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“I want her dead,” Arabella stated, her voice flat.
“Not as much as me,” I told her. “I’d like to rip her throat out.” I made the squeezing motion with my hand. “Then she couldn’t hurt us anymore. It would be reassuring.”
Everyone looked at me. Apparently, I must’ve said something surprising.
“Unfortunately, there is the small matter of the oath of office,” I said. “I’m the Acting Warden. I have . . . obligations.”
“Screw obligations.” Arabella punched the table. It quaked a little.
“We will arrest her,” Alessandro told her. “If she resists, we will neutralize her one way or another.”
Arabella pinched her lips together, her mouth a hard flat line.
“We are on full lockdown going forward,” I said. “Arkan is coming. Do we need to get the kids out?”
“No,” Ragnar said.
Halle raised her head off the table. “Absolutely not. We’re not leaving. This is our home.”
I looked at Cornelius.
“I will remain here,” Matilda announced.
“It seems like the most prudent course of action,” Cornelius said.
Patricia grabbed her trash can, stepped out into the hallway, and shut the door.
We all silently looked at each other until the retching sounds stopped and she came back in.
“Sending the children out creates an opportunity for hostages,” Patricia said.
“Then the kids will stay,” I said. “What about Regina?”
“My wife is still with her cousin in Lyon,” Patricia said. “She isn’t due back for another week. I’ve let them know about the situation and asked her to not cut her trip short.”
I could imagine how that had gone. Knowing Regina, she would’ve wanted to be on the next plane to Houston.
“Where are we with our phones?” Mom asked.
Everyone looked at Bernard. He reached under the table and produced a large box filled with neatly stacked phones, each labeled with a name. Leon took his phone out and passed the box around the table.
“This won’t happen again,” Bernard said.
“Is there a plan for this Arkan situation?” Arabella asked.
“Konstantin provided us with a breakdown of Arkan’s finances. He has squirreled away a big chunk of money stateside. We take it away from him,” I said. I knew an FBI agent who would be overjoyed to help.
Alessandro spoke, his voice tinted with detachment, as if he were discussing a chore. “He has a mole in the Harris County DA’s office.”
Leon whistled.
I’d cursed when I found out.
“There are other informants as well, but that one is the most important,” Alessandro said.
“Are you going to expose him?” Arabella asked.
“No. I’m going to take care of him personally,” the Artisan said.
There was an awful finality in his voice. I had forgotten how angry he was.
Arabella smiled. “I like that part.”
I turned to Leon. “What exactly happened with the FBI?”
Leon shrugged. “Nothing much.”
I waited.
He sighed. “I followed them to the Caberas.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“You weren’t supposed to see me. You said ‘shadow.’ You didn’t say ‘make yourself seen.’”
He had a point.
“Arkan’s people hit us on the Justice Park Drive,” Leon continued. “Literally forty-five seconds from the FBI field office. An enerkinetic and some other weird shithead. The enerkinetic lit up their vehicle with projectiles. It blew up a little bit . . .”
“Define a little bit,” Mom said.
“Driver’s side door blew off and the engine flew out and landed on their SUV’s roof. It crushed the top of the car but didn’t fall all the way through.” Leon raised his hand and tilted it side to side. “Halfway in, halfway out type of thing. Of course, the windows shattered because the roof came down.”
“Cheap-assed armored glass,” Grandma Frida opined. “That’s government contract work for you.”
I killed a groan.
“I dropped the enerkinetic, but the other asshole snuck up from the opposite side. He shot bursts of this glowing crap, looked like seaweed, stung like a jellyfish, and things got serious when it wrapped around the car and the metal started smoking.”
“Where were the FBI agents at this point?” Mom growled.
“Inside the car.”
Oh no.
“It took me a second to find him,” Leon said. “The car was smoking, and the fumes made it difficult to see and breathe, and then the seaweed kind of contracted, and there was a crunchy noise, so it was hard to hear.”
Arabella put her head on the table, face down.
“Then he tried to shoot that shit at me, and I saw the direction it was coming from, and the rest is history.” Leon grinned.
“What happened to the FBI agents breathing in toxic fumes while trapped in a car that was being crushed?” Alessandro asked.
“I pulled them out. Agent Garcia was mostly okay. Wahl wasn’t breathing, so I did CPR until the FBI guys ran out of the building and helped.”
“That’s my boy!” Grandma Frida said.
I stared at him.
“What?” He raised his arms. “He was breathing fine when I left. They put one of those masks on his face and he kept taking it off to curse. All is well that ended well. And now I’ve got cool scars. Chicks dig scars.”
