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Kostya rubbed the back of his neck, then took a sip of his beer. “I’m not taking that dare.” Then Kostya turned to look at Nolan. “Is he recruiting you?”

Nolan lifted up his hands, palms out. “He knows that Maggie has a lot of friends in Jasper Creek, so he told me that if we ever moved back to Tennessee, there would be a job waiting for me. Apparently, he’s getting more business than he can handle.”

“Good for him,” Kostya smiled sincerely. “Good for him.” Then he scowled. “But if he lures you away, he and I will be having words.”

It took Jenny a while to figure out all the players when she sat down in Gideon and Jada’s living room. Of course, since it was Jada’s house, she caught onto who Jada was. She was the gorgeous black woman who had set out all of the munchies and shooed the men away.

Then there was Lark Barona. She was married to Kostya Barona. Jenny didn’t really remember him from her rescue. Brax had explained that Kostya was his team leader, and that Lark was an investigative journalist. She wondered if she still did that line of work since she was so late in her pregnancy.

“You were kept in a hole in the ground?” Maggie clarified.

Leila nodded. “Not one of my favorite adventures.” She shrugged.

“Don’t downplay it,” Lark Barona said quietly. “What happened to you was horrific.”

Leila closed her eyes and shrugged. “I’m still working on that. Humor is how I cope. But when it happens to someone else, it’s horrific.” She turned away from Lark and leaned across the coffee table to Jenny. “Honey, I was in that hole for a day and a half. How long were you kept captive in Bangladesh?”

Jenny swung her head around, taking her time to look into the faces of each of the five women who had gathered today to give her support. All she saw was kindness and empathy.

“Three weeks. I was kept in a shack. To begin with, it had a clay floor, but it was monsoon season, so eventually it was a floor that was six inches of mud. I had a bucket for a toilet and they fed me roti bread, rice, and when I was lucky, lentil soup. I was so sick that in the end I thought I was just going to drown in the mud, and that didn’t sound too bad, you know?”

She hated the fact that she’d been this close to giving up. Her tears welled up.

Brax’s sister CiCi was sitting beside her. She grabbed her hand and held it tight, just like her brother would have.

“The important thing is that you didn’t. You survived,” CiCi murmured.

“What is it with being rained on?” Leila asked. “I swear, these assholes like it when we get rained on.”

“What happened to your captors?” Jenny asked Leila.

“Dead. Every single one of them. What about yours?”

“I’m not sure.”

Leila looked over at the men drinking beer in the kitchen. “Linc?”

He must have been listening in because he gave her some kind of sign. She turned back to Jenny. “Your captors are dead, too.”

Jenny looked at her, stunned.

“But I think there were a lot of them,” Jenny protested.

Jada picked up her half-full glass of wine and sat back in her chair. “Honey, that’s how they roll. Someone goes after us, or some woman in distress, they take care of the problem. We’re not privy to the particulars, but we know that in the end, we’re safe.”

“That’s not true, sometimes we see what happens,” Maggie piped up. “I had nightmares for a long time.”

Lark leaned forward. “Because of how Nolan took care of that crazy man who tried to kidnap you?”

“No. Thinking of that calms me down. But thinking about how Kyle could have ended up taking me and I would have disappeared and never seen Nolan or Iris ever again.”

“How did you stop the nightmares?” Jenny asked.

“I started with a counselor down in Jasper Creek. That’s where we were when Nolan took leave for a while. Then when we moved here to Virginia and got married, Nolan found a way for me to choose from a couple of different psychologists. I found a man this time, and I see him from time to time. Not often, maybe every other month.”

“That’s what Brax thinks I need to do.”

“Why?” Lark asked.