This was so screwed up, I realized all the shit I had already seen in my life was a goddamn birthday cake with fucking whippy icing compared to this clusterfuck. The freaking sprinkles on top were Landon’s voice popping into my head.

“When all odds are against you, and there’s no way out, you can’t lose your focus. That’s the time you have to find that point inside of yourself—the one that knows there is no such word as defeat—and fucking tie yourself to it, you hear me? If you don’t, you’re lost.”

Strangely enough, the words calmed me. I breathed deeply and leaned my arms across my knees.

I needed to put it all in perspective. I needed to find that focal point inside of myself and cling to it. Once I had my focus, I’d be able to complete the tasks necessary to get all of us out of this mess.

First things first: I got drunk.

Raine was pissed, and I was going to have to explain how it happened. I had the option of glossing over it for the really nasty shit that would follow in hopes that she kind of forgot the whole night I spent off my rocker, but I was pretty sure her short-term memory was better than that. The only other option was promising it wouldn’t happen again and apologizing profusely.

At least I was good at that. With a partial plan in my head, I stood and brushed sand from my ass before heading back in the other direction at a slow jog.

Assuming Raine didn’t pack a bag and head for the door at that point, it brought me to the next item—my son. She knew about him from our time on the raft together. When you’re in a situation you don’t think you’ll survive, there’s no point in hiding anything from each other. I’d told her every sordid detail about my life, the pregnancy of my former girlfriend included. I’d also promptly forgotten about the whole topic because thinking about it fucking hurt.

It was all a lot more real now, and sweeping it under the rug wasn’t an option any longer. I had to deal with it. There was only one way I could face it, and that was with Raine by my side. If she wasn’t there for me, there would be no point in any of the rest of it. If she was there for me, I knew she’d also be there for my son.

And now for the big one: I had to fight in another tournament.

Strangely enough, the fight itself wasn’t my biggest concern. On one level, I knew it would be dangerous—it always was—but it wasn’t the fear of losing my life that caused my concern. No, my worry was what would happen after the battle was over. When I was standing over the last dead body, what would Franks demand next in exchange for Raine and Alex’s safety?

Anything and everything, because he was a cold-hearted motherfucker.

I wasn’t sure if Landon really believed what he had told me or not, but I knew Franks wasn’t going to let me off so easily. I’d testified against him, and there was no forgiving that. He would always use it against me, always hold a grudge. He would want more when the time came, and he’d always know exactly what to hold over my head to get it. There was only one way to stop that cycle.

I’m going to have to kill Joseph Franks.

It wouldn’t be an easy task. A guy like that is never without his personal security. Even if I managed to do it, which was a long shot, there would be one other person who couldn’t allow it to happen without punishment—Landon Stark.

I’d have to kill Landon, too.

My steps faltered at the thought. Though there had been plenty of times I’d wished him dead, and more than one occasion when I seriously considered killing him myself, this was completely different. Despite everything that had happened in the past and everything that was happening now, I didn’t hold any anger toward him. I knew he was only doing what he was told to do. It was part of the life, and he was just as buried in it as I was.

Does Franks have something on Landon?

I had no idea. As far as I knew, Landon had no family, no ties, nothing at all to hold over his head except his loyalty to Franks’ organization and his dedication to the fighters he trained.

Back to the more immediate issue: explaining all of this to Raine. She wasn’t just going to be pissed off; she was going to shit kittens over the whole idea. She knew about the kind of people I had been associated with from her father’s days as a cop, but she’d never been immersed in it. Raine prided herself on being a good, upstanding citizen. She hated what I had done in the past. It’s not like she was the kind of girl who would have married into the mafia for any reason. She was with me under the pretense that I was no longer involved in any of that shit.

But I was. I am. On some level, I always would be.

There was no getting out of it once you were in unless it was in a coffin or tossed in a convenient body of water. Around here, they even had the added bonus of gators to clean up the mess. I had never discussed any of this with Raine because it simply hadn’t come up. I wasn’t expecting my retirement from the games to be subject to recall.

Pretty fucking naïve.

There was only one way to make her understand, and that was to tell her everything. It was going to scare her half to death, and I didn’t want to do it, but if she didn’t realize all our lives were on the line, she was going to fight me the whole way, and I couldn’t have that.

If I was going to keep us all alive, I needed her to have my back. I needed to know she would be there with me, even if she didn’t like it, all the way through to the very end. With her on my side, I’d make it.

I shook the raindrops out of my hair and looked at the watch on my wrist. I had about twenty minutes to get back, and I was going to have to run faster to avoid being late. Adding tardiness to Raine’s list of my screwups would be bad. I raced along the shore, grabbed my shoes and socks when I got to them, and made it back to the condo just in time.

In my head, I told myself I could do this. One more fight. One more fight would get me my son—the only child I would ever have. All of that was much easier than explaining to Raine everything that was happening.

Focus. One thing at a time.

I took a deep breath and opened the door.

Raine was still there on the couch, looking like she hadn’t moved since I left. She glanced over to me, picked the remote up off the arm of the couch, and flipped off the TV.

“You ready now?” she asked.

She’d been crying. I could hear it in her voice, and it threw me off my game immediately. I just wanted to wrap her up in my arms and tell her everything was going to be just fine, but that was a bigger load of bullshit than I could have pulled off.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

“You have a lot of explaining to do,” Raine said. “Where are you going to start?”

“Are you going to leave?” I asked. I swallowed hard as I braced myself for her answer. If she decided she was going to leave, everything else was moot.

“That depends a little on what you say next,” Raine said as she crossed her arms. “I’m pissed at you, Sebastian Stark. I can’t deny that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone that wasted, and I have no idea what to think about your finding out you have a son.”

“You knew I had one out there somewhere.”

“But you never knew anything about him,” she said. “You didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl before, and you never talked about him at all. Obviously, something changed. Did you see that woman?”

I shook my head. I had seen her, kind of, but I knew that wasn’t what she meant. The picture of Jillian with her brains blown out scurried around in my head until I pushed it away.

Raine raised an eyebrow at me, and I looked at the floor for a moment to gather myself before I sat on the couch. She turned toward me and tucked one leg underneath her. After a moment of silence, it became clear that I was supposed to start.

“I got drunk,” I said quietly.

“That much was blindingly obvious.”

I nodded and went with what I knew.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s not going to happen again. I just…I just slipped.”

“Into a bottle of booze?” Raine uncrossed her arms and leaned back against the arm of the couch with her elbows. I shrugged in response. She stared at me a long moment before sighing. Her expression softened. “Please just tell me what happened. How did you find out about your son?”

Might as well get it over with.

“I saw Landon yesterday,” I told her.

“Here?” Raine’s eyes widened. “He’s in Miami?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think he’s been here for a while.”

“Where did you see him?”

“We went to lunch at that place up Ocean Drive,” I said. “The one attached to a hotel.”

“You went to lunch with him?” Raine gasped.

I could just see the mental images in her head of Landon and me sipping fruity drinks at some beachside café. It was almost enough to make me laugh but not quite.

“He didn’t really give me an option.”

“Why didn’t you just walk away?”

My arms tensed and I gritted my teeth, which did nothing for my headache. This was the part I didn’t know how to approach. I wasn’t sure I could explain what it meant to be tied to someone the way I was tied to him.

“I’ve told you about him before,” I reminded her. “He’s not the kind of person who lets you just walk away from a conversation he intends to have with you. He asks; I answer. That’s how it works. He had shit to tell me, so he told me over food.”

“And he chooses now to tell you about your son? He had to have known about him before now.”

“He did,” I nodded. “It’s just…well, circumstances have changed.”

I took a minute to figure out how to continue, and Raine gave me the time. I turned to sit with my hands clasped together on my thigh. I twisted my fingers around themselves, wrapped them around my knee as some lame-ass support mechanism, and licked my lips before I went on.

“You know all about Jillian,” I started. “You know she got pregnant and then left with another guy. Well, they got married and were apparently raising my kid in Italy. Last week…”

I trailed off. I didn’t even know how to tell her this much. How was I going to get everything out? This was going to take a lot of talking if I kept stopping, though, and I had to get through it, convince her, and get prepared to fight. I couldn’t waste any time beating around the bush or whatever, so I just blurted it out.

“Well, they’re dead, and now he doesn’t have anyone.”

Raine bit down on her lower lip, and her forehead creased.

“What happened to them?”

“They were shot,” I said. I cleared my throat. “Murdered.”

She sat up a little straighter, and I could see both shock and sorrow in her eyes.

“Do they know who did it?”

It was just like Raine to be concerned about people she’d never met. Even if everything she knew about them was bad, she’d still be sorry something had happened to them.

“They’ll never know,” I said. “That’s usually part of being involved in the kind of business Jillian’s family runs. She’s related to Franks, so she grew up in it. She probably wasn’t expecting it to hit her like that, but the risk is always there.”

Raine eyed me.

“You know, don’t you?” she said. “You know who killed them.”

I took in a long breath and rubbed at my eyes. Apparently, I took too long to answer.

“Bastian?” Raine’s voice went soft, and I could hear the fear in her tone. “Did you…did you do it?”

“What?” I looked back to her quickly. “Fuck—no! Shit, Raine, when would I have gone to Italy?”

She scrunched up her face and glanced away before speaking so softly I could hardly hear her.

“You could have…had someone else do it.”

“Well, I didn’t!” As much as I might have hated Jillian, I wouldn’t have done something like that. The idea that Raine thought I was capable of taking out a contract on my ex pissed me off. “For fuck’s sake, Raine!”

I shook my head and let out an exasperated sigh.

“Well, who then?” she asked.

“I have my theories,” I admitted. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is, they’re dead, and now Franks is holding my kid for ransom, basically.”

“He wants money?” Raine said, confused. “I would think he’d have plenty of that.”

“He’d always take more money,” I said with a humorless laugh, “but no, he’s not asking for any money from me.”

Raine’s face went pale.

“What does he want?” she said so quietly that again, I could barely make out the words.