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Breathe. This is your job. Do your job.
His face was an awful mess of blood and broken bone. His left eye had swollen shut. The bridge of his nose jutted to the side. His mouth gaped open and a green slimy trail had leaked from his busted lips, staining the front of his shirt.
The sheer brutality of it was nauseating. I wanted to cover my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at him.
How could anyone do this to another human being?
“Catalina?” Leon asked, concern in his voice. “Are you okay? What is it?”
“It’s not Lander Morton.” Lander was eighty-three. The dead man had the build and dark hair of someone much younger.
What was this? Where was this?
A silver Alfa Romeo Spider flew past us down the street.
Alessandro.
The thought sliced through me, hot and sharp. I yanked myself back from it. Alessandro left six months ago. He was never coming back.
“It wasn’t him,” Leon said. “In the car.”
“I know.”
“If it was that jackass, I would’ve shot him by now.” His voice was cold and measured. He meant it.
“Why would you want to shoot him?”
“He broke your heart. You were miserable for weeks.”
“I broke my own heart, Leon. He was just the hammer I hit it with.”
Leon raised his eyebrows. “That’s deep, Catalina. Small problem though. I was there. He took advantage of your feelings, used you to help him, and then he split. You were depressed for months. You know that saying ‘I’ll make him wish he was never born’? If he shows his face here again, I’ll actually do that.”
Leon’s face had that particular calm, focused look that came over him when he locked on to his target.
If I detached enough to look at what happened between me and Alessandro, it made perfect sense. My magic had isolated me since I was born. If I liked someone or wanted them to notice me, they fell in love with me, completely and absolutely. Soon magic-fueled love progressed into obsession that turned violent. I was homeschooled until high school, because every time I thought I had my magic under control and tried to enroll in public school, disaster followed.
My attempts at relationships had been hesitant and always ended badly. A boy in middle school had built a shrine out of my used tissues and chewed-up pencils in his room and cut his wrists open to keep his parents from confiscating it. His family moved out of state to escape his obsession and I had to go back to being homeschooled. A high school football hero who all of a sudden noticed me panicked at the end of our perfectly nice date because I was leaving, grabbed me by the hair, and tried to force me into his car. There were others. Some escaped with their lives relatively unscathed, but others didn’t. I didn’t make a true friend outside the family until a few months ago. By that point, I had learned to control my power but lived in a constant state of paranoia, afraid that I would slip up and ruin someone’s life and endanger mine.
There was a time somewhere between fifteen and twenty when I desperately wanted friends. I had wanted a boyfriend, someone who was amazing, and handsome, and smart, who could carry on a conversation with me and get my jokes. Someone who would take off his jacket and drape it over my shoulders if we were caught in the rain. I wanted a connection, that simple human feeling of having someone to share things with. Handsome witty princes were in short supply, so I invented one, woven from book-inspired fantasies and naive little dreams. And then, one day I stumbled over Alessandro Sagredo’s Instagram account.
He was everything I had imagined my prince to be. Smart, handsome, charming. He lived in Italy, he was a Prime, an heir to an old noble family, and he sailed on the Mediterranean and rode horses in Spain. He was safe to dream about because he and I would never meet, and so I did.
Then, when I was eighteen, our family was forced to become a House, and I had to face off against Alessandro in the trials to prove that I was a Prime. He was everything his Instagram promised, and he noticed me. I was so terrified I had cooked him with my magic that when he came to ask me on a date, I did everything I could to push him away and then called the cops to keep him safe from me.
Six months ago, he crashed into my life again. The carefree playboy turned out to be a front. Alessandro was a ruthless, lethal killer. He tried to protect me, he flirted with me, he ate dinner with my family. He was immune to my magic, which meant that when he said he was obsessed with me, he actually meant it. He liked me for me.
The enormity of all that had short-circuited what little sense I had left. I never had a chance. I wanted to save him from the life of a contract killer and set him free. I wanted him to be happy.
And then the investigation ended and his fascination with me did as well. I had come to confess my love to him and found him packing. He was moving on to the next target on his hit list. When I asked him if he would ever come back, he told me he didn’t want to lie. It felt like someone pushed me off the top of a tall building and I hit the ground hard.
The rough landing woke me up. He had chosen the life he had for a reason and he wasn’t planning on giving it up. And whatever he felt for me, it sure wasn’t love. If you’re obsessed with someone, you don’t leave. You stay and try your hardest to make it work. I had been a fun diversion on his way to someplace else.
The obsession was now over. It hurt, but according to Sergeant Heart, who supervised my martial arts training, pain was the best teacher. Alessandro had people to kill, and I had a House to run and MII cases to take over. Leon was right. I had been depressed for months, but I wasn’t mourning Alessandro abandoning me. I was mourning the old me. For the new me to emerge, the old me had to disappear, and killing her bit by bit hurt.
Alessandro was a catalyst for that change. Eventually I’d scrounge up some gratitude for the lesson. No matter how agonizing, it was a necessary transformation. The old me would have gotten the lot of us killed. For now, I had to settle for determination. I would never again let myself sink that deep. And I wouldn’t allow my cousin to be hurt for my sake.
“Leon, if you shoot Alessandro, he will know he hurt me. I don’t want him to.”
Leon glanced at me.
I met his gaze.
“You have a point,” he said and pulled into the parking lot.
In front of us the MII building rose, a sharp triangular blade of cobalt glass and steel. It was time to earn my pay.
Chapter 2
I marched through the gleaming lobby of Montgomery International Investigations at full speed. Cornelius and Leon walked a couple of steps behind me. Rosebud still perched on Cornelius’ shoulder, her tiny arms around his neck.
The guard by the metal detector focused on me. Recognition sparked in his eyes.
“Good afternoon, Ms. Baylor.”
“Good afternoon.”
I walked through the metal detector and kept going to the stainless-steel elevator doors. Cornelius and Leon followed me. We took the elevator to the 17th floor. The double doors whispered open to glossy indigo floors and white walls. To the left lay a waiting area, tinted by the light spilling through the floor-to-ceiling wall of blue glass. Directly in front of us Lina sat at the reception desk. Today her hair was a rich purple and twisted into a conservative slick bun, contrasting nicely with her deep bronze skin and blue eyes. She wore an impeccably tailored olive-green sheath dress, which, combined with her hair, made her look like a stalk of flowering lavender.
“He’s expecting you,” she said.
I nodded and turned right at her desk, trailing the curving white wall. Behind me Lina asked, “Can I get you some refreshments, gentlemen?”
“Could I trouble you for some grapes?” Cornelius asked. “For the monkey.”
“We can get her all the grapes ever, because she is so adorable, yes, she is,” Lina cooed.
Walking through Augustine’s domain was like swimming underwater. The entire left wall was cobalt glass, two floors high, the city distant and remote behind it. The blue light colored the pale floor and walls, the pattern within the glass creating a perfect illusion of sunlight fracturing on the surface of water. It was its own little world, away from everything, soothing and calm, and I treasured the few moments I had to enjoy it.
I was about to expose my official status to Augustine. There would be no turning back from it.
Ahead a wall of frosted glass blocked the way. When Augustine wanted to impress, he projected his magic onto it, painting it with shifting patterns like frost growing on a window. But I had been to his office before and he felt no need to impress me. The wall remained beautiful but mundane. And solid. Augustine must’ve been wrapping up some business. I had to wait.
I crossed the floor to the wall of cobalt glass and looked at the city below, a great big sea of people. Towers of glass, steel, and concrete were its islands and icebergs, the currents of cars through the streets were the schools of its fish, and within its depths, hidden in luxurious offices, human sharks ran their magic empires.
The world didn’t always have magic. Oh, there were rumors and legends, but nothing obvious. Then, a century and a half ago, half a dozen countries were looking for the cure for the influenza pandemic ravaging the globe. They shared their research and discovered the Osiris serum, almost simultaneously. Those who took the serum could expect one of the three equally likely outcomes: they would die, they would turn into a monster and die after living for a couple of years, or they would gain magic powers. The quality of magic varied: one could have a minor talent, or one could become a Prime, able to unleash devastating power.
