I look around, trying to identify the members of Noah’s team. There are a couple of people whose body language seems just a bit off, enough that I suspect them, but the fact that I can’t pinpoint all of them is a good thing. It means that he selected the right people. Somewhere around me, there are other people who are armed. Other people who will be ready when I am.

  The post pops up on Jenna’s page, and less than a minute later, the man standing near the VIP section looks at his phone. He makes a call, and moments later, another man comes up and takes his place. The first hurries away, and I know the wheels are in motion now. All I can do is pray and trust.

  I hear Xavier take to the stage again. I will let him finish that song, then he needs to get out of here. I don’t know what’s going to happen, and I need to know they are safe. Cupcake responds to my text telling them to go back to the house with a sparkly heart. It’s not lost on me that it’s not a verification.

  Time ticks by. Every minute feels torturous. Everything around me feels slow, and the air buzzes in my ears. I wait for my phone to ring. Songs begin and disappear. The night wears on, and people start to fade. The furniture fills with people seeming to try to pick up enough energy to leave. The crowd starts to thin. Finally, my phone rings.

  “Got them,” Dean says.

  He sounds breathless, but there is no fear in his voice.

  “Both of them?”

  “Both. They tried to pull the same thing that they did with Haley. Owen and Jenna are safe. I’m following them back to the house.”

  “Tell them thank you.”

  “What’s happening there?”

  “It’s almost time. I’ll see you soon,” I say.

  “Emma, be careful.”

  I’m about to say “I always am,” but it would be a lie.

  Ten minutes after the call, I watch five people leave the lower VIP area and go to the bottom of the steps leading into the loft. Darren goes down the steps, and I sink backward a bit to stay out of view. The fact that he is upstairs now and I didn’t see him go up into the loft means that he has used the door from his office to go into the bomb shelter.

  He moves the velvet rope, and the group goes up the steps. I try to move enough to see them go through the loft door, but the angle is too extreme. The door is hidden in shadow at the back of the space. I wait as long as I think it would take for them to go down the steps, then I call Noah.

  “I’m going in. Tell them to follow me.”

  I put my phone in my pocket, and around me, I notice a few people’s heads twitch just slightly. I know that movement. They have earpieces in. They are hearing Noah’s voice. Every one of them knows who I am. They have been aware of my presence the entire time. And now they are watching me. I don’t acknowledge any of them. I pull my hair back into a ponytail and head for the dance area.

  There is a possibility that Darren’s arrogance goes deep enough for him to not have the door up in the loft locked. Considering I was in that loft with Noah and didn’t even notice the door, it means that it is effectively concealed, so he may leave it open as he does the others. But I don’t have the time to risk that. I have one shot at this, and it has to work.

  I break into a run.

  People around me gasp and move out of the way. Behind me I can hear the undercover officers following. I dive for the door and burst through it. I hear a shout and a grunt, but I keep going. I get to the office and step aside to gesture to the officers still behind me inside. We are down two, but I know they are handling the situation that’s unfolding in the club. It’s a tight fit, but I get into the office with them and shut the door, locking it behind us. I wrench the cabinet out of place and open the door.

  By the time we get to the door at the bottom of the steps, all of us have our weapons out.

  “Keep your eyes open. I don’t know what’s waiting for us.”

  Throwing open the door, I run into the open space. Lights have been turned on around the edges of the room, creating an ambiance I know is meant to be sexy, even romantic, and that just makes my skin crawl. The people I recognize from the VIP section jump out of their seats, shouting as we rush toward them. A bittersweet smile comes to my face as one of them reaches into his jacket and pulls out a service weapon, turning on the man beside him and shouting for him to hit the ground.

  I run past the seats and jump onto the stage. A girl in lingerie was up on the platform but is now cowering at the back of the stage. Just beyond the curtains in one of the wings, I can see a young man wearing only underwear.

  “I’m Emma Griffin,” I say. “I was here earlier. I’m with the FBI. You are safe.”

  She looks up at me with tears pouring down her cheeks. For an instant she stays where she is, then she jumps to her feet and collapses into my arms. I hold her tight against me.

  “You are safe. I have you.”

  “Watch out!”

  I look in the direction of the young man’s voice and see Darren coming at me. He has a stun gun in his hand and dives toward us. I quickly turn and push the girl out of the way, dropping down from the stage to throw off Darren’s balance. Jumping up, I direct a kick into the small of his back, bringing him to his hands and knees. He starts to get up, and a single gunshot rings out.

  People scream, and I see Darren’s body go stiff. He brings his hand to the center of his chest, then pulls it away, looking down at it. It shakes, making the blood shimmer beneath the lights glowing down onto the stage. He tries to stand up, but collapses. I tuck my gun away and go over to him. Pressing my hands to the wound, I look out into the room to see who fired the gun. I’m expecting one of the undercover officers, thinking they might have believed I was in danger and fired in an effort to protect me. Instead, I see Kenneth Wright, his eyes unblinking as he’s dragged to the ground.

  Darren gurgles beneath me, and I press my hands harder to control the bleeding.

  “Call Noah!” I shout. “We need an ambulance.”

  No one needs to do anything. Within seconds, Noah, followed by several uniformed officers, storms the room.

  He comes up onto the stage with me. “I heard a shot.”

  “Kenneth Wright,” I tell him. “He shot Darren.”

  “The ambulance is already on the way,” he says.

  “Are your officers upstairs okay?” I ask.

  “They’re fine. We’ve got the building cleared and secured. You should probably know, Xavier is still up there.”

  “Damn it.”

  I wash the blood off my hands at the station before going into the interrogation room. The girl from the history class—whose name I’m just now learning is Carly—glares at me from across the table. I sit down and meet her glare.

  “How long were you doing this before Haley Young?” I ask.

  “That’s your first question?” she asks.

  “Is there a different one you think I should be asking?”

  “If I’m a victim too,” she asks.

  “Hasn’t crossed my mind even for a second,” I say.

  “But I’m a woman,” she says.

  “That means nothing. Women are capable of everything a man is. They are every bit as conniving, cruel, and greedy.” I stand up, not willing to waste even another second on her right now. “Welcome to equality.”

  I walk out of the room and meet Noah in the hallway.

  “Just be warned, she’s already trying to position herself as being steamrolled by the big, bad men who made her do it all,” I say.

  “Do you think there’s any chance of that?”

  “No. That woman is in complete control of everything she does. She knows she doesn’t look like she’s in her mid-twenties, and she uses that to her complete advantage. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she does just have a voracious appetite for learning, but if I had to take a guess, I’d say she spends her days hopping from lecture to lecture to scope out fresh meat. Check the registrar. She’s probably not even enrolled. Why pay tuition when you’ve already got such good job security?”

  “I just finished talking to Jack, the muscle. He lawyered up pretty much immediately,” he says.

  “That’s fine. Get a swab in his cheek, let that lawyer know what you have on him, and watch him start singing,” I say. “He’s going to tell you anything you want to know to try not to spend the rest of his life in prison. Not that it will work.”

  “Darren Walsh will be right there with him. That gum? There was still DNA. It matched. He was in Walker Harrison’s apartment the night Walker disappeared. It seems like Jack and Carly handled most of his acquisitions, but that one he decided to do himself.”

  “I know we’ll get more information out of Jack once his lawyer sees just how much evidence we have against him. He has a lot to answer for.”

  Everyone else arrested during the raid is also exercising their rights and having lawyers come in rather than talking to us. That’s perfectly fine. They can do whatever they feel they need to. It’s not going to change the outcome.

  “Dean insisted I get out of the hotel and spend the night at his rental,” I tell Noah. “Apparently, Xavier and Cupcake already went and packed up my stuff, so I’m going to head over there and try to get some sleep.”

  “How did they get into your room?” he asks.

  “I try not to ask such questions.” I walk a few steps away, then turn back. “Did you hear anything about Darren Walsh?”

  “He survived the way to the hospital. They have him in surgery. I guess we’ll hear more when it’s over.”

  I nod. “Good. How’s Kenneth?”

  “He hasn’t spoken a word.”

  “He knew what was happening,” I say. “He brought them Walker.”

  “I guess he never thought they would go after his own daughter,” Noah says.

  “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  I end up staying in Stoneville for several more days while we work on the first stages of unraveling the case. With so many people involved, it’s a mess of lawyers and interviews, but I don’t mind a single second of it. This is why I do this. Watching the entitlement drain out of the eyes of the perpetrators and get replaced by stark realization and cold reality is something I will never get enough of.

  Before the drive back to Sherwood, I spend the morning in the kitchen of the rental house. On my way out of town, I stop by the bakery. Scarlet smiles at me, then quirks an eyebrow at the plastic-covered plate I’m carrying.

  “I realize you’ve had just about everything on the menu, but you didn’t have to start brown-bagging it,” she says. “You could just come for the coffee.”

  I laugh. “That will never happen as long as there are croissant sandwiches in this world. These are for you. I figured you have baked for me just about every day for more than two weeks. The least I can do is bake for you once.”

  “What is it?”

  “Cinnamon rolls. They were my grandma’s recipe,” I say.

  She ducks her head toward the plate and takes a deep breath. “They smell incredible.”

  “Thank you.”

  She accepts the plate. “I guess this means you’re leaving?”

  “Yeah, I’m heading home now. I’ll be back though. It’s going to be a long time and a lot of work before this case is really finished,” I say.

  She hugs me, and I leave.

  Two hours later, I’m freshly showered, in my favorite pajamas, and curled in Sam’s arms on the couch.

  “They did it for greed,” I tell him. “Carly and Jack. She tried to spin it into something else, but finally, she just stopped and admitted Darren has been paying them for over seven years to bring him what he considers ‘objects’ for his auctions. It’s all about the money to them. I haven’t gotten much from Jack, but it’s obvious she doesn’t care about what any of them goes through. She’s the one who came up with their little tag team ploy.

  “Once they had a target in mind, Jack would follow her and talk to her. The more she resisted, the more he’d pursue her. Then Carly would come out at just the right moment pretending not to know him and ‘rescue’ the girl. That earned her trust, and Carly would invite her to hang out, eventually luring her to Darren. Other girls were chosen specifically to fit requests from the VIPs. Darren paid well, and they were happy to rake it in as a side hustle along with working at the nightclub itself.

  “According to her, Haley was an unexpected problem. She fought. She wouldn’t just go along with them. So they ended up killing her.”

  “What about the assaults that also had Jack’s DNA?”

  “They knew they couldn’t just keep filling the auctions with people from around here. It would become much more noticeable if guys and girls all around the same age just kept disappearing. So they started traveling to find people to fill requests. Some of them were just lucky enough to get away,” I explain. “And many others didn’t. Darren said he didn’t even know how many he’s gone through. As disgusting as it is, he says that some of them are for sale and some are for rent. The ones who are for sale, he washes his hands of them as soon as they step off the auction block. He never cared what happened to them. Noah is trying to compile more thorough missing persons reports for the entire eight years in as many areas as we can connect him to. We know Haley is not the only victim who did not survive,” I say.

  “How is Walker?” Sam asks.

  “As good as can be expected for someone who has been held prisoner and rented out on a regular basis for six years,” I say. “When I talked to him in the hospital, he did confirm that Kenneth Wright did seem to bring him by the nightclub more frequently than he was expecting and asked him once if he was interested in making some extra money. When he answered he was, Kenneth didn’t give him any more details, but then within a few days, he was abducted from his apartment. Darren put him through what he called ‘training’.”

  “Yeesh,” Sam says. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “It’s exactly what you think it was,” I say. “It was their efforts to break in their new horse. A guy who looked like him was highly sought after, and Darren knew from the beginning he was going to be rented for a very pretty penny. But in order to be worth that cost and earn repeat customers, he needed to have some skills.”

  Sam shudders. “That’s enough. I don’t want more details. How about Brianna?”

  “She has a long way to go in a different way than Walker. I can’t even begin to imagine the kind of terror she was going through. She walked away from the concert and was planning on going to the party at the frat. She just wanted to blow off steam. After security wouldn’t let her back in, she was so angry she just wanted to get away from everything and lose herself for a bit. She went through the shortcut to campus and was getting close when a car pulled up behind her and someone chased after her. She says her memory is a little foggy after that, but she knows she was in a car without her phone and didn’t know where she was going. As they were driving through campus, she took her jacket and threw it out of the window near the frat house, hoping someone would recognize it.”

  “Smart girl,” Sam says.

  “She is. But she’s also devastated. She has to live with what her father has not just condoned but helped with,” I say. “Her body is healing a lot faster than her mind is going to. It will take some time.”

  I think that’s what we all need. Just a little more time.

  Chloe stood at the bus stop waiting for Dustin to get home like she did every afternoon.

  She had been babysitting the little boy for almost three years, and she’d fallen into a comfortable routine in the afternoons. She picked him up from the bus, they went back to the house for a snack, he did his homework, then they played or went on an outing until his parents got home from work. Sometimes she mixed things up a little by starting dinner for the family. That was meant to be one of those nights.

  Chloe was on her phone going over recipes, trying to decide if she should make a snack that would use some of the same ingredients so she could get a head start on some of the dinner prep. She was so distracted she didn’t even notice the bus was pulling up to the stop. A bright-pink hat bobbing past her snapped her attention to the children walking past her. Chloe looked for Dustin but didn’t see him.

  He must have taken his books out of his backpack on the way home again. The last time he did that, the bus pulled away with him still trying to shove everything back in, and she had to run down the street to get to him. The bus started moving again, and she muttered a frustrated condemnation of the bus driver for not having more patience for the sweet little boy.

  She’d learned a shortcut to get to the next bus stop and darted through a yard and behind two houses so she was waiting there when the bus turned the corner and stopped. The children for that stop came out of the bus, but she still didn’t see Dustin. At this point, worry clenched in her chest. It wouldn’t take him that long to put everything away or figure out he’d missed a stop. The bus driver would know by now that he hadn’t gotten off the bus and make him get off at this stop.

  But he didn’t appear on the steps.

  Chloe hurried over to the door before it closed and looked in at the driver.

  “Hi, Chloe. Are you picking somebody else up?” Mrs. Weaver asked, sounding slightly confused.

  “No, I’m here for Dustin,” Chloe said.

  “He’s not on the bus,” the driver told her.

  “He’s not?” Chloe asked, her stomach dropping.

  “No. He was on my list of students marked absent. Didn’t Cameron let you know?”

  “No,” Chloe said, shaking her head.

  Mrs. Weaver shrugged, reaching for the handle to pull the doors closed.

  “She probably just forgot. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  The doors closed, and the bus drove away, but Chloe stayed standing where she was.

  She checked her texts, voicemail, and email just to make sure she hadn’t heard from Dustin’s mother about him not going to school that day. But even as she was doing it, she knew there was no such message. It was Parent Appreciation Day at school. Dustin had been talking about it for weeks. Cameron wouldn’t have kept him home and then just not told Chloe.