on the ground hard, but unharmed.
“Wolf legs,” he muttered, watching her walk away, ridiculously grateful for those long, muscular legs.
* * *
“Where is he?”
They’d pushed their way through the club crowd, but by the time Stevie and Shen had arrived at the back bar, Wells’s brother was gone.
“We need to find him,” Stevie said, backing away from Shen. “We need to find him now.”
As Stevie moved, she heard Max behind her.
“I want Devon found,” she was saying. “I want to know who those guys—”
They walked into each other, their backs colliding.
Stevie immediately faced her sister. Dutch was standing behind her. Stevie could tell they’d been conspiring.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“What are you doing?” Max shot back.
“I know you’re up to something.”
“So are you.”
Of course, Max was right, which meant it was best they just walk away from each other.
With a nod, Stevie moved away from her sister. But she’d barely gotten three feet away when a strong hand grabbed her by the back of her neck.
Max’s eyes grew wide, her gaze directed behind Stevie. Max turned to go, but a hand reached out and grabbed her, too, yanking her close.
“Come with me,” Charlie ordered, dragging Stevie and Max away from the dance floor.
* * *
Shen and Dutch watched the MacKilligan sisters disappear into the crowd, Charlie dragging the other two with an amazing amount of ease.
“Should we follow them?” Shen asked Dutch.
“No.”
* * *
Charlie pushed her sisters into the room and closed the office door behind them.
Stevie immediately looked down at the floor. But Max . . .
“Oooh. A safe.”
Charlie snapped her fingers in her middle sister’s direction and pointed to a spot next to Stevie, right in front of a large wood desk.
Charlie began to pace in front of the pair. Back and forth. Back and forth. Until she came to an abrupt stop and pointed her finger at her sisters.
“Berg says you’re scared of me.”
Her sisters frowned, glanced at each other, frowned some more.
“Scared of you?” Stevie asked.
“Us?” Max asked.
“Well . . . he actually said that you were afraid of what I’d do to your friends.”
“Oh,” they both said, and then Stevie looked down at the floor and Max studied the safe.
“That’s a top-of-the-line safe,” Max said. “But, uh, I can break into it, like in thirty seconds.”
Charlie put her hands on her hips. “Berg was right . . . wasn’t he?”
No longer frowning, her younger sisters glanced at each other.
“We love how protective you are of us,” Stevie began, her fingers twisting.
“We really do,” Max insisted, sounding more sincere than Charlie had ever heard before.
“But you do . . . sometimes . . .”
“Just sometimes.”
“Get a little . . . overwrought?”
“Overwrought?” Charlie repeated
“Like that time my tutor and I were having a philosophical discussion about Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit.”
“He was being rude.”
“No. We were just discussing. But you didn’t like his tone. So you hung him outside the window by his foot. Most philosophical discussions don’t end with grown men sobbing and promising not to call the police if you just let them go.”
“And that time you didn’t like the football player I started dating—”
“He talked shit about his old girlfriend, which means he was going to talk shit about you.”
“You’re right,” Max agreed. “You’re absolutely right. Still, I don’t think it was necessary for you to bind, gag, and shove him in the trunk of his car and leave him in the woods with a warning that if he put any part of himself near my pussy, you’d cut his throat and let the neighborhood dogs at him.”
“Then,” Stevie softly added, “there was that squirrel incident.”
“He was rabid.”
“No. He was just a squirrel.”
“And what you did to Mr. Machenski’s Rottweiler,” Max tossed in.
“I just warned him off. He was scaring Stevie.”
“He didn’t scare me. He startled me,” Stevie argued. “There’s a difference.”
“And you didn’t just warn him off. You made that dog pee himself, and after that he didn’t come out from behind his house ever again.”
“So I’m a horrible person?”
“No!” Stevie quickly cut the distance between them and grabbed Charlie’s hand. “You’re a loving sister! You’ve protected us all these years.”
“Do you actually think I’d be alive if it wasn’t for you?” Max asked.
Charlie thought a moment, and replied, “Yeah, I do.”
“Yeah,” Stevie agreed. “You would have totally survived.”
“Okay.” Max raised her forefinger. “Let’s try this . . . would I have survived outside of prison, if it weren’t for you?”
“Oh, no.”
“No, no. You wouldn’t have.”
Max nodded. “Exactly.”
* * *
Stevie hugged her sister.