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he thinking risking you with his stupidity?”
    Trust Manny to scrape away Dante’s scabs with a quick, precise cut of his tongue.
    “I hated this guy got away the last time,” Dante sighed. “But now I’m wondering if I can be fair. I can’t fuck this up, tío . It’s like a second chance I’ve got to fix what I fucked up the last time.”
    He couldn’t tell his uncle he wanted Rook Stevens in his bed—nearly as badly as he wanted Stevens behind bars.
    “You can’t blame yourself for Vince messing up or him dying, honey. He made the choice not to be honest, not to get treatment.” Manny began to fit lids to the empty butter containers, making sure they matched up. “He was sick, mijo . He could have gotten help, but he didn’t. That is not your fault.”
    “He gave up, tío. Because I fucked up our case. I let Stevens get into my head. After the club. It all went to shit after that.”
    Dante hated he could still feel the silken smoothness of Stevens’s skin on his hands and the velvet brush of the former thief’s mouth on his. Especially since he was having a hard time remembering what Vince looked like when he’d been alive. The strongest memory he had of the man who’d taught him how to be a detective was a sliver of waxy yellow skin and bones, coughing himself to death in a hospital bed.
    “Everybody fucks up, Dante.”
    “I’m a cop, tío. People depend upon me to be objective. I want Stevens to pay for what he’s done, but it’s got to be done right—by the book.” Dante scrubbed at his face with his bare hand, rasping his palm over his stubble-rough jaw. “I just need to be fair, you know?”
    “Of course you can be, Dante.” His uncle patted his arm. “You’re the fairest man I know. But what you need to be more is honest with yourself. If you have that, everything else can take care of itself. Now, help an old queen get to bed and turn the lights off after me. You know I hate to walk through a dark house.”
    “Ah no, not with these on.” Dante tugged at the sleeve of his uncle’s outrageous pajamas. He bent over, kissing his uncle on the cheek. “As long as you have these, you’ll never have to be scared of the dark ever again.”

     

Four
    The funniest thing about fear, Rook discovered, was the feeling of his gums peeling back from his teeth and the flutter of sharp cuts running up and down his lungs and chest when the terror of his life finally hit him.
    It hadn’t taken him a lot of effort to sneak into his place. Once his grandfather’s lawyers got him cut loose, he bolted for his place to wait out the crime lab team swarming through the building. Someone at LAPD boarded up the front of his shop and wreathed the devastation in do-not-cross stickers, and for some reason, the cops thought a realtor lock on the back door was somehow going to keep people out. Or maybe they were thinking it would keep out the general shambling hordes of thieves and opportunists running around in Hollywood, but the truth was, a three-year-old with a plastic hammer could break apart a lock box in a matter of minutes.
    It’d taken him about a second and a twist of his wrist, but Rook wasn’t one to brag.
    Or at least not when he had fear choking his throat as firmly as Montoya’s fingers had been around his neck.
    “That wasn’t your neck Montoya had his hand around, fuckwad,” Rook scolded himself as he mounted the stairs to his apartment. “It was your goddamned dick. Okay, almost your dick. Through your jeans, but still, dick.”
    He’d tried not to look at the store itself, but there was no avoiding it when he walked past a windowed wall to get to the stairwell leading up to his apartment. Avoiding the elevator itself was key. That particular horror was smack-dab behind the main showroom, and there was no way he could get to it without doing a full waltz across the ground floor.
    Still, the police tape—the cursed yellow plastic shreds left behind in the rubble of Rook’s life—was