. The auburn-haired woman had magic, and Burn was just a pill, just a chemical compound. Maybe they had nothing to do with each other. Maybe the woman had just come into the restaurant for a good meal. Maybe she meant me no harm. Maybe . . .

I rubbed my throbbing temples. Maybes always made for one hell of a headache.

“Anyway,” Bria said, sliding the plastic bag with the pill into her pocket. “I’ll call the lab and see if anyone is working tonight. Maybe it’s not too late to get this one analyzed.”

She pulled her phone out of her jeans pocket, hit a button, and held the device up to her ear. “Hey, it’s Coolidge. I need to talk to whoever’s left in the lab . . .”

She started pacing back and forth, her boots crack-crack-cracking against the concrete again. The longer Bria talked, the higher and faster her voice got, and she kept throwing one hand up into the air, punctuating all of her sentences, even though the person on the other end of the phone couldn’t even see her.

“What is up with Bria?” I asked Xavier. “She’s usually not this . . .”

“Forceful? Gung-ho? Eager to nail a bad guy’s ass to the wall?” he said.

“I was going to say cold, rude, and dismissive. But yeah. All that too. I mean, she’s always happy to throw drug dealers and other criminals in jail, but this seems . . .”

“Personal,” Xavier finished.

“Yeah.”

He looked at Bria, but she was still talking on her phone. Xavier nodded his head at me, and we stepped a few feet away from her. Catalina continued her silent vigil by Troy’s body.

“Look, Bria asked me not to say anything,” he began. “But with what happened tonight, I figure that you deserve a heads-up.”

“About what?” I asked.

He glanced over to make sure that Bria wasn’t listening to us before turning back to me. “Bria and I have been working on taking down all the dealers who sell Burn for a couple of months now, ever since it started showing up in Ashland over the summer. It makes people crazier than anything else I’ve ever seen, so crazy that they’ll claw their own skin off because they think it’s on fire or melting or something like that.”

“Okay . . .”

“At first, it was just a routine assignment, you know?”

“Until . . .”

Xavier drew in a breath. “Until one of Bria’s informants got caught up in the middle of it. Max Young, he was one of her snitches, eighteen years old, even younger than that dead kid over there. Typical story. Never knew his dad, mom died when he was ten, bounced around from foster home to foster home until he aged out of the system at eighteen. One of those guys who’s always on the fringes, you know? Not really in a gang but staying on the edges in order to have the protection they offer in Southtown. Doing odd jobs for the real gang members to scrape together enough money for food and a lousy apartment every month. A nice kid, a likable guy, doing the best he could to survive.”

“So how did he meet Bria?”

Xavier shrugged. “He was about to get the shit beat out of him by a couple of guys outside a Southtown bar. We were on patrol, and Bria jumped in and saved Max from them.”

I knew my sister, so I could guess what had happened next. “And she took him under her wing.”

“Yep,” Xavier said. “Gave him some money, got him into a better, cleaner apartment building, even tried to get him to think about going back to school. In return, Max would feed Bria info about dealers, pimps who liked to beat the folks who work for them, gangbangers who were going to get a little trigger-happy with their rivals. Things like that.”

My gaze cut to Catalina, who was still holding Troy’s hand. She’d tried so hard to get away from Troy and the memories she had of growing up in Southtown, but here she was, another witness to the violence all the same.

“That sounds like low-level stuff,” I asked. “So what happened to Max?”

Xavier glanced at Bria again. “Max calls Bria last week, all excited and bursting with pride. Says that he finally has some high-level intel for her—info that will blow her Burn case wide open. Says that Benson is the one distributing it. We knew that, of course, but we couldn’t prove it, because—”

“No one talks in Southtown,” I murmured, finishing his sentence, which was a common saying around Ashland.

“Exactly.” Xavier nodded. “But Max says he can prove that it’s Benson who’s running the drug. Says he heard about a big shipment of Burn coming in from a dealer he knows. A kid selling at the community college, flashing a lot of cash and bragging about how much more he was going to make when the drugs came in.”

My eyes narrowed. “That sounds like our dead friend there.”

And if it was true, then Troy Mannis had been a marked man before I’d ever met him. Benson hadn’t held on to his empire this long by letting his dealers blab about drugs coming into town. Most of the cops might take bribes and look the other way, but there were a few honest ones like Bria who could cause trouble for the vamp, especially if they got a tip that panned out. At the very least, the drugs could have been seized by the cops or jacked by a rival crew, and Benson would have been out hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more.

I thought about what Benson had said to Troy about paying for his actions, all his actions. He must have been talking about Troy’s loose lips. Well, he’d certainly silenced them tonight.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought too,” Xavier said. “So anyway, Max sets up a meet with Bria. She goes to the location. Max is already there—dead. But that wasn’t the worst part.”

“And what would the worst part be?”

“The way Benson killed him.” Xavier jerked his head at Troy. “It was just like that.”

We both fell silent. I glanced at Bria, who was still talking on the phone. The death of any informant would be hard, but losing a kid like that—a kid she’d been trying to help—that would cut her deep.

“Max’s death was also a message,” Xavier said in a much softer voice. “To Bria.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because Benson stuffed a dead rat into the kid’s mouth—and inked Bria’s rune on Max’s forehead.”

I thought of all the pens I’d seen in Benson’s shirt pocket. My gaze shot over to Bria and the silverstone pendant glimmering around her neck. A primrose. The symbol for beauty. Her personal rune.

“Has Benson made any threats against Bria?” My hands curled into fists at the thought.

Xavier shook his head. “No, nothing like that. But no one’s giving her information anymore either. None of her snitches will return her calls about anything, even if it’s not related to Benson. Nobody wants to end up like Max. So Bria’s been on a tear to take down anyone and everyone associated with Benson and Burn.”

“Why didn’t she tell me?”

“She tried to talk to you about Benson once, when you were having that girls’ day at Jo-Jo’s salon. But she didn’t get the chance—”

“Because that’s the day Sophia was kidnapped,” I finished. “But why didn’t she try again? Especially after Max was murdered?”

Xavier gave me a pointed look. “And what would you have done if she had?”

I opened my mouth, ready to tell him that I would have supported my sister and let Bria handle things the best way she saw fit, but that would have been a lie.

I sighed. “I would have paid Benson a quiet visit on the sly. Or at the very least, some of his men, enough of them to send him a message not to mess with my sister.”

“And we have bingo,” Xavier said. “I know you, Gin. If there is the slightest risk to anyone you care about, then you will eliminate that risk. And we all know how you do that.”

“By carving people up like Christmas hams,” I finished.

“Exactly.”

I shrugged. “Bria’s hands are dirty enough just being related to me. Just acknowledging that I exist and that we have a relationship, that she cares about me. She doesn’t need to sink down any deeper in the muck with me.”

“And you need to realize that Bria is her own person, especially when it comes to being a cop,” Xavier replied. “She likes to do things herself, in her own way and time. Just like you do. She really liked Max. We both did. She feels like Max’s death is on her, and she wants to be the one to bring down Benson. You should understand that better than anyone else.”

I scuffed my boot over a skid mark on the concrete. “Oh, I understand it, but that doesn’t mean I like it.”

•

After Bria finished her conversation, she slid her phone into her pocket and came back over to Xavier and me. “Cassie is in the lab. It took some convincing, but she agreed to stay and analyze the pill tonight.”

Bria’s convincing had sounded more like badgering, but I decided not to mention that. Xavier nodded, and my sister turned her gaze to me.

“And I’m going to need you to come downtown and make a statement about what you saw. About Benson killing that dealer.”

My eyebrows zoomed up into my forehead. “You want me to what?”

“Make a formal statement,” Bria replied, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “To be a witness and help me build my case against Benson.”

My mouth dropped open. Between it and my eyebrows, no doubt I looked like some cartoon character whose face was stretched out to comical proportions. The next thing you knew, my eyes would pop out of my head and roll away in surprise. “You can’t be serious.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m an assassin, Bria,” I snapped. “I kill people. The only testifying I do is with my knives.”

She waved her hand, as though my dark occupation and all the blood on my hands were of no concern. “We can work around that.”

I stared at Bria. Normally, she tried to keep our professional lives, so to speak, as separate as possible, although I knew that she would always have my back if I ever really needed her. But right now, she seemed perfectly willing to shine the uncomfortably bright spotlight of law and order squarely on me. It wasn’t like her at all.

Xavier shrugged his broad, muscled shoulders at me, as if to say I told you so. Max’s death must have hit Bria harder than even she realized, if she was willing to shove me in front of everyone just to get Benson. Surprise sparked in my chest, along with a little hurt that she wanted to use me this way. But she was hurting too, so I tried to reason with her.

“Really?” I asked. “And how are you going to work around the fact that I’ve killed just as many people as Benson has? Maybe more?”

Bria’s hands dropped to her hips, and she tapped her fingers against her gold detective’s badge. “I’ll think of something.”

“And what do you think will happen if you arrest Benson and your case actually goes to court?” I snapped. “Any halfway-decent lawyer has heard more than enough rumors and innuendos to totally discredit me. Assassins don’t exactly make the best witnesses. I bet Jonah McAllister would pay Benson to be his attorney just for the pleasure of cross-examining me.”

McAllister had been Mab’s lawyer before I’d killed her, and he’d tried to have me murdered multiple times since her death. Back in the summer, I’d finally taken a bit of revenge on McAllister, putting him on the hot seat with the underworld bosses by revealing his involvement in a plot to rob them at the Briartop art museum. Ever since then, he had been staying out of sight and stewing in his Northtown mansion, but I had no doubt that he’d spent many long hours trying to figure out how to turn things back around on me. And something like this would be a golden opportunity.

Bria’s hand slid from her badge over to her gun, her fingers instinctively curling around the weapon. “You don’t understand, Gin. I have to get Benson. I have to. And you’re my best shot at that.”

For the first time, I noticed how tired my sister looked, the purple smudges under her eyes, the rigid set of her slender shoulders, the harsh slant of her mouth, as though she were disgusted with herself. Her blue eyes locked with mine, and I could see the pain shimmering in her gaze—along with the guilt.

“Look, if you want Benson taken out, just say the word, and I’ll start working on it,” I said, trying to find some way to help her and still keep what was left of my anonymity intact.

I knew that Bria wanted to do this herself, in her own way, within the black-and-white confines of the law, but Xavier was right. I’d do anything to protect the people I loved, and if I could help Bria by killing Benson, then I was more than happy to do it for her.

Especially since the vamp might decide to turn his attention to my sister if she kept pursuing him.

I drew in a breath. “It won’t be easy, and it may take me a few weeks, but I’ll figure out a way to get to him—”

“No.” She shook her head, her blond hair snapping around her shoulders before settling back down into place. “No. I’m not going to ask you to do that. I’m not going to stoop to Benson’s level.”

“We’re talking about my level right now.” My voice was as cold as hers was hot. “And I can tell exactly what you think of that.”