“After all these years fighting to keep you on my property, now I don’t want you leaving the Brotherhood mansion. For real, nothing is safer than that compound…but I do have a house on the Hudson River that’s tight. It’s next to a friend of mine’s, and it’s nothing fancy, but there’s a tunnel linkup between them. She’ll keep you safe.”

After he gave her the address, Bella murmured, “Thank you. I’m going to pack a few things up and have Fritz take me there in an hour.”

“I’ll get the fridge stocked for you right now.”

The phone made a beeping noise as a text came through. “Thank you.”

“Have you told him?”

“Z knows it’s coming. And no, I’m not going to keep him from seeing Nalla if he wants, but he’s going to have to choose to come and see her.”

“What about you?”

“I love him…but this has been really hard on me.”

They ended the call shortly thereafter, and as Bella took the phone away from her ear, she saw that a text had come through from Zsadist:

I’M SO SORRY. I LOVE YOU. PLEASE FORGIVE ME—CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT YOU.

She bit her lip and blinked hard. And texted back.

FIVE

Z stared at the screen of his phone, praying for a response from Bella. He would have called, but his voice was so shaky he didn’t want to alarm her. Plus getting into a huge emotional thing wasn’t a great idea, considering he had a broken leg on lesser real estate.

Rhage and Blay came back through the tunnel.

“…is why they didn’t come into the house,” Rhage was saying. “The entrance to this storage unit is through the shed out back. They were checking on the security system first, clearly less concerned that the house had been infiltrated.”

Z cleared his throat and warbled, “The alarm is still blinking. If it doesn’t get shut off, more will—”

Rhage leveled his gun at the red light, pulled the trigger, and dusted the thing. “Maybe that’ll work.”