His eyes unnarrowed, just the littlest bit. “Yeah, yeah, tomorrow. Or maybe Friday. I gotta see,” he said, his voice just a few degrees above frigid. “Wrap that food up for me.”

“Uh, yes, sure. Of course.”

Jenna glared at Crystal as she crossed the room, and Crystal threw her a look pleading for her to rein in her anger for just a few minutes. Once Bruno left, Jenna could dump as much of it on her as she wanted.

Crystal’s hands were a jittery mess as she grabbed plastic bowls and matching lids from a cupboard and hefted big slabs of lasagna into one container and thick wedges of cake into another. She pulled a handled brown bag from under the sink and packaged everything up for Bruno.

“What’s your problem?” came Bruno’s voice from the living room.

Crystal’s stomach plummeted to the ground. For a long moment, there was silence. Crystal returned to the living room, still death-gripping her hope that things wouldn’t get worse. “Here you go,” she said, as he finished donning his jacket.

“You wanna know what my problem is?” Jenna asked.

All the blood rushed from Crystal’s face. She felt it, because the room started spinning again, and she perceived sound like it had traveled through a long tunnel. “That’s enough, Jenna,” she said as harshly as she could.

Bruno wrenched the bag from Crystal’s hands and stalked toward her sister. He grabbed her jaw. “Yeah, I’d say that’s more than edamnnough, Jenna. Learn not to bite the hand that feeds you,” he said, shoving her away. She stumbled back a step, and he pushed by her, yanked open the door, and slammed it shut behind himself.

Pale and shaking, Jenna gaped at Crystal for a long minute, then she slipped the security chain across the door. “You want to explain what that was all about, Sara? Why I just got accosted in my own home?”

Crystal grappled to respond, but whatever force had been holding her upright for the past fifteen minutes stopped working at that very instant.

The room went wavy, her skin grew clammy, and her knees buckled. Crystal’s body went into a free fall.

The tenor of Jenna’s words changed. From anger to panic. “Sara!” Jenna rushed to Crystal’s side, to where she’d fallen in a heap in front of the couch.

Crystal curled into a ball and hugged herself as hard as she could.

“Sara? Sara, please,” Jenna said, stroking her hair and her face and her arm. “Tell me what to do.” More stroking, and Crystal became conscious that Jenna’s fingers were wet from where they’d wiped at her cheeks. Someone was making the most mournful sounds, long, low wails of grief and loss. “Sara? Did he . . . did he rape you?”

No, he didn’t rape me, she thought, shaking her head against Jenna’s thigh. The one bright spot in this whole mess. Her body had locked up so completely that he hadn’t been able to penetrate her. Though, had Jenna not come home when she did, Crystal knew Bruno wouldn’t have been deterred much longer. It hadn’t always stopped him in the past.

“I’m gonna call nine-one-one, sweetie. I’ll be right back,” Jenna said, stroking her hair again.

“No!” Crystal said, twisting to grip Jenna’s wrist before she rose. “No, don’t. I’m okay.” Her voice sounded warped, strained.

“You’re not okay,” Jenna said, a deep frown on her face. Though it was one of fear and concern, not anger.

Crystal shook her head. “He didn’t rape me. He didn’t hurt me. I promise,” she rasped.

Jenna eased back to the floor. “You didn’t look okay. When I came in . . . God. Sara, you looked like you were three seconds from a panic attack.”

“I know,” Crystal said, hiccuping. “I know.” She pushed onto her hands, but the sudden movement left her dizzy.

“Don’t rush,” Jenna said. “Just lie here with me for a little bit.” When Crystal laid her head in Jenna’s lap again, Jenna rubbed her back. “You’re the one usually taking care of me,” she said.

“Yeah,” Crystal said. “I never mind.” Her breathing shuddered, and the crying left her wrung out and headachy. She had to pull herself together.

“Well, I don’t mind either. I just really hate seeing you this way. Nobody should get to do this to you,” she said, keeping her voice as calm as she could as she rubbed wide circles over Crystal’s back. Jenna’s hand slowed. Stilled. “Sara?” she asked in a high-pitched voice.

Crystal closed her eyes. She’d been so wrapped up in herself, she’d forgotten. For a moment, she’d just let herself be comforted. And now Jenna knew. Now, Jenna had seen.

Slowly, the cotton of Crystal’s shirt slid farther up her back, just a few inches, as Jenna leaned around her.

Jenna gasped. “Oh, Sara. Oh, my God. What is this? Oh, my God.”

Crystal’s tears started again, and she burrowed into Jenna’s lap and wrapped her arms awkwardly around her waist. Jenna leaned down and returned the embrace as best as she could. They cried together for a long time.

When Crystal’s body simply had no more tears left to give, she slowly rolled onto her back, her head on Jenna’s legs. “I didn’t want you to know,” she said, her voice a raw scrape. “I didn’t want you to . . . think . . . less of me.”

“Less of you? How could I?” Jenna asked, shaking her head. “My God, I would never have thought this was your fault. Because it’s not. How could it be?”

“I know,” Crystal said, her throat tight again. “I was just so ashamed.” She covered her mouth with her hand, and Jenna stroked her palm over Crystal’s sweaty forehead.

“Will you tell me now?”

The thing she’d never wanted to do. Crystal was supposed to have shielded Jenna from all this. Let her live her life free from the knowledge of this reality. It was part of what she’d promised their father, at least that’s what she’d always told herself. Too late now. The failure sat like a ten-pound weight on her heart. Crystal’s head moved down in a nod without her telling it to, but it was the right thing to do. “I’ll tell you,” she whispered. “I’ll hate it, but I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

Chapter 16

The sun had set, and the team had been in position for almost two hours when the first vehicles pulled into Pier 13, a long stretch of concrete slab that ran from the road along a mammoth and abandoned industrial granary to the pier that stretched into the dark waters of Baltimore Harbor beyond. A gray van, two black Suburbans with tinted windows, and a box truck circled into the lot behind the granary.

“Hold your position everyone. Engage only if hostiles engage first. We are fact-finding only,” came Nick’s voice through Shane’s earpiece. From his sniper roost on an old barge moored to one side of the pier, Shane watched as men climbed out of the trucks and fanned out in a defensive circle. Ten in all. Heavily armed.

Against their six.

Near the middle of the group loomed the man Shane had seen kissing Crystal at Confessions. Bruno Ashe. He stood at the right hand of a tall, thin black man in a sharp-looking suit. Shane’s gut said that had to be Jimmy Church. Who else but a self-appointed Messiah, the name he called himself inside his organization, would radiate that kind of self-assurance or warrant the kind of deference the rest of the men paid to him?

Eyeballing the white box truck, Shane wondered if Church was giving or receiving tonight. Maybe both. And, really, it didn’t matter. Shane just hoped the nature of the delivery and those with whom Church was making the trade would help them figure out what the hell Merritt had been up to and how they could use that intel to regain their good names, their reputations, and their honor.

Shane scanned a one-eighty circuit from left to right. Though he couldn’t see any of the team, he knew Nick and Marz provided the team’s eyes from the sky from their positions inside broken windows on opposite ends of the granary’s second floor. Beckett hid at ground level behind a trailer that might once have served as some sort of office. Easy crouched in a nook where a lower concrete gangway ran along the far side of the pier, shielded by the shadows of the NS Savannah, the first nuclear-powered passenger ship, apparently, that had long been docked there. And Nick’s PI friend, Miguel, had the water approach covered from his position out in the harbor on his fishing boat. Jeremy had Beckett’s SUV hidden about a quarter mile away, giving them access to both a water and a land evacuation of the site in case they needed the options.

Nick had been reluctant as hell to bring Jeremy out in the field, and of all people, Shane totally got his wanting to keep his brother safe. But the reality was they were seriously understaffed for the mission they’d created for themselves. And to his credit, Jer was only too happy to help however he could.

“Note that all eyes are on the water,” Marz said. “Keep alert for a marine landing.”

“Roger that,” Miguel said.

Given that the Savannah took up most of the far side of the pier, that probably meant their unknown hostiles would dock on the same side as Shane’s barge, making his position the closest to deal with them should the need arise.

Damn good thing they’d had the day to prepare for this operation.

After Marz had nailed down the meeting’s location via the audio surveillance of Confessions, the whole group had gotten a few hours shut-eye, then spent the day learning everything they could about the pier. Miguel, Nick, and Easy had taken the older man’s boat out along the whole stretch of waterfront comprised of several piers. Once they’d seen that the dock appeared no longer in use, they’d dropped Easy off to wire up a few booby traps in case things went south and they required a little explosive assistance to cover their asses.