His hands came up to cover his mouth, and tears started in his eyes.

Roux said to me, “Shut up or I will shut you up. Luca? Go. Now.” The gun wavered off me, almost wobbling in his direction as she gestured him toward the stairs. “Get as much as you can in the car. You know what to prioritize. Ninety seconds. I mean it.”

He shook his head no, but his body stuttered into action. He turned and ran between us, through the gun’s field of vision and her own, headed for the stairs. I should have moved then, but he was by me in a flash. I had missed the moment.

“I can’t let you take him,” I told Roux.

She laughed outright, a bitter snarl of sound. “You think you’re saving that kid? You don’t know what you’re trying to send him back to. You have no idea. But I do. I know. I know exactly what his life was like.” Her eyes closed, hardly more than a long blink, but I believed her. I’d seen the Polaroids. She’d lived with horror, and when her eyes reopened, I could see it reflected in her gaze. “I’ll shoot you in your head before I let the boy go back to that.”

I nodded, hands up, compliant, but I didn’t think she would shoot me. Not yet. Not in front of Luca. Not even with him upstairs. She’d get him out of the house first.

She said, “Jesus, how’d you find out? Your fucking stepchild?”

I shook my head, lying on instinct. “Luca let it slip. He said Seattle.” She was staring me down, skeptical, so I kept talking. I didn’t want her thinking too hard about Maddy, tucked into bed, reading or texting, only a few blocks away. “I thought I was looking for a man. I thought a man was after you. Someone dangerous. Because of the Polaroids.”

“Those are old,” Roux said dismissively.

Luca came down, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt now, a half-full duffel in his hands. His eyes darted back and forth between us.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Nothing, baby. Go behind me and get the laptop,” Roux told him, moving forward, closer to me. The gun got so much bigger.

He hurried around her to the coffee table and stuffed the computer into the bag.

“Who was he? Mr. Polaroids, I mean,” I asked, to keep her talking.

She stared at me over the gun, eyes like ice chips. “My husband. He’ll never do it again, though.” She let her eyes drift to the gun, then back to mine. “You understand me?”

I did. Perfectly. She was saying I wasn’t the only person in the room who had once taken a human life. She was warning me that she’d do it again if she had to. Maybe not even if she had to. Maybe I had made her just angry enough, and she knew she’d never get my money now. I still didn’t believe that she would shoot me with Luca in the room, though. I hoped.

“Are you—” Luca said, then stopped.

“It’s fine,” she told him. “We’re just gonna ghost. Get the money.”

Luca came over and knelt by me, pulling out the Risk box and dumping the money and the IDs and other papers into the bag. This close, he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

Roux said, “Go on out to the car. Start it. I’ll be right there.”

My mouth went dry. If Luca left, if he was all the way out in the car . . . How loud was a gun? Roux’s gaze flicked off me to the sofa, just for a moment, and I knew then that she was going to do it. She would send him out, then wrap the gun in one of the ugly brown couch cushions to muffle the sound. She would shoot me, then coolly grab some clothes and make a run for it. How long would Faith Wheeler’s detective take, explaining the situation to the local cops? How long before they came? I heard no sirens in the distance. Nothing. But would they use sirens, given the situation?

Luca stood up and took the Picasso down from the mantel. He got a towel out of the duffel and began wrapping it up.

“You’re not going to shoot me,” I said to Roux, my voice shaking. “You need me to wire you the money. And I will. You can text me a bank, an account number. I’ll wire it anywhere you want, all of it, if you only leave him here.”

That paused Luca’s hands, and he turned wide eyes to Roux.

She didn’t even think about it. “Fuck you. I love him.”

He shuddered under the weight of those words, then finished wrapping the Picasso. And maybe she did love him, in some sick and awful way. Loved him like a lioness loves zebra. Loved him like a cannibal. I remembered her disdain for men, how she found boys so sweet. When I reminded her that boys grew up, she’d said, But at that point don’t they also get the hell out of your house? It made me wonder if there had been boys before Luca. It made me wonder where those boys were now.

“What happens next?” Luca asked her, wavering beside me. He had put the Picasso in the duffel. It was full, and he was ready to go, if he was going. But he paused, looking back and forth between us. I could see that he was panicked.

Roux told him, “We leave. I’m going to tie her ass up, and then I’ll get some clothes on and we’ll take off. Please go load the car.”

That reassured him, but she was lying. If he left, she would put a bullet in me. I laid a hand on him, keeping him beside me.

“Ezra, wait,” I said, as if that name had power to pause him, and it worked.

“Go start the car,” Roux said, calm and sure. Talking over me. “I’m right behind you.”

“Your mom wants to see you so bad.” I kept talking directly to him. He was still looking back and forth between us, his chin trembling. “She’s so worried. She loves you so much.”

He hesitated, teetering on some internal cusp.

“Your dad is worried, too, I bet,” Roux said, and at her words he flinched.

He’d refused to talk about his dad, I remembered. But there was no mention of a father on the website.

“Your father is not with her,” I said, trying to stall him. I could feel momentum gathering in his body. He pressed his lips together, firming his chin, and now his gaze was fixed on Roux. Still I kept talking, desperate. “It’s only your mom.”

He said, “She picked him. She knows what he’s like. She picked him over me.”

He started across the room, bag in hand, obedient but unthinking. He crossed through the gun’s field of vision, and this time I was ready. This time I used it.

I grabbed the poker off the little stand and moved toward her, staying behind him, lifting the poker as I ran.

“Get out of the—” she said, gun swinging wildly, trying to find me. I dodged left, keeping him between us. Then I shoved him, and he got tangled in his own long legs and the bag, falling in slow motion. I ran at her, the poker raised, swinging for the gun hand, the only thing I could reach this fast.

I heard the roar of the shot.

She must have missed, because I was still moving. I brought the poker down, as hard as I could, across her arm. She screamed, and I felt the give of bone under the blow. The gun went flying toward the sofa, thumping to the carpet. I heard Luca screaming, too, high-pitched and terrified, like a child. He was trying to crawl out of the way, the duffel bag abandoned. Roux, her wrist hanging down at an odd angle, was already moving for the gun.

I dropped the poker and leaped for it, too, reaching. I saw without understanding the bright red running down my outstretched arm. I was closer, but Roux spun to me.

She grabbed at me, trying to pull me back with her good arm. We got snarled up in each other, falling. She rolled, banging us both into the coffee table, but it got her on top. She jabbed her good hand down hard at my shoulder. An exquisite kind of pain came then. The world went white at the edges of my vision. Her hand drew back wet with blood, and now I could feel it gushing out of me in beats, so warm. I understood she hadn’t missed.

That red, wet hand came clawing at my face, trying to find my eyes, and I hit at her, banging at her other wrist where it hung all kinds of wrongly. She reared back, yelling something. Words. She was telling Luca to get it, to get the gun, but I couldn’t see him. I bucked her off, and I scrambled toward the couch on all fours. Then it was in my hands, that cold, black metal, surprisingly heavy. I heaved myself up, sitting on the floor with the gun in my good hand, sweeping back and forth, seeking her. Luca was still on the floor as well, moving away from the bag and both of us, scooting backward toward the front door. He was shaking his head no, and his eyes were huge.

Roux scrambled to her feet, and I saw that she now had the poker in her good hand.

We faced each other in the empty room. She already had the poker raised, but she was four steps away, and I had the gun leveled directly at the center of her chest.

I could feel a worsening pulse of awful pain deep in my shoulder. I felt it as a burning, the slick heat of the blood running out of me. She undulated in my vision, as if she were underwater again. As if I were seeing her magnified, the way things always are beneath the waves. A darkness was closing in at the edges of my eyes.

My phone was ringing again, somewhere, buzzing against the carpet. Luca’s mother. But Luca was scooting backward toward the door, crying.