Sure, you gotta do your best to prepare for your luck to arrive, and you have to be ready for the opportunities, but in the end it always takes more than luck. And sometimes, skill isn’t enough either.

So if something is important—I’m not talking pre-algebra important, OK? I’m talking real life-or-death important shit—well, then you do what you gotta do.

When you want to win no matter what, you just get the job done and say f**k the straight-and-narrow. Karma can kiss my ass for this one, I earned it.

Life is not always fair, but it does present you with choices. I could’ve taken my ten bucks and bought food. I could’ve ignored that card and called myself delusional for even thinking I could be worthy of that kind of job. I could’ve walked out when I heard what the TRAGIC contract really was and I could’ve told Spencer Shrike no when he asked to paint my body.

Fate is fragile. Deviate from it just a tiny fraction and you end up somewhere else. And as scary as that sounds, what it really means is that I’m the one in control. I’ve always been the one in control, I just never saw it clearly before. I control my reactions to the things life throws at me, so I control my fate.

Ronin might not be perfect, but he’s close enough for me.

I want him, I love him, and he’s mine.

That’s why I’m on the road right now. I know Ford and Spencer are probably going crazy—and if I turned my phone on I’d have dozens of messages telling me how pissed off they are—but I do not care.

Ronin might be required to take the fall for them, but he will not take a fall for me.

No way.

I’d rather go down fighting than give up and slink away like a coward. I can fix this, I know what that FBI guy wants, and I’m gonna go chase it down and get Ronin out of that jail cell if it’s the last thing I do.

Chapter Thirty-Six - ROOK

The drive to the village where my life with Jon made my dark childhood look like a bright Easter morning sunrise is long, filled with dread, and scary as f**k. I have all that time to just replay all the terrible things that happened inside that house.

Wayne, Illinois is not the kind of place where horrors happen. Wayne is the type of place where little girls join the Pony Club, boys get Porsches for their eighteenth birthdays, and parents stay together because there’s too much money at stake to split up. At least that’s how it is now. But a hundred years ago it was just another farm town known for breeding draft horses.

Our property butts up against a pretty forest preserve and I pull into a parking lot about half a mile from the house. The park is deserted this time of year unless there’s a classroom of little kids on a field trip, and today there isn’t. So no one notices when I ride the bike into the woods, weaving my way between trees, until I get far enough away from the lot to hide it behind a thicket of shrubbery. This way I can walk up to the house from the back and make sure no one’s waiting for me. It also gives me a nice hidden getaway route and all that f**king running with Ford is gonna pay off big if I have to make a break for it.

The house Jon and I lived in is at least a hundred years old and when it comes into view through the heavily wooded trees, I get the same creepy feeling I did that first day we came to look at it after his uncle died.

Picture the house in Night of the Living Dead. Not that pu**y remake where the house is some beautiful, sprawling Victorian-ish thing. But the original Night of the Living Dead, the black and white one from the Sixties that has that two-story farmhouse sitting off in the distance in a large field, white siding, half-ass porch, and those tall, skinny windows that just scream horror movie.

That’s my house in Wayne, Illinois.

The first time Jon and I came to look at it I refused to get out of the car. I was so creeped out he didn’t even push the issue, simply left me there in the passenger seat while he went inside and looked around. He only stayed about fifteen minutes and when he came back all he said was, I’ll clean it up and remodel the kitchen. I just stared at him. Because it was so out of character for him to give a shit about what I thought that I couldn’t even process it. I have no idea what he saw that day but I can take a good guess. Because his uncle was psycho. Psycho as in I keep my quadruple amputee mother under the bed on wheels, X-Files style.

I’m not exaggerating. Uncle Pete was caught with body parts in his basement and died while on trial.

I almost forget to breathe as little by little the house comes into view. It looks small on the outside but inside it’s one of those old places with huge rooms. It’s dumpy because the outside never got any attention. The siding is still a dingy grayish white, the tall hedges that line the far side of the property are all overgrown and bushy, the unattached garage roof is slightly sagging, and the yard grass is knee-high. But if you include the third-floor attic and the basement, it’s almost three thousand square feet of dump.

I never once set foot upstairs. Not even the second floor. It was off limits to me and even though it was kinda cramped only living in that little bit of space, I had absolutely no problem with that. I gladly made do.

Money did not make a shit of difference in my life once I got with Jon. When I was out on the streets, hungry, cold, and desperate, I thought for sure money was the answer. That’s the whole reason I went home with Jon in the first place. He had it all. He was cute, he had the job, the college degree, the Lincoln Park condo, the car, the clothes. He had everything I thought I wanted.

Just like Ronin, right? Ronin had all that too. And he wonders why it took me so long to get on board with him. It was a fool me twice kinda thing.