“Yes.” I sighed. “I realized that we had to act. Arabella had turned eighteen a couple of months before this happened. When our dad died, he was the sole owner of the agency and he split his shares equally between the three of us.”
“You voted her out of the business?” He glanced at me, the disbelief clear on his face.
“No! Of course not. Nevada took the agency over from Dad at its lowest point and built it back up. She’s the reason our bills were paid and there was food on the table. We could never lock her out.”
“Then what?”
“We took away her ability to financially contribute to the business.”
He laughed under his breath.
“She could take all the cases she wanted, she could use all of our resources, but instead of getting a set salary and letting the bulk of the fee go toward our debt, she had to keep everything she earned. I told her that if she wanted to work herself to death, there was nothing we could do about it, but we wouldn’t be complicit in her slow suicide.”
He smiled.
“What?”
“An elegant solution. It’s very you. Was she mad?”
“Livid. She tried to force us to rescind the provision, but we wouldn’t do it. Then she got this strange look on her face and said, ‘I can’t be the head of a family that doesn’t trust me.’ And then she walked out.”
The hurt on her face would stay with me forever.
“She didn’t speak to me for three weeks. She wouldn’t take my calls, she didn’t respond to my texts . . . Nevada gave me my first case, she taught me how to drive, she stayed up and talked to me when I would cry in my room over some teenage catastrophe. Once, she drove all over the city for hours looking for me when I used my magic accidentally and had to run away from a kid . . .”
“What?”
I shook my head. “It was stupid. I was fifteen, he was paying attention to me, and I went on a date with him. It got out of hand. I wanted him to like me, and my magic leaked. It was just a trickle, but it was enough. Everything was going well until I had to go home, and he grabbed me by my hair and tried to drag me into his car. I ran away and hid, and Nevada searched for hours until she found me.”
He had an odd look on his face.
“Anyway, Nevada was always there for me and I had hurt her. It was my idea. I had ripped a hole in our family.”
“Arabella went along with it. I assume the rest of the family did too.”
“Yes, but I was the mastermind.”
“Did she call you that?”
“Leon did.”
“Your cousin is a hotheaded idiot.”
“Leon is impulsive, but he wasn’t wrong.” I shrugged. “Nevada came to see me eventually. She told me she understood where I was coming from, but she couldn’t be the Head of the House anymore. As far as she was concerned, that was a vote of no confidence. Somebody had to be her replacement. I was the next oldest Prime. I had engineered the coup. There was nobody else.”
“What happened to the agency?” he asked.
“It belongs to all of us. Nevada is still a shareholder. I run the House Baylor part of it, and she’s in charge of Baylor Investigative Agency. She takes complicated cases, mostly pro bono, usually to help people who have nowhere else to go. A lot of her work revolves around Rogan too. They’re still dealing with the fallout from three years ago.”
“It had to happen,” Alessandro said. “You can’t belong to two Houses at the same time, Catalina. Eventually you have to choose. No matter how close of an alliance you have with your family, once you’re married, your loyalty belongs to your spouse.”
“Is that why you never went through with any of your engagements?” I was really brave. Or maybe it was the blood loss. I was bleeding from a dozen shallow gashes, and the stench of Lawrence’s bones made me feel woozy.
“It was part of it,” he said.
We turned onto our street.
The burnt-out shell of a Guardian lay on its side on the left. Black, greasy smoke rose from it. Next to it a charred body in urban fatigues sprawled on the ground.
The spike barriers were up, blocking access from the sides. Ahead, a Howitzer sat by the guard shack. Sergeant Heart had arrived.
Alessandro raised his eyebrows.
A huge, shaggy shadow charged from behind the shack.
“Stop!” I grabbed Alessandro’s arm. “Don’t hurt him.”
He slammed on the brakes.
An enormous grizzly sprinted toward our car. I unbuckled my seat belt and jumped out. The massive bear reared up on his hind legs and loomed over me, blocking the floodlight at the top of the guard booth.
I held out my arms. The grizzly leaned over and hugged me to him.
I caught a glimpse of Alessandro, halfway to us, a chain saw in his hands.
“This is Sergeant Teddy,” I told him, leaning my head against the soft fur. “He won’t hurt me. He’s a pacifist.”
“Che gabbia di matti!” Alessandro said.
We might be a bunch of lunatics, but it didn’t matter. I was finally home.
The street in front of the warehouse was strewn with bodies. The streetlamps, which we turned on in an emergency, flooded the scene with bright electric light, and every detail of the corpses was clearly visible. Some had simply fallen, their expressions blank, neat bullet holes in their skulls. Those had to belong to Leon and my mother. They were the lucky ones. They died fast. The others lay contorted, their faces twisted into hideous masks by fear and pain. It took them a while to die and they knew it was happening. They felt it.
Ex-soldiers in the dark uniforms of Rogan’s private army moved around them, quick and efficient, all wearing hoods, gas masks, and gloves up to their elbows.
Runa sat in front of the motor pool on a huge tire, watching as Heart’s people hooked the bodies and pulled them onto plastic, vacuum sealing them like pieces of meat to be stored in the freezer. There was an odd look on her face, not exactly blank but tired and sort of satisfied.
She saw me. “I told them to just burn the bodies, but they didn’t listen to me.”
I came and sat next to her on the tire. Across from us at the other end of the motor pool Ragnar sat at the wooden table, his head tilted up. He was looking at the moon.
“I told him to stay inside.” Runa shook her head at her brother. “He didn’t. Those three bodies over there”—she pointed at the far right, where three fallen bodies formed a clump of arms and legs—“they’re his. He asked me if that meant he was now a werewolf, and now he’s staring at the moon and won’t talk to me.”
Alessandro walked over to Ragnar and sat down by him.
Runa looked at me. “Nobody listens to me. What the hell happened to you?”
“Flying scorpion ticks.”
Runa raised her eyebrows.
“Never mind that,” I told her. “What happened here?”
Runa took a deep breath, puffed her cheeks out like a chipmunk and let the air out. “Let’s see . . . You left. Your security dude, the one with the A name . . .”
“Abarca?”
“Yes, him. He came in to talk to your mom. He wanted to hire somebody, she said no, he got all upset and started ranting about authority issues and how he was in charge of security, and your mom lost her patience and told him he was being replaced. He freaked out. He actually screamed at her. And she got this weird look on her face.”