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than three weeks before their May wedding—the rat bastard dumped her for a soft, feminine nurse with shoulders broad enough to prop up his fragile ego. Ten years together and— poof! —it was over. The replacement understood his needs, David had explained in his reasonable voice. She wasn’t always trying to engage in power plays and one-upmanship. She got him. A man in his position just wanted to come home to a double Lagavulin, not a ball buster—or worse, an empty house and no dinner on the table because Kinsey was out working an event for her job.
    Ooh, she wished she’d taken a rusty spoon to his ’nads. See how reasonable his voice sounded then.
    Setting her fury aside until later when she could feed it with Cherry Garcia, she looked up to find the mayor’s knotted expression fixed on a spot at the end of the densely packed bar. Or more particularly, on an Amazonian brunette with a rumpus of red-streaked curls and an unimpressed expression, which she was using on . . . well, well, well, if it wasn’t Gage “Baby Thor” Simpson.
    Gage was enthusiastically waving his hands to explain something really important . With each increasingly dramatic gesture, the woman’s eyebrows hitched higher in skepticism until finally he shook her shoulders impatiently and she laughed. Their easy camaraderie and obvious bond radiated off them, even from paces away. If those two weren’t related, Kinsey would sacrifice her meat virginity to the sausage bonanza.
    “Do you know Gage Simpson?” she asked Eli, who was still riveted by the exchange at the bar.
    “Who?”
    “That’s Gage Simpson, one of the Dempseys. And if I’m not mistaken, the woman with him is his sister, Alexandra.”
    “Tell me how it went with Almeida.” There was a snappishness to his tone as he tore his gaze away from the Dempseys, or more specifically, from Alexandra. Interesting.
    “Nothing to worry about. The wheels of rehabilitation are in motion.”
    “Sam Cochrane is making a bigger fuss of this than I expected,” Eli said, with not a small amount of weariness in his voice. “He’s siding with the police.”
    One of the mayor’s biggest campaign donors, Chicago real estate baron, media mogul, and Trump-style billionaire Sam Cochrane owned the Chicago Tribune . His paper had gone to town with a scathing editorial on the video and repeated calls for head rolling every day since. Cochrane had also made clear his intentions to neither endorse nor support financially his reelection bid if Eli didn’t come down hard on anything that carried the faintest whiff of scandal.
    “However it goes, he comes out a winner,” Kinsey said, knowing full well how sharks like Cochrane operated. “Calling out the bad behavior of public servants allows him to preach from the mountain while selling more newspapers and tightening the vise on you.”
    “Didn’t take you long to figure out the lay of the land.” Eli’s smile was wry. “There’s a bit more to it, though. Cochrane has history with the Dempseys. Used to co-own that bar of theirs with Sean Dempsey before they fell out. Now his daughter, Darcy, is shacked up with Beck Rivera.”
    The Dempsey foster brother she had yet to meet. This just got better and better. “And let me guess? He and Firefighter Rivera get along like a house on fire.”
    “Exactly. Darcy’s a sweet kid, though, and Rivera’s got a great left hook. Helluva boxer. I won a packet on him at the last Battle of the Badges.”
    Marvelous, another Dempsey with homicidal tendencies.
    “So, Almeida and McGinnis,” the mayor prompted. “What do we know?”
    “The fight was apparently over Alexandra Dempsey. She’s a probationary firefighter with six months’ service at Engine 6. Her report said McGinnis had too much to drink and was getting handsy with some of the female patrons, including her, but I have a feeling there’s more to it.” That significant look Luke had shared with his brothers said there was a mile-deep