Page 86 of Lights Out

Aly swiveled toward him. “Yes? Dad said to come here if I was ever in trouble.”

“Fuck!” Nico bit out. “I might have feds watching me. You can’t just bring me corpses like I’m the morgue.”

“Hey,” I said, stepping in front of Aly. He might be her uncle, but hearing him speak to her in that tone was enough to have me second-guessing whether or not I cared about making a good impression. “She didn’t know.”

Nico threw his hands up. “Tell that to the feds!” He wheeled around, yelling as he left the room. “Greg! Stefan! Alec! Junior! Get your asses up! We got a problem!”

Aly sidled next to me, and I wrapped an arm around her shoulder, glancing down to see her looking chagrined.

“Whoops?” she said.

I squeezed her close. “What were we supposed to do? Call the guy and warn him and the feds who might have tapped his phone?”

Footsteps thundered overhead, Nico’s shouts rousing everyone as he raised the alarm. Someone ran down a set of stairs nearby, and we turned toward the sound as a young man burst into the room, still pulling on a gray t-shirt. He was maybe Aly’s height at 5’8”, with dark hair and a rail-thin frame. Despite his baby face and freckles, something about the hardness in his eyes made me think he was older than he looked.

“Keys!” he yelled, gesturing toward Aly.

“Hey, Greg. Nice to see you, too,” she grumbled, digging around in her purse for them.

So this was Greg. I eyed her youngest cousin. Maybe he was exactly as old as he looked, and the hardness came from what he’d already done for his father. God knew I understood the way parents could prematurely age someone.

“Come on,” he said. “We gotta go.”

Aly extended her keys toward him. “What do you mean, we?”

Greg shook his head. “Keep ‘em. You drove in. You gotta drive out.” He turned toward me. “Where’s your coat?”

“Mudroom,” I said automatically.

He nodded and gestured toward his cousin. “Let’s get out of here.”

Aly took a hesitant step forward, pulling out of my embrace. “What about Josh?”

Greg’s eyes flashed to mine. “I’m gonna pretend to be him so anyone watching won’t get suspicious, and he’s gonna stay here and fill Dad in.”

“Uh-uh,” Aly said. “He’s not getting separated from me.”

“He’ll be fine,” Greg told her. “You think Dad wants to get on your bad side by messing with your boy toy?” He glanced at me again, giving me a once over. “Plus, it looks like he can handle himself. Now, move, Aly. We don’t have much time.”

She turned back to me, expression worried.

I stepped in and kissed her forehead before lifting my eyes to Greg. “I get that you’re in a rush, but I have to know what your plan is.”

He shifted from one foot to the other, talking so fast that he almost tripped over his words. “We’re gonna get to a safe spot and have someone remove the body.”

“What if the feds trail you?” I said.

“We’ll lose them.”

I held his gaze for a long moment. Jesus, he was just a kid, barely out of high school. “Don’t let anything happen to your cousin.”

“I won’t,” he said, stepping toward the door like he was trying to prompt Aly into action.

I looked down at her. “I’ll be okay. You?”

Her brows pinched together as she frowned. “I hope so. I don’t like this.”

“Me neither, but they’re the experts, and we have to trust that they know best.”

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