“I’ll talk to Dad,” he continued. “Mom’s already on board. She knows she didn’t raise a weak woman and she knows you’re all Nightingale.”

Oh shit. It was coming.

I looked to my feet.

“Ally,” he called.

I deep-breathed and looked to Lee.

“There are a million other things I’d want for you. It took me a while and Hank to lay it out, but the thing I should want most is what you want. So now I’m tellin’ you, like yesterday with that note, don’t ever doubt it, anytime you need me, I’m there.”

He always was.

Always.

“I love you,” I whispered.

“I know,” he replied.

I clenched my teeth to fight crying.

Lee wasn’t done rocking my world.

“After you left yesterday afternoon, Eddie got in my face.”

Oh man.

“We had words,” he carried on. “But I heard him and I heard you. Now I’m askin’ you to back off Darius.”

Oh no.

Hell no.

He wasn’t buttering me up with flattery, acceptance and promises to work with the Hot Bunch Dream Team and then socking this shit to me.

I turned fully to him. “Lee. No way.”

He lifted a hand and dropped it, shaking his head. “Eddie and I are gonna talk to Malia. See if she’s down for a possible approach from Darius. We’ll make sure she knows it’s only possible. But if she’s not, and gives indication she never will be, Eddie and me do not want this brought up to him. He’ll fight it, but he also might hope. If there’s no hope, I don’t want to set him up to feel that pain.”

That made sense.

“Okay, I’ll give you and Eddie time,” I agreed and jotted a call to Duke to give him a status report on my list of things to do that day.

“We make a miracle happen and talk Darius around, we pull in Jules. She knows the way to go about this shit and she can ease this for all three of them.”

That was such a brilliant idea I wished I’d thought of it myself.

“Right,” I said.

“And until all that’s in motion, Indy, Mom, Dad, Tom, Shirleen, no one knows about this. Darius is not gonna take kindly to us gettin’ in his shit. He needs fallback positions. If he picks someone in our crew, you out of his picture, it’ll be Indy or Shirleen.”

I nodded.

“You down with that?” he asked.

“Absolutely.”

That was when Lee nodded.

“This is the right thing to do,” I told him.

“It always has been,” he told me.

He was right about that, and suddenly I realized this had been weighing on him, and Eddie, and it had been doing it heavily.

For seventeen years.

Which sucked.

He looked away and I saw his jaw tighten before he looked back at me.

“Eddie and me, both of us, when he got into that shit, we almost lost him, Ally. I was in the Army when he got dug in deep with Leon so I wasn’t around to get involved. Eddie was and did. Hank was and did. When I was around, I did. But there was no turning back for him, he was that angry. His mind fucked, he made misguided decisions, not cluein’ into the fact that the man who was usin’ him was the man who deserved his anger. If he can hold anger that deep and extreme that it blinds him to the right path, you need to be prepared for what will come of this.”

“I am,” I assured him.

Lee studied me a moment and it felt like he was assessing the validity of my statement.

I would find he wasn’t when he admitted, “I’m not.”

“That right there,” I declared instantly. “That loyalty to Darius, loyalty that would make you, the strongest most fearless man I know, shy away from doing what’s right in order not to lose your friend, that’s what Liam needs to know is in his father.”

I muscle jumped in his jaw before he jerked up his chin.

Badass for You’re right.

I fought my smile.

Time to move on, though not to more pleasant things.

“I have a stalker,” I announced.

Immediately Lee straightened away from the jamb.

“What the fuck?” he whispered scarily.

“Not an old client or anyone affected by my work. An old neighbor. Don’t know him. Never met him. He was just around. And he takes pictures of me.”

“Are you shittin’ me?” he asked.