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“Nah,” Onyx denied, pulling me away. “That can’t happen.”
Damn near right on cue, Brandon appeared in the back doorway. “What happened?” he asked. “You’ve got this whole neighborhood on full alert now; you hear the sirens? Police are on our ass in two minutes, tops.”
“She shot her!” Maite shrieked in answer and before I could respond, Onyx had snatched her up, ignoring her objections to hang her over his shoulder and head out.
“This shit is taking too long; wehaveto get out of here.”
“He’s right,” Brandon agreed, letting him pass and then reaching out to grab me by the arm. “Let’s go,now.”
I didn’t have any argument there.
The last thing we needed was cops on the scene while we were still here.
It wasn’t great to leave a body around, but we got the lights turned off, and locked up, hoping no one knew exactly where the shot had come from.
If we could leave the outside of the scene subtly enough, the cops wouldn’t have anything to look for, no reason to come inside a business that wasn’t even open and didn’t appear suspicious.
Their lazy asses would write it off and move on.
We hoped.
Onyx kept Maite quiet enough to get her in the back of Keira’s SUV, knowing it wasn’t a good idea to have her near me right now.
She was pissed I’d shot her little girlfriend, rightfully so, from her love-addled point of view.
But that didn’t change thefactsof the matter.
Yes, I’d acted impulsively on a hunch—but I wasn’t wrong.
She was aRose,which made her dangerous by definition, and as far as I was concerned, any of them that weren’t aligned with Alicia may as well be an enemy.
Especially one married to Manuel Rojas, who we now knew was tied to Renard Belrose.
I had no way of being sure how that factored into everything going on, but it would be idiotic of me to think it didn’t factor at all.
And I was nobody’s damn fool.
“You saidshe’s been around for how long?” Onyx asked, nearly doubling the speed limit to get us back to the outskirts of town.
“At least five years,” I said, “Since well before Brandon and I took over, longer than Maite has been dealing with her.”
He nodded. “If it’s more like six than five… it means she was installed there byThe Garden, probably. Unless she was dismissed like Alicia, or… if she ran, which… I don’t know if that’s possible.”
“It’s definitely possible,” I countered. “It’s not unprecedented. And really… it could be how Renard found Jesse and the others, if he’s responsible for their deaths. If she has ties toThe Garden, she could’ve been reporting back.”
“Back up.” Onyx frowned. “What’s not unprecedented?”
I raised an eyebrow. “RosesandThornsescapingthe influence ofThe Garden. Jesse, Gerard, Miranda, my mother, they landed here because they ran fromThe Gardenthirty-something years ago. They were following Jesse, who left because he was traumatized over what the Belroses forced him to do to your mother.”
To his credit, Onyx didn’t slam on the brakes.
It was more of a… not quite slow enough pull to a stop.
But it felt like, even in his moment of shock, he was cognizant of not hurting me.
We were on the edge of town, minimal traffic, so there was no disruption to worry about with us being stopped at the traffic signal for too long.
“They played his song,” Onyx murmured, rubbing his chin as he stared out the window at nothing. “I wondered, but… with both of them dead, I thought I’d neverknow. But how doyouknow?” he asked.
