Outside the casino, checkout-time traffic clogged the main drive. I finally spotted Karin, Benji, and Pete in my cousin’s new sedan. All three looked pensive as I wove through the bumper-to-bumper snarl of cars to reach them.

When I hopped in the backseat beside Benji, he snapped his fingers at me. “Lemme see your phone.”

Frowning, I handed it over. “What’s going on?”

While he flew through screens at lightning speed, Karin gazed at me from the front seat with something like pity. “You aren’t falling for Dmitri, hon. You’re already there, aren’t you?”

I hesitated, then murmured, “Yes, I am.”

Her expression said, Welcome to the world of heartache.

“What the hell’s happening? He’s going to wonder where I went.”

Pete glanced back from behind the wheel. “We’re rescuing you.”

“From what?”

He honked at the cars blocking his way. “We’ll explain everything, but for now, we need to get out of here.”

“To go where?”

Benji glanced up. “Don’t say. Not yet. Her phone is hot.”

“Hot??” My heart raced. “Who would bug it? Did you guys just wake up this morning and think ‘Vice probably has a bug’?”

Pete said, “Your husband did it.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Panic churned. “Why would he?”

Benji powered down my phone, handing it back to me. “Pretty sure we can talk freely now.”

“You can’t know it was Dmitri.” But who else would do something like that to me? Who would have the chance? “Maybe . . . maybe the cartel is monitoring us for some reason!”

Benji shook his head. “You’re the only one in the family with a tap. Plus, the hack to pirate the microphone is really sophisticated. Something you’d see from a tech genius. Assume he made a clone and accessed all of your data in real time as well.”

Data. Every text, picture, e-mail, and web search. My face heated as I thought of everything I’d written about him, all the things I’d said about him while in range of that phone. “Since when?”

“No way to tell,” he said. “If I had to guess, I’d say from the beginning.”

From the first night? Then Dmitri had probably heard me telling Karin I’d never come harder than with him. I cast my mind back. He must’ve heard my family plotting how to shake him down. He’d called with news about my new car right when we’d been wondering how to monetize his interest! “Then he knows what we are. What we’ve done.” And he still wanted me? I stared down at my ring. He might’ve started spying on me in the beginning for security reasons. Maybe he regretted it—the same way I wished I’d never used him. Maybe he and I could try counseling. “This isn’t necessarily teotwawki here.”

“There’s more,” Karin said. “A couple of weeks back, I was talking to Giovanni, the Caly concierge. He said Sevastyan was at the casino about a year ago.”

“Dmitri told me about that trip.” When he’d made the decision to turn his life around then.

Karin said, “I used some juice to order security footage of his visit. We got it two days ago.” She’d waited for me to reach Vegas before she would risk communicating with me on a potentially hot phone.

My anxiety multiplied. Here comes the other shoe. “And?”

“Sevastyan sees you. He followed you.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. If he saw me and was interested, why not approach me? He’s a gorgeous billionaire.”

“He wasn’t so hot back then,” Pete said. “He was much thinner and looked strung out. Pretty sure he was a drug addict. And he’d been drinking like he was trying to kill himself.”

He kind of had been. But that was before he’d started to work out and eat right. Before he’d kicked those pills. “Still, I would’ve given him the freaking time of day.”

“No, Vice, you wouldn’t have,” Karin said. “Because you were at your bachelorette party.”

“What are you saying?”

Pete laid on the horn. “He got rid of your fiancé that week.”

My mind zoomed back to the night I’d caught Brett. Yes, I’d marveled at how off-the-charts hot that woman had been.

The showgirl who’d somehow found her way to our party. To Brett.

Oh, my God. “My grift sense said it was a badger game! I just suspected you guys of pulling it—to get the gull out of my life.”

“Not us,” Karin said. “Sevastyan must’ve hooked up with a private investigator in Vegas and put a temptation scenario into motion.”

I had no urge to get back together with Brett or anything, but could any man have withstood that kind of lure? Fifteen minutes ago, I would’ve bet my life on Dmitri. Now I didn’t even know him.

He’d set me up for devastation, ensuring I found my fiancé with another woman. The success of his scheme had depended on my pain.

“We’ve started digging with detective agencies,” Pete said. “We’ll know more soon enough.” He craned his head, looking for a way to reverse.

I’d love one too—a way to reverse the last month of my life. I’d known something was off, had felt it down to my bones! “You guys think Dmitri’s been spying on me for a year?”

“Yeah, sis.” Benji’s solemn eyes made mine water. “I’d bet ten large he was.”