“Hey,” I told her, lifting her chin as I gathered my courage.

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry I did this to you.”

She frowned. “You didn’t do this to me.”

“I literally did,” I said. “Or are you forgetting that Brad’s not the only man in this kitchen who broke into your house?”

She released a shaky breath and tugged her chin out of my grip. “I haven’t forgotten. Trust me, that first time, I was just as ready to shoot you as I was Brad. But,” she looked away, worrying her lower lip between her teeth, “after that, I never felt like you wanted to hurt me. I can’t explain it, and I know it sounds stupid and illogical and dangerous, and, god, it is, but something in my gut told me to trust you.”

I leaned down and bumped my forehead against hers. “It was the snacks, wasn’t it?”

She huffed out a laugh. “What can I say? I’m a sucker for homemade trail mix.”

I pulled her into another hug, wanting to hold her right there for the rest of her life, shielding her from this terrible world with my body if that’s what it took to keep her safe from it. Unfortunately, the unconscious man at our feet would only stay that way for so long, and the sooner we got him out of there, the better.

I unwound my arms from Aly and dropped down beside Brad’s backpack. “I think tying him up with his own rope has a kind of poetic justice, don’t you?”

“I do.”

Now probably wasn’t the time for those two little words to make my stomach somersault, but hearing Aly say them warmed my heart in a way that made me want to hear them from her again, preferably while standing in front of an altar of some kind, or on a tropical beach, just the two of us – whichever she preferred.

She grabbed a pair of gloves and squatted beside me as I unzipped the bag.

“Son of a bitch,” she said when she got an up-close look at its contents. Her fingers shook as she reached in, flicked aside the knife, and pulled out the rope. “He’s done this before, hasn’t he?”

“Based on the police files I read, yes,” I told her.

“How has he gotten away with so much?”

“Money, and he’s not an idiot,” I said. “Most of the evidence tying him to his recent crimes is circumstantial. His only conviction happened when he was still a teen, and it got expunged from his record. He must have gotten complacent the other night.”

Together, we tied him up, with me hauling his arms and legs tight as I talked Aly through the motions. It would have gone faster if I had done it, but this was the kind of skill everyone should learn, and after such a close call, I was desperate to teach her everything I knew about self-defense and survivalism.

“Do I want to know how you know how to do this?” she asked halfway through.

“Probably not,” I told her. “No, not like that. That part of the rope goes under instead of over.”

She corrected her mistake. “Does it have something to do with why you didn’t want me to call the cops?”

“Surprisingly, no,” I said, and she shook her head.

Once Brad was trussed up, I made Aly double-check her knots, tugging as hard as she could to prove he couldn’t get free. We put his balaclava back in place and, inspired by my earlier freakout, dragged it over his eyes like a blindfold. Then we gagged him, and I went to grab my laptop from my bag.

An hour later, we had all the answers I could find in such a short amount of time. Brad’s phone was still at his house in a wealthy suburb north of the city. He’d disabled the GPS location services on his vehicle, so it might have been parked nearby, but if we couldn’t find it, the cops would have a hard time, too. Even if it got found, it’d be difficult to prove how it had gotten where it was or where Brad had gone after ditching it, so I felt confident that Aly would be in the clear.

“You should stay here,” I told her as I closed my laptop and met her gaze over the dining room table.

She shook her head, her expression turning mulish. “Absolutely not. This is a two-person job, and I’m not letting you shoulder the burden of it on your own. We’re doing this together, or not at all.”

I let out a heavy breath, knowing when I was beaten. Lowering my voice, I pulled her from her chair onto my lap and wrapped my arms around her waist. “We are talking about kidnapping and complicity in a potential murder.”

She gazed toward the sound of Brad struggling against his restraints just out of sight in the kitchen. “I’m well aware, but that son of a bitch broke in here planning to do unforgivable things to me, and I’m not a very forgiving person as it is. I’m not exaggerating when I say I could kill him myself and not lose any sleep over it.”

She turned to look at me then, and the absence of her usual light drew me up short. No, she wasn’t exaggerating. Right now, I was staring into the eyes of a dangerous woman. And to think I’d been worried about being too fucked up for her. What had she said the first time I watched her through her computer? That Fred only liked me because cats were sociopaths, and he recognized one of his own? I should have picked up on the subtext then: Fred liked two people, Aly and me, making us two peas in a pod.

She blinked, and life returned to her expression, her lips tugging up as she shook her head at me. “I can feel you getting hard right now.”

I met her gaze, uncaring, embracing the fucked up for the first time in my life because at least I wasn’t alone anymore. “And I bet if I reached into your panties, you’d be soaked.”

She rolled her eyes and pulled free from my embrace, standing. “I never should have told you what you do to me.”

“Yeah, sure, let’s chalk it up to that.”

She glared at me.

I booped her nose and was just about to pull her back into my lap when Brad tried to scream through his gag.

Twenty minutes later, we’d changed into real clothes – thank fuck I’d washed and dried my jeans before we fell asleep – I’d dosed Brad with his own chloroform, slapped duct tape over his gag, and shoved him into Aly’s snowboard bag.

While she made us coffee for the road, I left to get my car, keeping the lights off as I backed into her driveway to avoid unwanted attention. It was two a.m. on a Saturday, which meant the risk of someone still being up was greater than on a weekday night. Aly’s front lights were off, and thankfully, her Christmas ones were on a timer, so they’d gone dark hours ago.

This section of her block didn’t have a streetlight, but I still wasn’t taking any chances. I had another mini-blackout waiting to go, and I triggered it right before opening my car door. As the neighborhood plunged into darkness, I popped the trunk and sprinted toward Aly’s front porch. She threw the door open when I reached it, and together, we hauled the Bag o’ Brad up and shuffle-carried him outside, dropping him into the trunk with little ceremony and quietly shutting him in. That done, Aly doubled back for the coffee while I climbed into the driver’s seat.

The neighborhood lights flashed back to life right after I eased out of the driveway, and Aly and I shared a relieved look over the fact that we’d pulled our escape off.

“Here’s your coffee,” she said, passing over a travel mug. “Black with a little sugar, right?”

I raised my brows at her as I took it. “Yeah.”

She flashed me a pleased grin and turned forward in her seat. “I pay attention, too.”

The woman was down for kinky sex, knew how I liked my coffee, and was more than willing to aid in the murder of a rapist. What had I done to get so lucky?

I returned my focus to the road as I pulled out of her sleepy neighborhood onto the busier throughway. There were still cars out and about, but the further we got from the city, the fewer we passed, and in less than an hour, we were the only vehicle on pitch-dark country roads that wound through snow-covered cornfields.

Aly and I barely talked during the drive, both of us stuck in our heads over what we were doing and how much worse this night could have gone if Brad succeeded in breaking in. What little we did speak revolved around me catching her up on everything I’d learned while she was still on shift last night.