“I hear an arrest is imminent,” Sera said. “At least Dom is no longer a suspect, despite the pictures showing he could be thest person who was seen with Elyse Bailey.”


    “They already know who the killer is?”


    A theory was that Grigori made a deal with the feds to protect him from the Russian bratva.


    “It doesn’t make sense. I’m sure either Grigori or Anton was the one who killed Elyse.” I touched my throat. Although my bet was Anton. It made me wonder if all or some of these Mistress Strangler killings were the work of the Russian bratva, or at least Grigori’s crew.


    “I’m smelling a lot of coverup.” Bianca read my mind. “ording to what Sandro learned, Grigori was running a sessful sex-trafficking operation and many of his clients are high-profile government officials—not only in the US, but world leaders. Add to that a mix of celebrities, sheiks, oligarchs, and kleptocrats.”


    I shuddered. “I think he was considering selling me.”


    “What?” Sera and Bianca eximed.


    “I know I’m too old for the taste of most of his clients, but Billy told me he’d been having a hard time looking for a feisty natural redhead for someone.” I was remembering now Grigori ranting to Anton that his client already made a deposit and that deposit money was gone. With me miscarrying and being out ofmission, he had no one to sell. “He either made a deal with the feds or another entity, but I was instructed never to return to Manhattan.”


    “But why?”


    “Because they couldn’t keep me out of New Jersey if I wanted to see Harriet.”


    “But why Manhattan in particr?”


    “If they’re making a move against the New York bratva, then they’ll likely be tried there.”


    “That is, if Grigori became a rat himself,” Bianca said. “Sandro doesn’t see that happening.”


    “Desperate people do desperate things.”


    “Do they want you to testify?”


    “I can only testify that Anton shot my brother and they hired me to clean up the mess. I didn’t see them kill Elyse.”


    “It makes no sense that Grigori let you go.”


    “He needed money. Someone took pity and bought me.”


    “Maybe he had a deal with someone who takes his rejects,” Sera said. She was staring at her phone and didn’t see me wince. I knew what she meant, but I guess that word was triggering for me right now.


    “Does she have an ent? Is she Italian or Russian?” she asked, looking up.


    “No. Very cultured American. Highly educated. I would even say she might even know differentnguages.”


    “Oooh, CIA,” Bianca suggested.


    I huffed a shortugh. “Maybe awyer. They might be building a bigger case. But I’m free to move after September nine.”


    “Why that day?”


    “No clue.”


    “You’re not in some kind of safe house or WITSEC? Are they even concerned if anything happened to you?” Bianca asked.


    “I never thought about it until I was here a couple of weeks.” I’d been in a dark ce. There was a time I didn’t shower for a week. One afternoon, a thunderstorm rolled in with a deluge and I had the urge to dance in the rain and I went with instinct. It helped me break through the cobwebs of my mind and forced me to soak in a warm bath.


    Taking a brush to my hair was still optional. I resisted the idea of chopping my hair off with the kitchen shears and instead drove my ass to town and had a stylist detangle it. That was the first glimmer of my old self when I saw myself in the mirror. A sh of defiance appeared in my eyes. My mother’s voice telling me not to depend on other people. Never let a man control the money, and have my own.


    Sera regarded me like a specimen under a microscope or a doctor who didn’t know how to tell me I had a few months to live. Or even days.


    “What?”


    “I wonder if you have a tracker on you?” Sera asked.


    Bianca pped a hand over her mouth before eximing, “Of course!” She started typing into her phone. “Sandro always carries a detector with him.” Sandro had been over at Dom’s for a couple of hours. He said Dom was drunk off his ass and Sandro had to make sure he didn’t choke on his vomit. It might have been meant to be funny, but it didn’t quitend that way to me. I was surprisingly apathetic. Maybe it was time to back off on the antidepressants and anxiety meds.


    Bianca surged from the couch. “I’ll be right back.”


    “I’ll get more chips,” Sera said. “Want another Coke?”


    The girls didn’t drink in solidarity with my alcohol restriction. I forgot how Coke, chips, and queso were so addictive. Bianca, of course, brought her favorite—blueberry soda.


    “No. I’ll stick to water. At this rate, I won’t be sleeping.”


    With as much caffeine as we consumed, it wasn’t surprising why we were wide awake at two a.m.


    Bianca bounced back through the door, holding a wand that looked like the metal detector ones you saw at airport checkpoints.


    She turned it on and tested it on herself, holding it against her right thigh. It beeped. “Cool, it works.” After she got kidnapped by one of Sandro’s hidden enemies, she’d finally given in to being tagged when she’d resisted the idea for a long time even with the De Lis.


    Sera held out her left arm. “Try mine.”


    The wand beeped somewhere along the middle of her forearm.


    Bianca stood in front of me. “Okay, stand up.”


    “I don’t really think they would bother. Maybe the van?” I raised both arms as Bianca enthusiastically waved the wand over me. “You’re enjoying this.”


    She giggled and did between my legs.


    “Dom said he already checked.” Sera was texting on her phone. “But could use another sweep.”


    “Excuse me?” I retorted, only mildly irritated. Typical Dom.


    Bianca was behind me when the device beeped.


    My blood ran cold, and I grew lightheaded. I wasn’t really expecting it.


    “It’s in your ass,” Bianca hissed.


    I whipped around, ring at her. “What?”


    “Don’t be mad at me.” She twisted me to face away from her again. Sera walked over to where Bianca was checking me out and the device alerted again.


    “It’s really in your ass.” Both girls tittered.


    “It’s not funny.” I spun a one-eighty to glower at them while poking on my poor behind for the device. I felt it when I pressed down. “Shit. It’s really there.” Whoever inserted the tracker in me made sure I had the lowest chance of feeling around for it.


    “I’m sorry.” Sera rolled her lips, fighting a smile, but failing. She was typing on her phone.


    “Don’t tell Dom.”


    “Toote.” Her eyes shot to mine. “The guys areing over.”


    Minutester, Dom barged into the house. “You have a tracker on you?” He stalked toward me, and if I hadn’t held an arm out in warning, he would have grabbed my shoulders.


    His arms fell to his sides, his face dejected and etched in frustration. “Sloane…”


    “I do, and I don’t know why you’re here, because I don’t need you.”


    Pain shed through his features, and a pinch of guilt squeezed my heart. I steeled my spine. I only had to remember the night he cruelly turned me away. How cold his eyes had been when, for the first time in my life, I begged a person who had the power to shatter my heart to help me.


    An awkward silence fell in the room. Dom and I were both panting. Him probably from exertion due to his mad dash from his beach house, and mine was probably more from my heart than my lungs.


    He reeked of whiskey. He had shadows under his bloodshot eyes. And his facial hair was unkempt. A far cry from the polished boss I’de to know.


    It was guilt. He was simply feeling guilt.


    “Dom, maybe you should go,” Bianca said.


    “The fuck I am!” he growled at her.


    “Watch how you talk to my wife.” Sandro inserted himself between me and Dom and effectively shielded Bianca, too.


    “If Sloane doesn’t want to see you, respect that,” Sera said.


    “We’re in a precarious truce with the Russians. I need to know who put the tracker in her,” Dom responded evenly.


    “The woman who paid me.”


    “What woman?” Dom yelled.


    “Everyone calm down.” Bianca raised both arms in a cating gesture. “We’re thinking Grigori turned fed informant, and the woman is his handler,” she said.


    “Highly unlikely,” Sandro answered. “If anything, we’re dealing with other organizations or dirty politicians or businessmen who have stakes in seeing Sloane disappear.”


    “Then why not kill me?”


    “Doesn’t make sense, you’re right. We’ll have more motive once they make the arrest.”


    “What do you want to do, Sloane?” Sandro asked me. “I can take it out for you.”


    “You’re not touching her,” Dom snarled.


    “That’s hardly your decision,” Sera shot back.


    “It’s in her upper right butt cheek.” Bianca’s cheeks med. “You’ll have to…uh, be…naked or wear a thong.”


    “I can wear my bathing suit.” I had no reservations about letting Sandro dig around in my flesh. I trusted him enough to have done minor surgery on himself. But I wasn’t oblivious to the fact that Bianca might not want her husband touching another woman’s buttocks even if it was to remove a tracker, so I asked her, “Can you do it? All you have to do is make a small incision and yank it out.”


    “I’d rather not. What if I cut too deep?”


    “Sera?”


    But she was already shaking her head.


    Dom crossed his arms. He was in a staredown with Sandro, and I could feel the violent waves rolling off him.


    “Aren’t you hungover?” Sandro asked.<fnf90f> Checktest chapters at f?ndnovel</fnf90f>


    “Fuck you,” Dom gritted. “Finding out someone put a tracker in my woman is enough to turn me stone-cold sober.”


    “Hey,” I snapped. “I’m not your woman. Got me?”


    “But I’m your man,” he replied with conviction.


    I shot Bianca and Sera a helpless look as if saying, I give up.


    For someone who didn’t want drama, Dom was certainly full of it. And where the hell was this I’m your maning from? He was suddenlymitted? I didn’t trust his change of heart or words out of his mouth right now.


    “Fine, Dom, you can do it. But only if we don’t damage the tracker.” I was regaining some of my spunk. Apparently the man before me had a way of firing me up.


    “I’ve done it before,” Dom informed me.


    “Why am I not surprised?” I said dryly. “I’m gonna get my kit and change.” It was no big deal, but I could see how the two women would be averse to doing it. Handling a scalpel and cutting into skin could make the inexperienced woozy. I’d seen both men and women faint just by looking at a needle plunge into muscle.


    I put on a bikini bottom and peeked out of my bedroom, but Dom was already leaning against the wall outside of it. For fuck’s sake.


    He entered the room with all the predatory vibes in the universe. Even hungover, he radiated a lethal aura only enhanced by his rough appearance.


    “Don’t even think of trying any seduction.”


    He genuinely looked insulted. “I’m not that insensitive.”


    I grabbed the marker I had brought out and faced the full-length mirror. I felt around for the tracker. “It’s right here. You can probably see the incision site.”


    He lowered to a knee and moved his head closer. I could feel his breath on my skin. I wasn’t aroused and was surprisingly jaded. “Just so you know, my libido is dead.” It was probably from the antidepressants I was taking, but he didn’t need to know that.


    “I’m just concerned for you. Bianca and Sera already warned me and gave Sandro the green light to take me out if I misbehave.”


    His tone was part amused, part affronted. Like he couldn’t believe their loyalty was to me instead of him. I also wasn’t sure how I felt about Bianca and Sera stepping in to defend me, but I remembered my therapist’s words about allowing people to help me.


    It wasn’t weakness.


    Blowing out a breath, I handed him the marker. “Please mark the spot.”


    “So I don’t cut the wrong ass cheek?” he quipped.


    I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, that.”


    He chuckled and drew a dot on the area, taking longer than was necessary to aplish the task.


    “Stop feeling me out.” He had his free palm on my other cheek, but it was totally innocent.


    Maybe.


    “You’re so prickly,” he grumbled. “I just want to be precise.”


    “Riigght.”


    Now that we’d established where the tracker was, it was time to take it out. I’d already prepared the instruments. “This is the anesthesia, the scalpel, and the tweezers. You need help on…”


    “I got this, baby.”


    I gritted my teeth at the endearment. He was making it sound like we were still together, but I held my tongue. Because I wasn’t about to antagonize the person who was about to perform minor surgery on me.


    Dom delivered the anesthesia like he’d done it countless of times.


    “Do you get to y mob doc too?” I asked, just so we had something to talk about while the anesthesia took effect.


    “Sometimes when he’s not avable, and a bullet needs toe out or a knife wound needs stitching. That kind of thing.” He sat back on his heels and stared up at me.


    “You’ve lost weight,” I blurted out.


    “I could say the same about you.” We let the silence wrap around us for a few seconds.


    “I’m sorry about Billy,” he said. “I…I was there.”


    “What do you mean?” I choked out before suppressing a ragged sob.


    “When they found his grave,” he said. “God, Sloane, I’ve never been more terrified in my life. I thought the second body was you.”


    “Sometimes I wish it was…” I whispered.


    “No,” he growled. “Don’t say that. Otherwise, I’m moving in here with you.”


    I emitted a brittleugh. “Seems you have no problem invading my privacy.”


    “Hate me forever if you must. I made the mistake of taking what we had for granted once. I’m not doing it again.”


    We had so many missteps between us, but I was still struggling to get over Billy’s death and his secret with Harriet.


    “Billy killed my father,” I blurted out.


    Dom reeled back like I’d punched the breath out of him. “Come again?”


    “My father didn’t leave us,” I rushed out. I had told no one else, not even my therapist. “But Billy caught him beating up Mom, and he said…he just saw red and grabbed the baseball bat and hit Dad on the head. Over and over.”


    “Holy fuck. He told you this where? In the basement of that house?”


    “Before he…he passed. He wanted to get it off his chest. Mom panicked and went to Harriet. I think Harriet had told a story to Mom about a friend who went to the Russian mafia to get rid of her abusive husband, but I think Harriet was talking about herself.”


    “So Harriet put your mom and Billy in contact with Grigori?”


    “Yes,” I whispered in the same breath as, “I think it’s numb.”


    Dom looked at me strangely and I tipped my chin to where he’d poked me with a needle. “The incision site.”


    “Sorry,” he muttered.


    “Do you want to do this some other time?” Because he looked as dazed as I was when Billy revealed the truth. Granted, I was miscarrying at that time too and suffering from blood loss. Sometimes I reyed it in my head like it was a bad dream. That for years, the three most important people in my life hadn’t instigated the lie I’d been living. That I didn’t waste those years thinking Billy was a worthless piece of shit of a brother when he’d been living with the guilt that he killed our father. That he let me live with that hole inside me that our father abandoned his family, and we weren’t worth it to stay. I was rewiring my beliefs with the way I’d made my choices because of them, and they were a tangled mess inside me.


    “No, I want to get this thing out of you,” Dom told me gently.


    And I didn’t know whether it was the sympathy in his voice that brought tears to my eyes. “I don’t know why I unloaded this on you when you hurt me, too.”


    I hated how my voice warbled. Dom was thest man I wanted to see me at my most vulnerable.


    Regret etched his features. “Because I was your person,” he said. “And I betrayed you.”