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Ryland nods. “Casey…still talking to him? I thought you guys—”

“Who’s Casey?” Steven asks.

I swallow and look at him. Steven has only been part of the inner circle for the past few years, so he doesn’t know about Casey. “My best friend. You’ve never met him. He has social anxiety like Maxwell.”

Steven scrunches his brows and shrugs. “Everyone’s worried about you, then. And if Ethan and Alexis weren’t doing another one of those bucket list items today, they’d be here too.”

“Leave them alone. Let them enjoy their newlywed bliss.” My brother, the yearner of the family, finally married the love of his life and our good friend, Charles Vaughn’s younger sister, recently. “Fucking interventions—I can’t believe you guys did it again. Completely overreacting.”

I shudder, thinking about last month when Ethan rounded us inside The Menagerie, a specialty cocktail bar within The Orchid, and grilled me for an hour. Apparently, I resembled a walking zombie with dark circles under my eyes.

“Then how do you explain these photos?” Maxwell picks up a tabloid and practically breathes fire onto them. “Fucking Greg Masters. These headlines will sink our cruise before it leaves the dock. ‘Party Prince’s Desperate Striptease—Rex Anderson’s Fall from Grace’ and ‘The Orchid Cruises—Front for Drugs and Debauchery?’”

I gnash my teeth together, which only makes the pounding in my head worse. Fuck Greg Masters andGossip Times, the biggest tabloid in the country, which has taken an obsessive interest in our family.

Feeling like a bomb is about to go off inside my chest, I snatch the offending papers from him and scan the articles. The dates range from a week ago to as recent as yesterday. Normally, I don’t read these things.They just piss me off and goad me into making a scene, which has always been the paps’ game all along.

“What the hell!” I hurl the papers onto the ground.

“Easy there. Just bad press. We’ve all been there.” Charles picks them up. “Let’s fix you first.”

“There’snothingto fix!”

I stand and hiss as pain ricochets inside my skull. Perhaps Casey’s right. I party too much and am throwing my life down the drain.

But what choice do I have? It’s better than feeling empty all the time.

My phone buzzes in my pocket.

Gritting my teeth, I take it out, fully intending to power it off before chucking it across the room.

Then I see the text message.

Every molecule inside me freezes.

My feet move toward the door before my mind catches up.

“Where are you going?” Ryland hollers.

“Be right back. Need to take care of something important.”

Something that may save me.

Twenty minutes later, I’m pacing in the rose garden, my mind chaotic as I reread the text message for the thousandth time.

Elias

You asked me to contact you if I ever needed your help again. I’m moving someone, a target of The Association, to safety, and The Orchid cruise is the perfect cover. Your shot at atonement, even though I think it’s unnecessary. Don’t make me regret asking you.

My chest tightens, a cocktail of fear and adrenaline swirling inside me. Elias Kent, a mobster who’s helped my family out of a bind a fewtimes, doesn’t mince words or ask for favors lightly. If he needs my help, he’s exhausted all other options.

Atonement.

The dark hole inside me. The constant guilt and hollowness nothing could snuff out—not Velowake, not parties, not women.

Not my work at Fleur, including heading up the massive cruise project for Maxwell.

But this. To save another woman.