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  I stared at him. “Could you be more specific?”

  “Everything between Gessner, Clay, Blalock, and Hempstead.”

  Dear God. That was almost two square miles of industrial real estate and our warehouse was sitting smack in the middle of his land. Every day I drove past these businesses and nothing seemed different.

  “When did you buy this land?”

  “I started the day Adam Pierce was arrested.”

  “Why would you do this?”

  “Because you live in the middle of an industrial jungle, Nevada.” His face was hard. “You have a number of small roads, you have industrial traffic going through here, and there are about a thousand places one could hide a strike team. I bought it because there is no way to effectively secure this location.”

  “And you’ve secured it?” I had diagnosed him as a control freak long ago, but this was going too far.

  “Yes. Now this area is patrolled, equipped with structure defenses, and secured by armed personnel.”

  “No, Rogan. Just no.”

  “The only reason these people came in on that particular road was because I allowed it. I shut down all nonessential roads at night. I made sure that stealth wasn’t an option. They were forced to punch through and come in hot, rather than use covert tactics and slit your throats while you slept. Even so, an assault of this scale is difficult to control. That’s why I stood there and presented a convenient target. Now we have a solid lead.”

  So that’s where the spiked barricades came from. I should’ve known. When you worked for Rogan, he made sure you were defended. He went so far as to make you immune to financial pressure from outside sources: his companies provided your car loan, your kids’ college loans, your mortgage . . .

  Oh no. No, he wouldn’t.

  My voice could’ve frozen the air in the warehouse. “Rogan, do you own my mortgage?”

  “Not personally.”

  “Damn it!” He couldn’t have touched our business. Augustine would never sell, so he went after my home instead.

  “Nevada, it’s in a trust. I don’t personally own it. One of my companies owns it. I can’t foreclose on it and I can’t sell it. The terms remained exactly the same.”

  “You had no right to buy my mortgage!”

  “I had every right. It was right there. Anybody could’ve bought it and used it as leverage.”

  “You and I’ll never be financially equal; I get that. But you can’t just buy up chunks of my life. For anything between us to work, I have to be able to say no to you. If you own my house, I lose that ability. I lose my independence.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “There is no such thing as a simple meeting now. Any communication from you will be an invitation from a man who owns my house.”

  “Have I used it as leverage? Have I mentioned it? Did I wrap it up with a pretty ribbon and offer it to you on a silver platter and said, ‘Here is your mortgage, sleep with me?’”

  “You didn’t have to. It’s enough I know you could.”

  “So now you’re blaming me for the things I could theoretically do?”

  “I’m blaming you for the thing you already did. You bought every business around me and then you bought my mortgage. For any kind of relationship to work, I have to have a choice to walk away from it. You’re taking that ability away from me. You know I would do anything to keep the roof over my family’s head.”

  “That’s not even logical,” he said, his voice precise and sharp.

  “Oh? Then why didn’t you tell me about it?”

  “I did tell you when you asked.”

  “Let’s look at the sequence of events: you proposition me, I tell you no, you buy my mortgage. The fact that you don’t tell me about it just reinforces the fact that you may have used it as leverage. Because you would, Rogan. You will use every resource at your disposal to win.”

  “I don’t want to win.” He locked his jaw. “This isn’t some idiotic competition between you and me to see if I can wear you down. I didn’t tell you because I knew you would react just like this.”

  “You knew it was the wrong move.”

  “Wake up,” he growled. “Tonight sixteen trained killers came here to murder you. They had military-grade weapons and equipment. They would’ve driven a tanker truck into this place, detonated the charges, and shot all of you as you ran out with your skin on fire. Do you honestly think that your seventy-three-year-old grandmother in an aging tank, your mother with a permanent injury and a sniper rifle, and a cage full of guns can protect you? This is House warfare. You were vulnerable. You were vulnerable physically and financially. I eliminated those vulnerabilities.”

  His magic flared around him, raging, and met mine. Our powers collided.

  “I didn’t ask you to eliminate them. They were not yours!”

  “Your normal existence is over, Nevada. It was over when you took Harrison’s contract. The first time you popped on these people’s radar, you were forced to go after Adam Pierce. This time you voluntarily put yourself in the crosshairs. They can no longer ignore you. This isn’t about ethics, laws, or noble adherence to the rules. This is about survival. I didn’t tell you about it because you desperately cling to the illusion that you’re still a normal person living a normal life, and I tried to preserve it for you, because I wanted to keep your head above the river of shit and blood as long as I could.”

  “I waded into that river on my own. I don’t need your help. Get off my property,” I ground out.

  Rogan marched through the open garage door to the middle of the street, turned toward me, and spread his arms. “I’m on my property now. Is everything fine now? Did all of your problems disappear and none of this happened?”

  “I’m going to shoot him,” I squeezed through my teeth.

  “No, that would be murder,” Grandma Frida told me, her voice soothing. “You’ve had a long day. Let’s put your magic away. You know what you need? A nice cup of chamomile tea and a tranquilizer . . .”

  I turned and marched out of the motor pool. It was that or I would explode.

  Chapter 8

  It was morning and my mother made breakfast. Various animals ate from different bowls on the floor, all with the exception of Bunny, who dutifully sat by Matilda’s side and tried his best not to drool at the smell of bacon. As I watched, Matilda quietly dropped a piece on the floor. Bunny wolfed it down and resumed his vigil.

  My mother had her patient face on. Catalina cut strawberries on Matilda’s plate. Arabella made odd patterns in her pancake with the tines of her fork. Leon, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed enough for me to want to strangle him, shoveled bacon into his mouth. Bern devoured his food in a methodical fashion. One day he would drop all pretense and just divide his plate into a grid. Everyone looked tired. Nobody talked.

  Bern had done an audit of our finances. Mad Rogan owned our mortgage. He also owned our car loans and our business line of credit. We’d received paperwork regarding the change in ownership for all those things, but our mortgage had already been sold once, so my mother simply shrugged and filed it. A small college loan Bernard had taken out last year in addition to his scholarship was the only thing Rogan left alone, probably because it came through a federal financial aid program and couldn’t be acquired.

  “We can pay off the vehicles,” Grandma Frida said. “I let that girl have the last ATV, so we’ve got two and a burned-out wreck, but the two vehicles are in decent condition with only some damage. They’re state of the art. I have the buyers lined up. We can unload them for about three hundred thousand each.”

  “We should keep one,” Mom said. “We may need it the way things are going.”

  Grandma Frida made big eyes and tried to inconspicuously point in my direction.

  “Keep one,” I said, struggling to swallow my pancake. Overnight the red welts on my neck had matured into a spectacular bruise. My throat hurt. “It doesn’t matter. We still owe a million four hundred thousand on the mortgage.�
�

  I had reached a seething point last night. Eventually my anger boiled over, and now only quiet determination remained. Rogan owned our mortgage. I would just have to work very hard and take it back from him. There was no other way to do it. We were Baylors. We paid our debts, and when life knocked us down, we picked ourselves up and punched it in the teeth. Sometimes that hurt more, but we still did it.

  “A million and four hundred thousand? That’s almost the original price of the warehouse,” Arabella said. “We’ve been paying on it for seven years. How is that possible?”

  “Interest,” Catalina said with a distant look that manifested when she did complicated math in her head. “With the 4.5 percent interest and finance charges, that’s about right. I can crunch the exact numbers for you.”

  “That’s not fair. Buying on credit sucks,” Arabella declared.

  “We would have to be attacked about three more times before we can pay the mortgage off,” I said. “We’d need six more ATVs to sell to buy Rogan out.”

  Leon speared his strawberry with a fork. “I, for one, welcome our new Mad Rogan Overlord. I’m eager to learn and prove to be a valuable member of his team.”

  “Shut up,” Catalina, Bernard, and Arabella said at the same time.

  Leon squinted at them. “Maybe he’d let me have a gun, unlike some people.”

  “You don’t need a gun,” Mom snapped.

  “Do you even know where that overlord line is from?” Bern asked.

  “A TV show.”

  “No, you idiot, it’s from a movie called the Empire of the Ants. Look it up.” Bern’s phone chirped. He looked at it. “It’s Bug. Okay, so, two things. One, I have the video of the mercenary dude being loaded on the plane to Johannesburg, alive, like Rogan promised. Do you want to see it?”

  “No.” Rogan was a controlling overbearing asshole, but when he gave his word, he kept it.

  “Two, this morning I made a door in Scorpion’s server and Bug spent the last hour waltzing around in their confidential files. Scorpion was hired through an intermediary and paid by electronic transfer. Rogan’s people found the intermediary. He was paid in cash by an unidentified man.”

  “How much?”

  “Half a million.”

  “We’re expensive, yus!” Arabella said.

  “I left Scorpion a little present,” Bern said. “Bug activated it a couple of minutes ago, before hightailing it out of their servers.”

  “What’s the present?” I asked.

  “When they try to access their confidential files, they will find a marathon of Hello Kitty’s Paradise. All twelve years of it in the original Japanese.”

  “I like Hello Kitty,” Matilda said.

  Cornelius cleared his throat. “I feel partially responsible for this situation.”

  Matilda reached over and petted his arm. “It’s okay, Daddy.”

  Everything stopped as all of us collectively struggled with an overload of cute.

  “Thank you,” Cornelius told her. “But I’m responsible. I knew what was to come, or at least I suspected, yet I minimized that risk in our initial conversation.”

  I sighed. “You didn’t minimize anything. I was aware of the risk when I took the job. The responsibility for everything that happened is on me.”

  “Your outrage over Rogan’s actions is well warranted,” Cornelius said, obviously choosing his words carefully. “But the danger of your family being harmed or put under pressure is very real. He isn’t wrong.”

  I dropped my napkin on the table. “I know he isn’t wrong in his assessment, Cornelius. I’m upset because he refuses to acknowledge that I’m also right.”

  “If he’d come to you with all of it, you would never have agreed to the purchase,” Bernard said.

  “Probably not, but at least I would’ve had a choice.”

  “What choice?” he said.

  “I don’t know.” I got up and went to rinse my plate.

  “Are we going to school today?” Leon asked.

  “No,” my mother said.

  “Great.” Leon smiled. “Then I’m going to go outside and see if I can get a gun. Since my own family won’t let me have one, I’ll have to beg strangers.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Catalina asked.

  “Do you think guns are just lying around outside?” Arabella asked. “Or did someone plant a gun tree in our parking lot?”

  “Have any of you looked outside?” Leon asked. “Since the sunrise, I mean.”

  Bern poked his phone. “He’s right. I think we should look outside.”

  I got up and marched down the hallway, through the office, and to the front door, my entire family behind me. I pushed the door open.

  An armored transport rolled past us, carefully staying on the other side of a white line someone had painted on the pavement around our property. Across the street, a team of military-looking people installed an M198 Howitzer. A mobile howitzer that resembled a tank roared down the street in the opposite direction. To the right, an observation tower was going up, put together by another military-looking crew. Two severely groomed people in tactical gear double-timed it past us. The one on the left was leading what looked like an abnormally large grizzly on a ridiculously thin leather leash. The grizzly wore a leather harness marked “Sergeant Teddy.”

  My mother’s mouth hung open.

  Grandma Frida elbowed my mom in the ribs. “Pinch me, Penelope. It’s Fort Sill.”

  I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

  A trim woman about my age approached the white line and stopped. Her straight dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Her skin was a rich medium brown with an olive tint, her eyes were dark, and her features pointed at both African and possibly Latino heritage. She wore a beige pantsuit.

  “Melosa Cordero with a message from Mad Rogan,” she said. “Permission to enter?”

  This was ridiculous. “Sure.”

  She stepped over the white line.

  “The major regrets that his presence makes you uncomfortable; however, he wants me to inform you that Baranovsky’s shindig is tomorrow, so he respectfully suggests that you go shopping. I’m to accompany you. I’m authorized to make purchases on his behalf.”

  “That won’t be necessary.” Rogan wouldn’t be paying for anything else of mine if I could help it. “You’re free to go. I’ll buy my own dress, Ms. Cordero.”

  “Please call me Mel. He said you would say that. I’m to tell you that—” She cleared her throat and said in a deeper voice, obviously quoting, “This is strictly business. Don’t throw a tantrum, Nevada. It’s not like you.”

  A tantrum, huh? I made a heroic effort to keep my mouth shut. I was reasonably sure that if I opened it, I’d breathe fire and melt her face off.

  “He said that if you got this look on your face, I’m to tell you that I’m an aegis,” Melosa said. “I’m ranked as Significant and I’m a trained bodyguard. My mission is to shield you and Cornelius. I’m also to remind you that the safety of your client is your first priority.”

  I pulled out my phone and texted Rogan.

  Thank you so much for providing us with an aegis. So kind of you.

  My pleasure. Is there anything else I can do for you?

  As a matter of fact there is. Make a fist and hit yourself with it.

  Is this the part where I tell you some ridiculously condescending line about how attractive you are when you’re angry?

  Do you actually have a death wish?

  Are you going to do something about it?

  Argh.

  “Cornelius?” I asked. “Your agreement with Rogan is terminated once we discover the identity of your wife’s killer?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Good.” Because once that contract was over, I would make Rogan eat every single word of this message. I had no idea how I would do it, but it would happen.

  “If I may,” Melosa said. “We have a saying in this business. Don’t look a gifted aegis in the mou
th.”

  “What was your last assignment?” my mother asked.

  “I was guarding the Argentinian finance minister,” Melosa said. “I was pulled from that detail last night, but I’m in operative condition. Equzol is a hell of a drug.”

  “I feel like I missed something. We’re going to Baranovsky’s art gala?” Cornelius asked, his face puzzled.

  That’s right. He’d slept through it. I told him that my personal “relationship” with Rogan wouldn’t interfere with this investigation. I would keep my word, no matter what it cost me.

  “Come inside,” I told Melosa. “There are pancakes and sausage. Feel free to have some while I bring Cornelius up to speed.”

  Briefing Cornelius took a lot longer than I’d anticipated and by the time I was done, my throat was in serious pain. He took it well. He and Melosa watched the video of the overpass incident, and then Cornelius declared he would be coming with us from now on.

  Which was how all three of us ended up going to see Ferika Luga together. Cornelius said that his sister frequently shopped there for formal attire, and since I had no idea where to buy a suitable dress, I decided to trust his judgment. I also dipped into my emergency budget. I wouldn’t be wearing a dress Rogan bought me.

  Since my Mazda was gone I abandoned all pretense of blending into the traffic and took one of the captured ATVs instead. ATVs weren’t made for comfort or for city traffic. We stood out like a sore thumb, and by the end of the trip, I’d need a butt replacement. The day had started on a high note so far. I couldn’t wait to see how wonderful things would get from now on.

  As we drove out of the neighborhood, we passed a crew installing an electric fence along Clay Road.

  “Did Rogan move his headquarters somewhere around here?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Melosa answered. “It’s not cost effective to protect two different headquarters.”

  “Where is it located?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  I finally understood why he was called Mad Rogan. It wasn’t because he was insane. It was because he drove you nuts with sheer frustration.

  We had to make a detour into an older neighborhood, where Cornelius disappeared down a narrow street with another mysterious sack.