“Thank you, Jack,” Ness says politely as she climbs out.

“Yeah, thanks Jeeves,” I mutter to him on my way out the door.

I can see his knuckles whiten on the steering wheel and practically hear his molars grinding together.

I slam the door behind me just to annoy him all the more, and then I head off to class, hoping Jack will be too irritated to pick me up again afterward.

I keep sneaking my phone out during class, to see if my brothers have texted me. Or Cal. I know they’re hunting down the Butcher.

I hope they’re all together, whatever they’re doing. Zajac scares me. I know where he came from. There’s a difference between growing up in a criminal family and fighting your way up in the criminal world. The Butcher is playing this game to win or to die. There’s no middle ground for him.

So I’m glad my brothers aren’t alone in this.

But I’m annoyed that, yet again, I’m being left out of the action. This morning, I demanded Cal to take me with him, but he refused before the words were even out of my mouth.

“No, Aida. We have no idea where the Butcher is or how far he plans to take this. We could be walking into an ambush everywhere we go.”

“Then why are you going? Send someone else. Like Jack,” I said hopefully.

“This isn’t an errand-boy kind of job. Zajac is not fucking around. He didn’t just shoot at us last night, he hit two cops. We have no idea how far he plans to take this.”

“I know people that know his people. I can help,” I insisted.

Callum seized me by the arm, hard enough to hurt. His blue eyes cut into me, narrow and unblinking.

“You’re not going anywhere near this Aida. So help me god, I will lock you in that closet for a month before I let you wander around Little Ukraine, talking to bartenders and strippers.”

Whenever anybody tells me what I can’t do, it makes me about a hundred times more determined.

Callum saw the flare of rebellion in my eyes and sighed, loosening his grip on my arm just a little.

“I promise you, as soon as I hear anything, I will call you.”

“Or text,” I demanded.

Callum nodded.

“I promise,” he said.

So I let him go, and I didn’t immediately slough off my classes and head to Little Ukraine. That’s not where I’d go anyway, if I wanted info on the Butcher. I have a much better lead than that.

But for now, I’m stuck in Comparative Literature, completely ignoring the analysis of feminist characters in Austen’s novels. Instead I’m wondering what Nero meant when he texted me:

We found the shooter. Got a tip on the old bastard, too.

I text him back, but he doesn’t send me anything else.

The class ends abruptly—or so it seems to me as I stare out the window totally distracted.

I snatch up an armful of books, not bothering to stow them away in my bag, then head outside, trotting across campus in the direction of the west lot where I’m supposed to meet Nessa and our detestable chauffeur.

When I’m almost at the right spot, I hear a male voice say, “Do you need help carrying all those books, little lady?”

For a second, I think it’s Callum. I don’t know why—he doesn’t do corny impressions, like some helpful cowboy. When I turn around, I’m met with Oliver’s tanned, grinning face instead. He’s bruised where Callum tuned him up. A dark line down the center of his lip marks the place where it split.

“Oh,” I say, annoyed. “It’s you.”

“Not exactly the enthusiastic greeting I was hoping for,” Oliver says, keeping pace at my side.

“What are you doing here?” I demand. He’s years out of school, there’s no reason for him to be hanging around here.

“I came to talk to you.”

I take a false step on a stone hidden in the grass, my ankle bending uncomfortably under me.

“Ouch! Fuck!” I hiss, stumbling a little.

“Careful,” Oliver says, catching my elbow.

“I’m fine,” I say, trying to pull my arm away. But I’m limping slightly now. I don’t think it’s sprained, it’s just that thing where it’s tender and wonky, and you have to baby it a minute.

“Come over here,” Oliver says. “Sit down a second.”

He steers me away from the parking lot, over to an underground walkway, at the head of which is a stone bench, partially hidden under an overhang.

Oliver is so big and overbearing that I can’t really pull away, not without hurting myself. I sink down on the bench. Oliver sits right next to me, almost forced to put his arm around me because of the tightness of the space. I can smell that cologne he always wears, pleasant but a little overpowering.

“I can’t stay,” I tell him. “Somebody’s picking me up.”

I pull off my sneaker and massage my ankle, trying to work out the kink.

“They can wait a minute,” Oliver says.

He takes my socked foot and pulls it into his lap, kneading and massaging my ankle. It feels good, but I don’t want him to get the wrong idea. So after a minute I say, “That’s good, thanks,” and take my foot back.

Oliver looks down at me with his big brown eyes, his expression reproachful.

“Aida, what you did cut me to the bone. Do you know how painful that was, to see a picture of you on fucking Facebook, wearing a goddamned wedding dress? Standing next to him?”

I take a deep breath, trying to be patient.

“I’m sorry, Oliver. It was sudden. I was pretty fucking surprised myself.”

I don’t know how to explain it without telling him too much. All I can really say, lamely, is, “I didn’t do it to hurt you.”

“But you did hurt me. You’re still hurting me. You’re killing me every day.”

I let out a breath, both guilty and annoyed. Oliver can be a bit . . . dramatic.

“I didn’t even know you were dating him!” he cries.

I press my knuckles into my forehead. My ankle is throbbing. It’s actually kind of cold here, out of the sunshine and close to the chilly cement tunnel.

I feel bad about the way I dumped Oliver, I really do. It was the weirdest thing. He never did anything wrong, exactly. He took me on trips, bought me about a thousand gifts, told me how desperately infatuated he was with me.

It started out as a casual fling. I didn’t think some country club, uber-capitalist trust-funder would pursue me so aggressively. I figured Oliver just wanted to get fucked by a bad girl. Tired of the Madisons and the Harpers of the world refusing to make eye contact during a BJ.

We happened to be at the same party, two summers ago. We drunkenly kissed in the boathouse, then he tried to put his hand down my bikini bottoms, and I shoved him in the lake.

A couple of weeks later, we met again at a party in Wicker Park. He gave me shit about the lake thing, I told him he was lucky we were swimming, not mountain-climbing.

The next day he sent a bouquet of three hundred pink roses to my father’s house.

That’s how it was from then on. He kept chasing after me with these grand, exotic gestures, and I went along with it for a while. Dinners, dancing, weekend trips. But I didn’t take it seriously. I doubted that he’d want to bring a gangster’s daughter home to meet Mr. and Mrs. Castle. Even around his friends, I could tell he was sometimes proud to show me off, sometimes nervous, like I might pull out a switchblade and shank somebody.