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Draw a ring around yourself and the ones you love, and do your best to keep the evil out.

You spend your whole life fightin' this war.

And that's the best you can do.

Keep it away.

Protect it with everything you've got.

Because this is all you get.

One.

Small.

Space.

A flicker of light in the darkness.

Mike says nothin' and I take this as my cue to get the fuck out of here before the anger sets in.

I drive off, ready for the shots that never come.

I leave him behind.

And again, I do not look back.

CHAPTER 14

I miss the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange by thirty minutes, but it doesn't matter. It's not like I understand the significance. That's all Cash.

When I walk into the Ashby mansion a little past eight, the place is absolutely quiet except for the sound of the TV in the study. It's right off the entrance—the room where I recovered after the brand went septic.

The hospital bed and medical equipment are long gone, and all the couches and wingback chairs are back where Eleanor arranged them forty years ago.

Cash is sittin' on one couch, leanin' forward with elbows on knees, Wyatt in a chair with a weird grin on his face, both starin' up at the TV mounted over the fireplace where men in suits discuss the flow of fake money.

They both look up when I enter. Cash says, casually, like it's not any big deal, "How'd it go?"

"Well…" I set myself down in a chair opposite Wyatt. "He didn't kill me."

Cash nods. "Perfect." Then takes his eyes back to the suits.

"Savannah and Mercy?" I ask.

"Sleepin'," Wyatt says. "They haven't come down yet."

I decide to check on them myself, but when I go to stand, Cash says, "Hold on. Here we go…" And turns the volume up.

What comes next are a bunch of big words. Words I've heard before because Cash uses them like they grow in front gardens. Just somethin' everybody has.

I hear margin call, and called the loans, and default, and some fella in a blue tie keeps sayin’ collateral like it’s a cuss word he’s not allowed to say on TV.

Then a red word flashes across the bottom of the screen—HALTED—and Wyatt lifts his glass of whiskey at eight in the mornin’ and hollers, “That’s one!”

Then it’s the senator, Marcus’s daddy, bein’ walked out of his own front door at sunup with his hands behind his back. Insider tradin’. I don’t know what that is either, but I know what handcuffs look like.

Five minutes later the number comes back, lower than when it left, and a few minutes after that, it’s HALTED again.