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Walking down the stairs.

Steve follows her.

Then, distantly, quietly, I hear a door click closed.

Beck exhales.

Then moves into Lex’s room.

“What the fuck?” Lex tries to get up, but Ace just shoves him back down again.

“Don’t.”

“Get the fuck out of my room!”

Beck does, but he does it a few minutes later and with his arms full of electronics.

“Seriously, what the fuck?” Lex snaps.

Beck ignores Lex, goes to Ace’s room and—I wince at the sound—drops everything he’s carrying onto the floor.

Then he comes back, hand shoved in Lex’s face.

“Phone,” he demands.

“Fuck you,” Lex snaps.

Ace growls and spins his brother around, planting his face into the wall.

All of five seconds later, Beck has Lex’s phone in hand.

“I’ll watch him pack, make sure I didn’t miss anything.” He passes the phone to Ace then jerks his chin at me. “But for now, I think you two need to get on a plane.”

FORTY

Ace

“Well this is a fucking mess,” Ally mutters, leaning back in her desk chair, her gaze pointed away from us, mind clearly already working through the latest crisis I’ve landed on her lap.

She sighs, drops her feet to the floor and glares at me.

“Do you know what landed in my inbox ten minutes before you walked through my office door, hand-in-hand with Violet fucking Conrad?”

“Lamour,” Vi corrects quietly from my side.

Ally studies her closely for a beat then one half of her mouth curves up. “Ace tell you that he and I fucked?”

“Ally,” I growl, “what the fuck?”

“Not on video, of course.” She lifts a delicate shoulder and drops it in a careless shrug. “I’m too smart for that.”

“Ally, shut the fuck up.”

The temperature drops in the office by at least ten degrees.

The flight from my parents’ home to L.A. took just under four hours.

And most of that time—aside from the multiple apologies she tried to give me—Vi was huddled into herself, curled into that protective position, her gaze pointed out the window.