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Once we gathered enough capital to hire our own security, Mom brought Lieutenant Abarca in to oversee it. They’d served together, and he’d needed a job. Abarca supervised the hiring and the training of our guards, and he seemed competent. He was approachable and friendly, but as time went on, the cracks in our security became more and more apparent.
Abarca dropped into a chair. “Hi Pen.”
Pen was not my mother’s favorite nickname.
“The security barriers weren’t up, George,” she said. “I sent the alert myself. You acknowledged it. And then my daughter almost got hit by a truck that shouldn’t have been on that road.”
“It was Justin’s truck. He delivers groceries to the DFAC, and he has done so for the last eight months. He was not a security risk and we were almost out of coffee. You know an army runs on coffee.” He grinned.
His smile bounced off my mother like rubber bullets off a tank. “This isn’t a joke. You put my children in danger. You put your own people in danger. Why was Kelly alone in the booth?”
“Merriweather’s daughter had a recital,” Abarca said. “These are people, Penelope. They have lives and families, just like you.”
My mom gave him her thousand-yard stare. “Their families don’t employ them, George. We do. And we have the right to demand a certain level of professionalism and discipline. Last night your people let an Illusion Prime roll right through the security checkpoint all the way to our front door.”
“That was an extraordinary case. Nobody could have foreseen that.”
“Really?” My mother leaned forward. “Our security personnel, who are supposed to maintain a log of departures and arrivals, didn’t realize that Catalina was already home or think it odd that she came back in a strange car driven by a chauffeur none of them had ever seen before?”
Abarca’s face took on a patient expression. “People are human. They make mistakes.”
“They can make mistakes on someone else’s dime.” Mom’s face held no mercy. “The two guards who let Montgomery through are fired.”
Abarca stared at her in stunned silence. A moment passed.
“You can’t mean that. Lopez is taking care of her sick mother and Walton has two kids.”
“I have five kids and a mother in this house, and I want to keep them all alive. Mistakes like that get people killed.”
Abarca shook his head. “I won’t do it, Pen. If you want them gone, you’re going to have to tell them yourself.”
He and Mom locked gazes.
“Either you fire them, or you can pack your shit and go with them.”
“We’re not at war anymore,” Abarca said.
“You’re wrong,” I said. “As of today, we are at war.”
“You’re dismissed,” Mom said. “Let me know your decision by tomorrow.”
Abarca looked at me, then at her, then at me again, stood up, and left.
I turned back to my mother.
“I know,” she said. “If we don’t fire him, he’s going to get himself killed and our people too.”
“Then let’s fire him and hire someone else.” We would give him a generous severance package. At this point, I would rather take a financial hit than keep at it. I knew everyone who worked for us. I didn’t want any of them to die because we failed to properly train them. We needed better leadership.
Mom sighed. “It’s not that simple. If we fire him, there is no telling how many of them will quit. They’re loyal to him.”
“Mom, they need to be loyal to us.”
“I know,” Mom said. “But at least they provide some protection. I don’t want to fire him until we have a replacement ready.”
“We could give Abarca a second chance,” Bern said.
Mom’s expression hardened. “We won’t get a second chance, Bernard. We will be dead. Second chances are given when someone is good but makes an honest mistake or their nerves get the better of them. I gave Abarca the authority to hire his own unit. I questioned his choices at the time and he personally vouched for every soldier he brought to the table. It was his responsibility to train them and mold them into a cohesive unit. It’s six months later, and they’re failing at the basic security procedures. That’s not nerves. That’s incompetence. Hiring him was a mistake, my mistake. I wasted our time and money and I put us in danger . . .”
She looked like she was about to walk across hot coals barefoot. Oh, Mom.
“It wasn’t a mistake,” I said. “It just didn’t work out. He looked really good on paper. He has all the qualifications. He’s just . . .”
“He just cares about being liked more than he cares about doing his job,” Mom finished. “I’ll handle it.”
Bern raised his head from his laptop. “Found something,” he said.
I found Runa in the guest bedroom. She sat on the queen bed, next to Ragnar, who was curled up under a blanket. Sleep had softened his face. He looked so young right now.
“Hey,” I said quietly.
“Hey. He’s still asleep,” Runa said. “Is that normal?”
“Yes. It’s normal.”
“Have you actually done this before?”
“Yes.”
Last year one of Rogan’s security people had developed an unhealthy obsession with Arabella and decided to break into our house in the middle of the night. I had fallen asleep in the media room, and he surprised me as he blundered past. He slept for two days, and once he woke up, he was an emotional zombie for a week. Rogan fired him and strongly encouraged him to move out of state. The last we heard, the man was in Alaska.
“What happens if he doesn’t wake up tomorrow?”
“We’ll put him on an IV and wait some more. His respiration is normal, his heartbeat is steady, and if we really tried, we could probably wake him up for a few seconds. He just needs rest, Runa.”
She looked at her brother, reached over, and pulled a corner of the blanket up to expose his feet. “He always kicks the blanket off to stick his feet out. When he was little, it used to cause him anxiety. He wanted to sleep with his feet uncovered but he was scared that a monster from under the bed would grab his foot at night . . .” Her voice trailed off.
I wanted so much to make it better for her. “He will wake up.”
Runa looked up at me and held her hand out. “Runa Etterson, Prime Venenata.”
It was the way she had introduced herself at Nevada’s wedding. Why were we doing the introductions again? “We’ve already met.”
“No. I’ve met Catalina Baylor. She’s shy and she tries to fade into the background. She gets embarrassed if anyone glances at her a second too long. I watched her at her sister’s wedding and half of the time she looked like she was waiting for her chance to run away.”
“I was.”
“I saw you verbally eviscerate Conway a few hours ago. You had this look on your face like you were some ice princess and he’d trespassed in your kingdom. And then you cut my sister’s reanimated corpse into four pieces.”
“Conway was wrong to treat you the way he did, and reanimated bodies have to be disabled. The smaller the pieces, the lesser the threat.”
She shook her head. “That’s not my point and you know it. What the hell happened to you?”
I came over, sat on the other side of the bed, and put the small box I was carrying onto the covers.
“When we met at Nevada’s wedding, I was panicking. That was the first time I was in charge of anything important. You were born a Prime, into a House of Primes. I was born a normal person, into a normal family, except that I had this terrible magic I had to hide so I wouldn’t accidentally hurt people with it. I was only required to go to school, get good grades, and keep my magic hidden. Nobody expected me to take any responsibility for anything else. I had the luxury of covering my face and saying, ‘This is too hard. I can’t do this.’ And I did.”
“So what changed?”
I sighed. “We became a House. I was certified as a Prime. I had a nervous breakdown.”
Runa blinked. “Why?”
“Because it was all too much. I needed rules. As long as I followed the rules, nobody got hurt and everybody left me alone. Suddenly, all my rules no longer applied and hiding in the background wasn’t an option. I was freaking out. Then Rogan’s mother found me and offered to mentor me. She made me see things from a different perspective.”
“She taught you how to dismember a person with a knife?” Runa asked.
“She hired someone who did. Have you killed anyone before?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry you had to do that today.”
If I hadn’t taken her with me, she wouldn’t have killed Conway. But she would have to kill sooner or later. Maybe it was better this way. I had a feeling that whoever targeted her family wouldn’t let go, not now, after their murder was confirmed.
“Have you killed anyone?” Runa asked.
“Physically, no. But what I do is much worse. Victoria Tremaine is my grandmother. When she requires the contents of your brain, she grasps your mind, wrenches it open, and takes whatever she wants. All your secrets, all of your hopes, your fantasies, your guilt over things you did years ago and tried your best to hide and forget, she sees it and rummages through it. Nevada has the same talent. I saw her interrogate a man once. He was a hardened mercenary and after she was done, he curled into a ball and cried like a child.”
