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I make a mental note to be mindful of how I ensnare my target. Odin cannot link the disappearance of his nephew to Crius, and more importantly, to me.
“Was there anyone in particular you wanted to research?” the other man asks.
Mentioning Veer Bestlasson would be like signing a confession for my future crime. For similar reasons, I won’t mention Phoenix.
“I met a promising young student named Femi. I don’t recall his last name.”
He shows me the student records. Unlike the London School of Finance, which restricted this information to a single team of administrators, Marina University allows department heads to peruse every piece of data imaginable.
Dr. Xander pulls up the young man’s profile. I’m not surprised to see that Shango pays his tuition, considering he’s the leader of the Olorun.
It’s one of the four largest families in the underworld, along with Uranos, Dagda, and Odin’s family, the Bestlasson. Crius is the head of the Vanir, a smaller organization affiliated with Odin’s that runs a network of flesh markets and brothels, but Crius is always striving for more.
“Are there any other students you’d like to research, Marius?” asks Xander.
I shoot him a glare that makes him flinch.
“Thank you,Dr. Xander,” I place emphasis on his title because he and I are not friends. “That will be all.”
His features pinch with displeasure. I won’t be here for long enough to want to be on a first-name basis with this man. Nor will I allow him to gather any incriminating information from me to spill when Odin and his inner circle storm the university in search of their soon-to-be-missing youngest son.
The moment I’ve delivered the Bestlasson boy to Crius, I intend to leave the underworld. Permanently.
“I wondered if now was the time to discuss the issue our department is having with student behavior?” His voice hovers in my ears like a gnat.
“Try again next week.” I turn to the computer, ignoring the way his shoulders sag with disappointment.
If the scrawny bastard wanted to work with academically minded students, he should have applied for work at a real university. Leaning back in my leather seat, I wait for him to slouch out of the room before I return to the computer.
The system tells me there are no students with the first name Phoenix, so I open up the search to all fields.
I find her.
She looks younger in her picture, even more fresh-faced with a smattering of freckles, but there’s no mistaking the softness in her gray eyes.
“Hedwig Phoenix Stahl?” I rub my chin.
At least she hadn’t lied about her age, and I understand why she only gave me her middle name.
Stahl isn’t a family I recognize, but I haven’t kept abreast of the underworld in the ten years since I freed Mother from Crius.
I had bought our freedom with seven assassinations. Seven lives ended and it was all for nothing because Mother had been seeing him for years behind my back. He’d just allowed her to come and go until he needed me to carry out another dangerous task.
My jaw tightens. When will women learn that a man will never change his ways unless he has a gun to his balls?
A sharp blade of resentment cuts through my gut at once again having to work to earn her safety.
I scroll through Phoenix’s file, noting two interesting facts. The first is that the security system logs her as a student who leaves the campus each weekend. The second is that both her rent and tuition fees are a month overdue, and were last paid by Gordon Gofannon, a long-time employee of Declan Dagda.
Another sugar daddy?
I shake my head. She just lost her father.
Or was abandoned by him. It’s a common practice for men who lack the resources to protect their offspring from powerful enemies to give them alternative last names. Crius is a case in point.
I’d been too consumed by the prospect of her being a Bestlasson spy to question her, but everything she has told me so far supports the conclusion that she’s looking for a rich lover.
I type in a string of other names I remember from the class in case someone later monitors my search history. When I’m sure I’ve set up an innocent trail of, I type the name of my target, Veer Bestlasson.
