Yet now . . . now she looked like she’d kill the first person who said anything to her. Man, woman, or child. Like she was just waiting for that one thing to set her off.

When she was close enough so that he didn’t need to yell, Vic asked, “Livy? What happened?”

“Later,” she said, walking right by him and to the van. She grabbed the big backpack she brought everywhere.

“Livy?”

“Later.”

Then she and her backpack were gone, and Vic had absolutely no idea what the hell had just happened.

“What’s going on?” Shen asked from the van.

He looked at the panda and threw his hands up. “I have no idea.”

Chuntao Yang, who’d renamed herself Joan when her family first moved to America, woke up early. Her sisters and an aunt needed to catch a flight to Belgium in the afternoon. They had to prep for a job in Italy. It was always risky when they worked that close to the Vatican, but the payoff would be outstanding.

Still, they had to plan carefully no matter what country they were working in. Joan had no desire to go to prison. Her kind, honey badgers, filled prisons all over the world, which meant she’d end up spending most of her time fighting. So she’d rather stay out of prison and enjoy her life.

Joan put on her favorite red dress—she looked wonderful in red—matching Jimmy Choo red heels, just enough gold jewelry to highlight her attributes, and her red cashmere coat.

Satisfied with what she saw in the mirror—and when wasn’t she satisfied?—Joan headed down the stairs toward the kitchen, where her sisters and aunt were making breakfast and preparing for their afternoon trip.

Once she got to the bottom step, Joan placed her travel cases on the floor and dropped her coat over the banister. Fluffing her hair, she walked down the hallway, her mind turning, planning for this next job.

Joan loved her work. Loved how it took her out of her problems. Everything in her life narrowed into planning and executing The Job. So much so that when The Job was complete, her problems had usually gone with it. Or at least the worst was over.

And the way things had been going lately . . . well, Joan was really looking forward to this particular job. More than she could say.

As she neared the kitchen, Joan could hear her sisters and aunt chatting in English and Mandarin. For years, Joan refused to speak her native language because she wanted to be able to blend in as much as any Asian woman could blend in America. It had worked to some degree. She could speak English, French, Russian, German, Italian, and Spanish flawlessly, her accent in all those languages near perfect. But when she got angry enough, the Mandarin came out of her with or without her consent. Of course, only her family and her ex-husband ever seemed to get her that angry. No one else was worth the trouble.

Joan wasabout to step into the kitchen when she stopped, her daughter’s scent surprising her.

Slowly, Joan turned, and yes, her daughter stood behind her, just a few feet away. Unsure what she was doing at their safe house in Chicago, Joan was about to ask. But Olivia cut her off.

“Who did we bury, Ma?” she asked.

Joan blinked. “What?”

“Who did we bury in Dad’s grave?”

Without looking behind her, Joan knew from the sudden silence that her sisters and aunt were listening to every word. Not that she blamed them.

“Who did we bury?” Joan asked. “Well . . . your father, of course.”

Livy shook her head. And Joan now realized that her daughter was angry. Not just angry . . . livid. And because her daughter was a lot like Joan herself, that was a very rare sight.

“It can’t be Dad.”

“It can’t?” Joan asked, trying to sound bored. “Why not?”

“Because I just saw him.”

Joan felt her heart pound in her chest while she fought her anger at him for not contacting her in all this time. “He’s alive?”

Her daughter stared at her for a moment. A long moment that told Joan something was very wrong.

“Livy?”

“No. He’s not alive. He was stuffed and placed next to some bitch’s fireplace for all her friends to gawk at while eating hors d’oeuvres and drinking champagne.”

Livy’s words tore through Joan, her heart no longer pounding from excitement but despair and anger.

“So it can’t be Dad in that grave. Now I’ll ask you again, and then I’m going to start flipping the fuck out . . . who did we bury in that Washington graveyard?”

As soon as Livy cursed, she knew she’d hear it from her aunts and great-aunt. They might be honey badgers but the whole respecting-the-elders thing was big among her brethren. So as soon as that “fuck” left her mouth, her aunts were on her, yelling at her in Mandarin and shaking fingers at her while her great-aunt Li-Li helped her mother into the kitchen to sit at the large table and held her hand.

Livy, in no mood for any of this, pushed past her finger-wagging, yelling aunts and stalked into the kitchen after her mother.

“Answer me.”

Livy’s aunts followed, but before they could get in the middle of this, she spun on them, bared her fangs, and hissed a warning.

“Stop it,” Joan said. “All of you.”

“I’ll get you some tea,” Li-Li said before going to the stove, briefly stopping to give Livy a hard “Li-Li glare,” as it was called among the Yangs. Then she scratched the big, brutal scar on her old neck and continued on to make the tea.