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I turned on my heel and walked toward my office, my heart hammering in my chest as one thought swirled through my head.

What the hell was that?

Chapter Two

Nightmare

The woman had a devil’s tail pinned to her ass.

Jesus.

Watching it swing back and forth as she disappeared behind the swinging door to the kitchen, I shook my head.

The rest of the outfit was the same thing I always saw her in—black skinny jeans, a black tee with Sinful Sweets scrawled across the front in hot pink lettering, and hot pink Chucks with little cupcakes hand-painted on the sides.

That wasn’t what had me shaking my head, though. It was the red, glittery devil horns on a headband shoved into all that blonde hair, and the matching tail safety-pinned to her ass.

She wasn’t the only thing that was festive.

My eyes shifted around the room at all the halloween shit.

Fake cobwebs stretched across the top of the display case. Little paper ghosts were hanging from the pressed-tin ceiling. A plastic skeleton was sitting on the pink velvet loveseat in the window with a coffee cup fastened to its hand.

If nothing else, the woman was festive.

“Is living beside her gonna be a problem?”

My head whipped around at the rumble of Denali’s voice. “Is what going to be a problem?”

Denali nodded his head in the direction his sister had gone, then leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest.

My brows shot up. “No,” I said. “Not a problem.”

And it wasn’t going to be.

I’d made my mind up about that the second the man told me where I’d be laying my head from now on.

Joy was wrong for me in every way a woman could be wrong for a man.

For one, she never shut up. I’d been around her maybe a dozen times since I’d started prospecting, and I didn’t think I’d seen her mouth close once. I’d spent ten years in a concrete box listening to men scream and steel doors slam, and all I wanted now was some goddamn peace and quiet.

For two, she was Denali’s baby sister. I wasn’t delusional. I knew he’d put me in the ground if I laid a hand on her.

And I wouldn’t blame him for it because I was a killer. Denali was the only other person to know that truth. Everyone else, my sisters included, thought I was innocent.

They were wrong. I wasn’t.

I’d killed Donnie Bradford in that alley ten years ago, and I’d slept just fine every night since knowing I’d rid the world of a rapist. You couldn’t reform men like him. There was no learning their lesson. You only had one choice, and that was to put them down like the rabid dog they were, which is precisely what I’d done.

That was why I would never make a move on Joy Cullen. She deserved a man whose hands were clean. Somebody who could give her a house with a white picket fence, two-point-five kids, and a golden retriever.

Not an ex-con who killed a cop.

And if those weren’t reason enough, I was too fucking old for her. Thirty-four to her twenty-four.

So, no. It wasn’t going to be a problem.

“Good.” Uncrossing his arms, he leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. “Because I’m only gonna say this once, so you need to⁠—”