“No.”
Leon walked into the kitchen, saw Alessandro, growled “For fuck’s sake!” and walked out.
Alessandro laughed, reached over, and stole a piece of one of the little orange peppers.
Arabella’s eyes got big. Runa opened her mouth and Arabella clamped her hand over it.
I gave Alessandro a sweet smile. “That’s not yours.”
Take the bait. You know you want to.
“Give me back my pepper. I mean it, Alessandro. You can’t have it.”
Three, two, one . . .
Alessandro winked at me and popped the pepper into his mouth. His gorgeous jaw moved.
He froze. His expression locked into a harsh mask.
“Don’t you want to say something suave?” I asked. “Go ahead. Flirt with me.”
A red flush washed over his face.
“What’s the matter, Alessandro? Do I make you nervous?”
His eyes teared.
I took pity on him. “Welcome to Texas. That ‘little bell pepper’ on fire in your mouth is called a habanero. The bathroom is down the hall, first door on the left. Don’t be a hero, Alessandro. Spit it out. I don’t have time to take you to the hospital.”
“Dibs on holding his hair while he pukes,” Runa announced.
“Fine,” Arabella said. “But I get to rub his back and make ‘there, there’ noises.”
Clearly, she and Runa were the same person.
Alessandro turned on his heel and marched out of the kitchen.
I held it together until I heard the bathroom door close and laughed. Runa put her head down on the table and squeaked. My sister giggled, making snorting noises.
“That was evil, Catalina,” Runa managed between howls of laughter.
“I told him to give it back. He saw me put on gloves.”
“He did,” Arabella moaned.
“Did you see the look on his face?” I laughed so hard, I cried a little. Some of it was probably a hysterical reaction to everything that had happened since Augustine dragged me out of bed three days ago, but I didn’t care. It felt so nice.
Leon walked back into the kitchen and slid a piece of paper on the island. “While you’re in a good mood.”
I swiped at my tears with my forearm and focused on the words. The purpose of this letter is to request full reimbursement for my personal property destroyed on January 6th by an employee of House Baylor Investigative Agency . . . Blah, blah, blah . . .
“Twenty-three thousand dollars?!”
Leon took a step back. “Remember, I’m your favorite cousin and you love me.”
“We only got paid seven thousand for the Yarrow job. You put us sixteen thousand in the hole. How, Leon?”
“I can explain. I got to the house to confront the accountant lady, and her husband ran out in his pajamas and started screaming that she locked herself in the panic room with their baby.”
“And you called the cops. Because that’s what we do when we find ourselves with a hostage situation. We defer to law enforcement, don’t we? Because they have authority and jurisdiction and experienced hostage negotiators, right, Leon? Because we can’t assume responsibility for resolving a hostage crisis since we don’t know what we’re doing. Because we don’t want anyone to die, and we don’t want to be sued.”
Leon raised his hands. “Who hasn’t been sued?”
“Us! We haven’t been sued. And we aren’t getting sued if I can help it. Did you call the cops?”
Alessandro chose that moment to wander back into the kitchen. He looked pale, his eyes were bloodshot, and his hands shook a little.
“You had to be there,” Leon said. “I made an executive decision. Time was of the essence.”
“Bullshit. It takes twenty minutes to drive from our house to that subdivision. You called here, convinced Grandma and Arabella to bring Brick over, and waited for twenty minutes for them to arrive. And then the three of you thought it would be a grand idea to drive Brick through the house. Literally!”
“It sounds bad when you put it that way,” Leon said. “But we saved a hostage.”
“No, you put the life of a child in danger.”
Arabella stirred. “Technically, it wasn’t exactly a child.”
I turned to Leon. He sighed, looking resigned, and held up his phone. On it a middle-aged white man clutched a giant orange cat.
“What is that?”
Leon visibly braced himself. “It’s Tuna. Also known as Baby.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
Leon backed away.
I dropped the knife and grabbed a habanero. “Come here.”
“What has gotten into you?” Leon backed away, keeping the island between us. “You’re always so calm and reasonable . . .”
I chased him around the island. “I’m trying to solve a murder and a kidnapping, a consortium of assassins is targeting us, we had to hire the most expensive private army in the country to keep us alive, I have no idea how to pay for any of it, and instead of making money, you decided to put us deeper in the hole. For a cat in a domestic dispute.”
“I didn’t know it was a cat until we busted down the door. He said baby, not fur baby.”
We made a full circle around the island. I stuck my hand out at Arabella. “Hold him.”
My sister shook her head. “I’m not involved.”
“You rode in Brick. You’re involved. I’m the Head of the House and I’m ordering you to hold him down so I can stuff this pepper up his nose.”
Alessandro moved into my path, put his hands around my waist, and picked me up. Everything stopped. He was holding me effortlessly five inches above the floor. He was touching me.
Leon made a break for the doorway.
“Put me down,” I growled.
“No, you’ve gone mad with power.”
“Alessandro!”
“It’s eight fifteen,” he said. “We have bigger fish to fry. Call Linus. Or I can keep holding you just like this. I don’t mind.”
Runa put her hands to her mouth, making a funnel with her fingers, and dramatically whispered. “Door number two.”
The fight went out of me. “I’ll make the call.”
Alessandro lowered me back to the floor. He held on to me for another long breath and slowly let go. I marched to the cutting board, dumped the chopped habaneros into the bowl, and pulled my gloves off. “Arabella, please put this into the food processor, pulse on high for three minutes, pour it in a pan, and simmer it for ten. Don’t let it burn. Also, I’m taking your Mercedes for this trip.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
I made a face at her and reached for the phone.
The moment we got into the car, Alessandro morphed back into a killer. The slick veneer of polish he projected in the kitchen dissolved into calm alertness. He wasn’t on edge, but he was ready, his magic coiled and simmering just under the surface. Right now, he was lying back in the passenger seat, his eyes closed. We were making our way west, to Cat Spring, a tiny town about an hour out of Houston.
Alessandro could look like multiple people. There was Instagram Alessandro, meeting my family, charming and harmless. There was sexy Alessandro, flirting and too hot for real life, posing on my bed and petting my dog. There was Alessandro the Count, in an expensive tailored suit, and Alessandro the Prime, frighteningly competent, his power an impenetrable wall wrapping around him at the trials. None of them was a lie. He put them on like clothes to match the occasion.