Burn for Me

Chapter 10

I was lying on my side. Darkness surrounded me.

A hard arm was wrapped around me. Someone’s body pressed against my back, curled around mine.

“Am I dead?”

“No,” Mad Rogan said.

Mad Rogan was spooning me. The thought blazed through my head. I tried to scoot away. My chest met hard rock. My back met an equally hard surface, which had to be his chest. There was nowhere to scoot away to.

“What’s happened?”

“Well, they must’ve rigged an explosive device to cover their exit. It detonated.”

“I get that. Explain the not dying part.” And the spooning part. He was touching me. Oh my God, he was touching me.

“There was no time to escape, so I broke through the floor and pulled it on top of us.”

His voice was quiet, almost intimate. He sounded so reasonable, like it was just an ordinary thing. I broke through some solid marble and then built it into a shelter over us in a split second. No big. Do it every day. Just thinking about the amount of magic it would take to do this made me shiver.

“There was an explosion,” Mad Rogan said. “Some debris fell on top of us. I had to shift things around, but it’s relatively stable now.”

“Could you shift things around so we could escape?”

“I’m spent,” he said, his voice the same measured calm. “Shifting a few thousand pounds of rock drained me. I need time to recover.”

So there was a limit to his power. Good to know that occasionally he was mortal. “Thank you for saving me.”

“You’re welcome.”

My brain finally digested his words. “So we’re trapped underground with the building on top of us.” We were buried alive. Fear welled in me.

“Not all of the building. I’m reasonably certain it’s still standing. I activated the beacon, so my crew is en route. It’s just a matter of getting us out.”

“What if we run out of air?”

“That would be unfortunate.”

“Rogan!”

“We’ve been here for about fifteen minutes. There is probably about twenty cubic feet of air here, about what you would find in an average coffin.”

I would kill him if I ever got out of here.

“There are two of us and your breathing’s elevated, so I would estimate we’d have about half an hour. If we weren’t getting the air from somewhere, we would be feeling the CO₂ buildup already.”

I clamped my mouth shut.

“Nevada?” he asked.

“I’m trying to conserve oxygen.”

He chuckled into my hair. My body decided this would be a fine moment to remember that his body was wrapped around mine and his body was muscular, hard, and hot, and my butt was pressed against his groin. Cuddled up by a dragon. No, thank you. Let me off this train.

“If you keep wiggling, things might get uncomfortable,” he said into my ear, his voice like a caress. “I’m doing my best, but thinking about baseball only takes you so far.”

I froze.

We lay still and quiet.

“What is that smell?” he asked.

“It’s my jeans. A bag of food court trash broke when I climbed through the Dumpster.”

A minute passed. Another.

“So,” he said. “You come here often?”

“Rogan, please stop talking.”

He chuckled again. “The air isn’t stale. We’re getting oxygen.”

He was right—the air wasn’t stale. At least we wouldn’t suffocate. Unfortunately that left all the other problems, like being buried alive and being wedged against him.

“Can you turn so you’re not pressed against me?”

“I could,” he said, his voice amused. “But then you would have to lie on top of me.”

My brain said, “NO.” My body went, “Wheee!”

I gave up and lay still.

And waited.

Buried.

With tons of debris on top of us.

If something gave, we’d be crushed. I strained, listening for the slightest noise of things shifting overhead.

Crushed.

With our bones cracking like eggshells under the weight of stone and concrete and . . .

“Why did you enlist in the Army?”

“Simple question, but a complicated answer,” he said. “When you’re a Prime, especially an heir Prime, your life stops being your own once you graduate from college. Certain things are expected. Your specialty is predetermined by your family’s needs. It’s understood that you will complete your education, work to further the family interests, select a mate whose genetic pedigree is most likely to produce gifted children, marry, and have said children, at least one but no more than three.”

“Why not more than three?”

“Because it tends to complicate the family tree and division of assets. It’s that same old version of go to the right school, marry the right person, land the right job. Except in our cases magic dictates everything.

“The system allows for certain leeway, but not much. Instead of working on advanced weapons systems like my father, I could’ve moved into the nuclear reactor business. Instead of marrying Rynda Charles, I could’ve married her sister, or I could’ve imported a bride the way my father did.”

When we got out of here, I’d have to look up Rynda Charles just to see what she looked like.

“My course was predetermined. I was the only child and a Prime. Somewhere around my eighteenth birthday, I realized that I was burning through my free time faster than my peers. If I ever hoped to break free of my extremely comfortable gilded cage, I needed to find someone strong enough to block my family’s influence. The military fit the bill.”

My memory resurrected his words. I joined because they told me I could kill without being sent to prison and be rewarded for it. “And you got to kill people.”

“Yes. Let’s not forget that. Was your father in the military too?”

“No. Dad never went in. Military tradition in our family runs mostly through the female side.”

He was doing that thing again. I couldn’t even see his face and I knew he was doing it, that attentive focused listening, which made you want to keep talking and talking just to have the benefit of his attention. His hold shifted around me slightly, his body cradling mine. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it . . . If I concentrated on it too much, he might sense it. I still had no idea what sort of telepath he was or what abilities he had.

“You didn’t go in either,” he said.

“My father died when I was nineteen. Someone had to run the family business. My mother couldn’t do it, because . . . for various reasons. Everybody else was too young.”

“What was wrong with your father?”

Something inside me shrank, twisting into a cold, painful ball. “He had a rare form of cancer. It’s called malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor. MPNST.”

How I hated these five letters.

“He had sarcomas, malignant tumors that formed around his nerves. They were so close to his spine that the doctors couldn’t surgically take them out. When all of the traditional treatments failed, we moved onto experimental therapies. He fought for four years, but eventually it dragged him down.” And the last year had been so horrible.

“And you blame yourself?” His voice was soft.

“No. I didn’t give him cancer. I didn’t even know exactly what he was diagnosed with. I had just read a letter from his doctor I didn’t fully understand. He caught me and made me swear to not talk about it. I should’ve told my mother.”

“Why didn’t he want anyone to know?”

I sighed. “Because my father knew he was terminal and his chances of recovery were nonexistent. It was never about curing the cancer. It was about buying him a little bit more time. He knew it would come at a huge emotional and financial cost. My father always wanted to take care of the family. He . . . he weighed the costs and heartache of going through treatment against a couple years of his life and decided it wasn’t worth it. When we finally found out, my mother was so angry at him. I was angry at him. Everyone panicked. We pressured him to go into treatment.”

“Exactly what he didn’t want.” He said it as if he understood.

“Yes. We bought him three years.” There was so much more to it. My father had poured his life into building the agency. In his mind he saw it as the means to provide for us, even for our children. A family business. We’d mortgaged it to MII to get the money for the experimental therapy. By that point control of the agency had passed to me and my mother as joint owners, with me owning 75 percent of it and my mother holding a 25 percent stake. We never told my father where the money came from. It would’ve killed him faster than any cancer. There was so much guilt to go around already. We kept drenching each other with it in bucketfuls.

No matter what happened, I would keep the agency alive.

Something scratched the stone above us.

I jerked.

“Easy.” Mad Rogan pulled me closer to him, his arms shielding me.

His phone chimed.

His phone chimed! He had a signal. We couldn’t be that deep underground.

Mad Rogan swiped across it. “Yes?”

A curt female voice asked, “Major?”

“Here,” Mad Rogan said.

“Apologies for the delay, sir. We had to convince the first responders to grant us access to the scene. We’re directly above your signal. It doesn’t look too bad. You’re under two shattered columns.”

For a supposed recluse, he sure employed a lot of people, and those people spoke in very familiar tones. He hired ex-military or ex-law enforcement. Probably both.

“Did the cops get Pierce?” I asked Rogan.

“Pierce?” he asked.

“Disappeared,” the woman replied.

How could he have disappeared? He was in plain view, belching fire at a tower from the middle of an intersection, and the cops had been en route. They would’ve converged on him like a pack of wolves. How in the world did he get away?

“Permission to begin the excavation, sir?” the woman asked.

“Granted,” Rogan said.

“Stand by.”

A muted mechanical whine of some sort of motorized saw cut the quiet above us. A tiny trickle of concrete dust fell on my face. I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Well, I knew they had to come and get us eventually,” Mad Rogan said. “But you can’t say we didn’t have an awesome time.”

I rang the doorbell. “You really don’t have to wait with me.”

“I do,” Mad Rogan said. “I must deliver you to your loving mother’s arms, or she might shoot me.”

She might shoot both of us anyway. It was almost eight o’clock. It took Mad Rogan’s people over an hour to pull us out, and the police detained us for questioning for another hour. We lied. Waiting to be cut out had given us a long time to get our story straight. Neither Mad Rogan nor I was associated with Adam Pierce in any way, so we both claimed to be in the building on business. The explosion had nearly obliterated the bodies, and when I asked Mad Rogan about the fact that bullets from a gun registered to me were in the bodies and in the wreck of the lobby, he told me he would take care of it. So I didn’t mention shooting anyone, he didn’t mention slapping anyone with the door, and I learned one crucial difference between a normal person like me and a Prime. When cops called Mad Rogan “sir,” they meant it. He told them what happened and nobody doubted it. I had never been treated with deference by the police before. Today I was, simply because he was there. I wasn’t sure what to think about that.

Mad Rogan’s people had locked the jeweled ornament in a small metal case and taken it to his vault. I hadn’t fought him on it. If Adam and whoever was working with him decided they wanted it back, Mad Rogan’s private army was much better equipped to fight them off. I’d taken several pictures of it and emailed them to Bern.

The door swung open. I braced myself.

I had examined my reflection in the Range Rover’s side mirror, and I knew exactly what I looked like. The shallow knife scratch at my hairline had bled all over my face. The blood smears had combined with rock dust, black, oily soot from the explosion, and fire-retardant foam, which had dripped all over me when Mad Rogan’s people had finally pulled us out of the hole. My hair had turned into a frizzy mess, and the foam cemented it together. To top it all off, the lasagna on my pants had ripened and now emitted an odor usually emanating from day-old roadkill. I was bloody, filthy, and soot-stained, and Mad Rogan didn’t look any better.

My mother stared at me, then at Mad Rogan, then at me again.

I raised my hand. “Hi, Mom.”

“Inside,” my mother ordered. “You too.”

“He doesn’t need to come inside,” I said. I didn’t want Mad Rogan anywhere near my family.

“He’s covered in blood. At the very least, he can wash it off.”

“I’m sure he has a very nice shower at his house,” I said.

“Actually, I would be very grateful for a chance to clean up.” Mad Rogan touched his forehead. His fingers came away bloody and stained with soot. Suddenly he looked young and disarming, like one of my cousins when they were in trouble. “And a bite of food if you could spare some.” If he laid it on any thicker, he’d be ready to audition for Oliver. My mother couldn’t possibly buy this.

“You don’t even have any clean clothes.” I was grasping at straws.

“I do,” Mad Rogan said. “I always carry a change of clothes in my car.”

“Inside,” Mother said.

I knew that tone. It meant the argument was over.

I walked in. Mad Rogan got a duffel out of the Range Rover and followed me. Mother closed the door behind us. I led him through the office into the hallway. He surveyed the warehouse from left to right, starting with the media room and the kitchen; the girls’ bedrooms built on top of each other, Catalina’s painted pure white on the outside, Arabella’s charcoal and covered with her attempts at graffiti, mostly involving her name; Grandmother’s rooms, the guest suite; my bedroom and bathroom above the storage room in the corner, Mother’s suite, the boys’ rooms; and finally, the Hut of Evil. Mad Rogan’s eyes widened.

“If you harm anybody in my family, I swear I will murder you,” I told him.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

I led him to the guest suite.

It took three shampoos and a lot of scrubbing, but when I left my room, I was clean. The air smelled of bacon and pancakes. Suddenly I realized I was starving.

I walked into the kitchen and found Mad Rogan in it. He sat at the table, dressed in a blue Henley shirt and jeans, sipping coffee out of a mug with a little grey kitten on it. His dark hair was combed back from his face. His jaw was once again clean shaven. I am a polite, nonthreatening kind of dragon with excellent manners. Horns are hidden, tail is tucked away, fangs covered. I would never do anything cruel, like stab a man with a knife about ten times to get him to answer a question.

Somehow this new, on-his-best-behavior version was scarier than witnessing him calmly breaking a man with his bare hands. After what we’d been through, I would’ve expected him to hole up somewhere dark, eating raw meat, chain-smoking, guzzling some sort of ridiculously tough drink, like whiskey or kerosene or something, and thinking grim thoughts about life and death. But no, here he was, charming and untroubled, sipping coffee.

Mad Rogan saw me and smiled.

And my mind went right into the gutter.

How was it that he was sitting in my kitchen?

My mother turned away from the stove and held out a plate of pancakes. I took it from her and set it on the table next to a platter of bacon. Mad Rogan pushed the second mug of coffee toward me. It had an orange kitten on it.

Grandma Frida strode into the kitchen, followed by Lina and Arabella. “I smell bacon! Penelope, did you know there is a handsome man in our kitchen?”

Oh Lord, here we go.

My mother made some sort of noise halfway between a cough and a grunt.

“Well,” Grandma Frida said, “introduce us, somebody.”

“Grandma, Mad Rogan. Mad Rogan, Grandma,” I squeezed out.

Arabella’s eyes got really big. She grabbed her phone and started texting. “Leon’s going to pee himself.”

“Quit it,” Lina growled and sat in the chair next to me. Grandma took a chair next to Rogan.

“How are you feeling?” he asked her.

“Fine, thank you.” She gave him a big smile.

I passed a plate to Rogan and sat across from him.

Leon ran into the kitchen and stopped, his gaze fixed on Mad Rogan. Bern bumped into him, nudging him into the room. “If you’re not getting bacon, get out of the way.”

Arabella grabbed three pieces of bacon from the plate. “Mine!”

“Bacon hog,” Lina told her.

“Settle down, there is more bacon.” Mom pulled another broiling pan full of bacon out of the oven. I grabbed a pancake, wrapped bacon in it, and bit. It was fluffy and delicious, and for no apparent reason it made me want to cry.

“By the way,” Arabella said, “you might get a call from school. I forgot to mention it before.”

Mother paused. “Why?”

“Well, we were playing basketball and I guess I pulled on Diego’s jersey. I don’t even remember doing it. And Valerie decided it would be a good idea to snitch on me. I mean, I saw her walk over to the coach and pull on his sleeve like she was five or something. I even asked Diego if he cared, and he said he didn’t even notice. It’s a sport! I was into it.”

“Aha,” Mother said. “Get to the call-from-school part.”

“I told her that snitches get stitches. And Coach said that I made a terrorist threat.”

“That’s stupid,” Lina said, pushing back her dark hair. “It’s not a threat, it’s just a thing people say.”

“Snitches do get stitches.” Bern shrugged.

“Your school is stupid,” Grandma Frida said.

“So he said I had to apologize and I refused, since she snitched on me, so I got sent to the office. I’m not in trouble, but they want to move me to third-period PE now.”

Well, it could’ve been worse. At least she didn’t hurt anybody.

Silence claimed the table. Across from me, Mad Rogan was cutting the pancake into precise pieces and devouring it with a familiar efficiency. When my mother had come home on leave, she’d eaten like that. She was leaning against the island now, watching him.

“You’re Mad Rogan!” Leon burst out.

“Yes,” Mad Rogan said, his voice calm.

“And you can break cities?”

“Yes.”

“And you have all this money and magic?”

“Yes.”

Where was Leon going with this?

My cousin blinked. “And you look . . . like that?”

Mad Rogan nodded. “Yes.”

Leon’s dark eyes went wide. He looked at Mad Rogan, then glanced down at himself. At fifteen, Leon weighed barely a hundred pounds. His arms and legs were like chopsticks.

“There is no justice in the world!” Leon announced.

I giggled and almost choked on my pancake. Mother cracked a smile.

“Can you play guitar too?” Leon asked. “Because if you can, I’ll go kill myself right now.”

“No, but I can sing a little,” Mad Rogan said.

“God damn it!” Leon punched the table.

“Calm yourself,” Bern told him.

“You shut up. You’re the size of a Sasquatch.” Leon pointed at Mad Rogan. “Are you seeing this? How is this fair?”

“He’s fifteen,” I told Mad Rogan. “Fair is very important right now.”

“You have time,” Mad Rogan said.

“Yeah . . .” Leon shook his head. “No, not really. I can’t sing for sure, and I’ll never look like that.”

“I’m a product of calculated selective breeding,” Mad Rogan said. “I was conceived because it would be good for my House to have an heir and because my parents’ genes ticked the right set of boxes. You were probably conceived because your parents loved each other.”

“According to our mother,” Bern said, “he was conceived because she was too wasted to remember a rubber.”

Mad Rogan stopped chewing.

“I was conceived because my mother skipped bail. Her boyfriend at the time threatened to call the cops on her, so she had to do something to keep him from doing it,” Bern said helpfully.

Awesome. Just the right kind of information to share.

“Aunt Gisela isn’t the best mother,” I said. “There’s one in every family.”

“What do you do?” Leon leaned forward. “You left the Army and disappeared. How come?”

“Leon,” Mother warned.

“Is it because of the war?” Lina asked. “People on Herald say you have PTSD and you became a hermit like a monk because of it.”

“Either a hermit or a monk, not both,” I corrected out of habit.

“Herald also said he was disfigured.” Arabella made big eyes.

“Yes, I’m a hermit. Mostly I brood,” Mad Rogan said. “Also I’m very good at wallowing in self-pity. I spend my days steeped in melancholy, looking out the window. Occasionally a single tear quietly rolls down my cheek.”

Arabella and Lina snickered in unison.

“Do you also brush a white orchid against your lips?” Arabella put in.

“While sad music plays in the background?” Lina grinned.

“Perhaps,” Mad Rogan said.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Grandma Frida asked.

I put my hand over my face.

“No,” Mad Rogan said.

“A boyfriend?” Grandma Frida asked.

“No.”

“What about . . .”

“No,” Mom and I said in unison.

“But you don’t even know what I wanted to ask!”

“No,” we said again together.

“Party poopers.” Grandma shrugged.

“It’s nine o’clock,” Mom said. “Go on.”

Leon pointed at Mad Rogan. “But Mad Rogan!”

“But you have a sixty-seven in French,” she said. “You’ll regain your staying-up privileges when you pass.”

“But!” Leon waved his arms.

“Don’t make me carry you,” Bern rumbled.

“Dibs on the shower,” Arabella jumped up.

The girls left the room and dragged Leon with them. Grandma Frida, Mom, Bern, Mad Rogan, and I remained.

My mother leaned forward. “Nevada is going after Pierce because we have no choice as a family. I don’t know what this is about for you. I don’t know if it’s pride, or if you’re just bored. I know you kidnapped Nevada. You scared her and tortured her. If you hurt my child again, I’ll end you, Prime or not.”

Nice, Mom. I’m sure he’s scared.

Mad Rogan smiled without showing his teeth. The familiar cold, predatory look slid into his eyes, the dragon waking up and showing his true colors.

“Thank you for inviting me into your lovely home and offering me this delicious meal.” His voice was calm and measured. “Because I’m your guest, I feel some small degree of obligation to you, so I’ll make it perfectly clear, Sergeant. I know who you are. I’ve seen your service record, and I consider you to be a potential threat. If you threaten me again, I’ll change your threat status to definite, and I’ll act on it.”

He’d seen my mother’s service record. His House had run a background check. That meant his question about my father being in the military had been complete bullshit. He probably knew the whole history of my family. He’d manipulated me, and I’d played right into it. Stupid.

“I prefer not to kill children,” Mad Rogan continued. “But I have no problems with making them orphans.”

True. Every word. He meant it.

Bern blinked.

Mad Rogan drank from his grey kitten mug. “Besides, considering your daughter’s skill with a firearm, she’s likely to shoot me before you do.”

My mother turned to me. “What happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. I was trying very hard to pretend that it hadn’t happened.

“Nevada . . .” she began.

“No,” I said quietly.

A dark stain was spreading through Mad Rogan’s Henley over his ribs. “You’re bleeding.”

He looked down at himself and frowned.

“Let me see.” I got up.

“It’s nothing.”

“Rogan,” I said. “Lift up your shirt.”

He pulled his Henley up, exposing his side. A folded paper towel covered his lower ribs, held in place by duct tape.

“What is this?” I demanded.

“It’s a bandage,” Bern said.

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is,” Grandma Frida said. “Sometimes you cut your finger and you wrap the paper towel around it real tight, slap some duct tape on it, and good to go.”

“Your father used to do this,” Mom told me. “I swear, it’s like every man is born with it, or they must take some secret class on how to do it.”

I waved my hand at them. “It’s a paper towel. With duct tape! Where did you get the duct tape?”

Mad Rogan shrugged. “In the cabinet under the sink in your bathroom. I thought it stopped bleeding.”

“Well, it didn’t. When did you even get this?”

“I got hit by some debris during the blast,” he said.

“Did you clean it?”

“I showered,” he said.

“Right.” I glanced at my mother. “Okay, the two of you will have to postpone trying to figure out who is the harder hardcase until I fix this.” I got up and pulled a med kit out of the kitchen cabinet.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and flicked it on. A text from an unknown number. I sighed. Of course.

I put the phone on the table and tapped the text message. A picture of me and Mad Rogan circling the tower. In the picture, my face was pale, my mouth pressed into a hard line. I looked like I was trying not to cry, which was so strange, because at the time I wasn’t anywhere close to crying. Mad Rogan’s face was turned away from the camera, his head tilted as he looked up at the second-story windows.

A second text popped under the first. It said, “Whos the guy?”

Rogan focused on the phone. “Pierce.”

I texted back, “Where are you?”

“Outside ur house.”

My heart hammered. Mad Rogan leaped up and took off for the door. My mother moved. I hadn’t seen her go that fast since she left the Army. Grandma Frida dashed to the motor pool, Bern ran to the Hut of Evil, while I chased Mad Rogan. I caught up with him by the door, slipped into my office, and tapped the keyboard. A grey thermal camera image filled the screen, split into four parts, each section of the screen showing the view from a different side of the house: the parking lot and street in front of the motor pool at the back of the warehouse, the trees to the right, the street to the left, and the front door, with Mad Rogan’s Range Rover parked next to my car.

I held my breath. Nothing.

Mad Rogan leaned over me. His chest brushed against my right shoulder.

On the screen the night spread outside the house, a charcoal painting came to life. Nothing moved. No cars passed the house. If my mother put a bullet through Adam Pierce’s heart, we could kiss the agency good-bye. If he came to burn us to death . . . he shouldn’t be able to burn us to death. Hellspawn was a higher-order spell. It would’ve tapped him out the way Mad Rogan was now tapped out. At least I hoped it had.

The intercom on the phone flashed white. I pushed it.

“Three people in the building across the street,” Bern said quietly. The image on the monitor zeroed in on three white human silhouettes on the roof of the warehouse to the north. One of them lay in the familiar sniper pose.

“Those are mine,” Mad Rogan said quietly.

We waited. Trees rustled gently in the night breeze, barely visible on the screen.

My phone buzzed. Another text.

“Ma’am, this is the police. The call is coming from INSIDE YOUR HOUSE.”

Asshole!

“Did I freak you out?”

Gaaaah!

I pushed the intercom. “Just got another text. I think he’s screwing with us.”

“Sit tight,” Mom said.

I typed “Asshole” on my phone.

“Heh. Tell your new friend I said hi.”

On the screen the Range Rover exploded. Thunder punched the door and wall with a huge, invisible fist. The warehouse shook.

The intercom lit up. “Do you have the kids?” Mother asked.

“Yes,” Bern said. “They’re with me.”

Flames billowed out of the Range Rover’s metal carcass, bright white. Going out there was out of the question. We’d all make lovely targets silhouetted against that fire.

We sat, and waited, and watched the Range Rover burn until the fire department barreled down our street in a blaze of glory, lights, and sirens.

“Take your shirt off.” Now there’s something I never thought I’d say to the Scourge of Mexico.

Mad Rogan pulled his shirt off, and I tried my best not to stare. Muscles rolled under his tan skin. He wasn’t darker than me, but I tanned to a reddish gold, while his skin had a deeper, brown undertone to it. He was perfectly proportioned. His broad shoulders flowed into a muscular, defined chest that slimmed down to the flat planes of his hard stomach. Handsome or athletic didn’t do him justice. Dancers or gymnasts were athletic. He had the kind of body that should’ve belonged to a man from a different time, someone who swung a sword with merciless ferocity to protect his land and ran across the field at a wall of enemy warriors. There was a brutal kind of efficiency about the way muscle corded his frame.

I hadn’t even realized how large he was. Because all those suits streamlined him and his proportions were so well balanced, he looked almost normal-sized. But now, as he sat in my kitchen chair, dwarfing it, there was no way to ignore it. The sheer physical power of him was overwhelming. If he grabbed hold of me, he could crush me. But I didn’t care. I could look at him all night. I wouldn’t go to sleep. I wouldn’t need to rest. I could just sit there and stare at him. And if I looked long enough, I’d throw caution to the wind, reach out, and slide my hand over that powerful muscle. I would feel the strength in his shoulders. I would kiss . . .

And that was about enough of that.

Underneath all of that masculine, harsh beauty was cold, the kind of cold that could stab a helpless man with a knife, feel the tip of it scrape the bone, and do it again and again and not be bothered by it. That cold scared me. Mad Rogan, unlike other people, rarely lied. I didn’t know if it was because he knew I would call him on it or if it was simply his way. When he said he would kill you, he meant it. He didn’t make threats or promises, he stated facts, and when he wanted something, he’d do whatever he had to do to get it.

I opened the med kit and pulled out gauze and medical tape.

The fire department was gone, having drowned the sad remains of the Range Rover in fire-retardant foam. It was almost surreal how quickly their questions had stopped after Rogan had given them his name. My mother insisted on staying in the crow’s nest she and my Grandmother had installed while I’d gone to talk to Bug. The kids had gone to bed. Grandma Frida had too. One of Mad Rogan’s men had come to personally take responsibility for failing to prevent the explosion. When Arabella was about two or three, she didn’t like to be in trouble. She didn’t want anyone to be mad at her, and the suspense of waiting until the exact nature of the punishment was decided always proved too much for her, so when she would do something bad, she would announce, “I’m going to punish myself!” and march off to her room to be grounded. I saw that precise look on the man’s face as he stared at Mad Rogan in quiet desperation. He would totally punish himself if he could.

He was gone now, and the warehouse had fallen quiet.

I crouched to take a better look at Mad Rogan’s so-called bandage. “I’m going to pull it off now.”

“I’ll try not to cry.”

I rolled my eyes, sighed, and yanked the duct tape off. He winced. A shallow gash cut across his ribs on the right side, more of a scrape than a deep cut, but it was three inches long, and it had bled. At least it wasn’t a gaping wound, so we could get away without stitches. I got the saline solution and clean rags.

“Sorry about your car.” I squirted the saline solution into the gash and blotted it.

“We agreed on full disclosure,” he said. “When were you going to tell me that Pierce is obsessed with you?”

“He isn’t obsessed with me.”

“He called you to let you know he was starting his fireworks today. He claims he’s in lust. Then he texted you to make sure you saw him blow up my car. That’s twice he notified you before he did anything he views as impressive.”

I smeared antibiotic ointment on the cut and placed a gauze pad over it. “Adam is a flake. He’s impulsive and he likes people to reassure him he is cool and awesome. I’m a young woman, I’m attractive, and I indicated that I wasn’t impressed by his shenanigans.” I began to tape the cut. “He discussed bringing me home with him to meet his mother just so he could see the look on her face. He got a giggle out of it. It’s not obsession, it’s . . . passing fancy, or whatever people call it.”

“These are things I need to know,” he said. “I can use this. If I’d known this, I would’ve handled today differently.”

“Funny how it’s always ‘I’ with you. It’s never ‘we.’” I taped the other side of the gash.

“What did you do that would make him infatuated? Did you kiss? Did you hold hands?”

His voice had taken on a distant tone, but there was a slight edge of heat to it.

“I gave him a peck on the cheek. It wasn’t sexual. He was trying to get me to run away with him, and I didn’t want to rebuff him so hard that he’d slam the door shut. I still have to bring him in.”

“Then why is he infatuated?”

“I don’t know why,” I said, exasperated. “Probably because I’m chasing him and I said no. He can’t comprehend that I’m chasing him because MII will throw my family out on the street. His House has been on top forever and he can’t even picture someone doing that to them, let alone try to understand what it would be like. He probably thinks that I’m pursuing him because I’m secretly fascinated with the glittering jewel that he is.”

Oops. Said a little too much. I didn’t really want Rogan to know that Montgomery held us by our throat. There was no telling what he would do with that information. I straightened. “Look, right now there are two people in this kitchen. One is an overindulged, filthy-rich Prime, and the other is me. You have more in common with Adam than I do. Why don’t you tell me why he’s doing things?”

Mad Rogan looked at me, his eyes clear and hard. “I’m nothing like him.”

On that we could agree. Rogan was nothing like Pierce. Adam was a teenager in a man’s body. Rogan was a man, calculating, powerful, and stubborn.

Bern walked into the kitchen at a near run and stopped. I realized that I was standing about two inches from a half-naked Mad Rogan, who was looking up at me.

“Should I come back later?” Bern asked.

“No,” I said, stepping away from Mad Rogan. “He was interrogating me while I patched him up, but we’re finished.”

Mad Rogan glanced down at his side. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Bern put a laptop on the table. “I found it.”

On the laptop, a video feed played an image recorded with the regular camera at the front door. The time stamp said 20:26. Twenty-six minutes after eight. It had to be just a few moments after we arrived.

A pair of teenagers came skating down the street on their boards, one in a blue shirt and one in black. They looked like typical Houston kids: dark hair, tan, about fourteen or fifteen. They shot by the Range Rover and kept going. The clip stopped with the kid in a black shirt holding a cell phone to his ear as he rolled off.

Bern clicked the keys. The image rewound in slow motion, and I saw the kid in blue bend ever so slightly as he jumped over the curb and toss a small object under the Range Rover.

“Is that . . . ?”

“It’s a bomb,” Bern confirmed. “He must’ve remotely detonated it.”

“He used children to place a bomb?”

“Yes,” Bern confirmed.

“Children?” My mind couldn’t quite wrap around it.

“And one of them called him to report.” Mad Rogan’s eyes iced over.

I sank into a chair. “What if it had detonated early? Who hands a bomb to kids? And for what? To make a lousy point?”

Mad Rogan tapped his phone. “Diego? He used children. Yes. No. Just let me know.”

He hung up.

Two young boys had skated by our house, holding a bomb. What if one of them had fallen? What if someone had been in the car? What if one of us had gone to the mailbox? Then we would have had more dead bodies. The death count for today would have been more than six. Six was more than enough, especially because three of those six deaths happened because of me.

My chest hurt. I killed people today. I took their lives. They would’ve taken mine, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter right now. My grandmother barely survived. My house had almost been burned to the ground, then two children threw a bomb under a car parked next to it. It all crashed down on me like an avalanche.

“Are you alright?” Mad Rogan focused on me.

“No,” I said.

Bern was looking at me too. “I can make tea,” he said. “Would you like some tea?”

“No, thank you.” I turned to Mad Rogan. He was a Prime, and right now we couldn’t afford to pass up on whatever protection he could offer. “Can you do any magic at all, or are you completely dry?”

“It’s coming back,” he said. “I’m not helpless.”

“Can you stay the night?” I asked.

“I can,” he said.

“And if Pierce shows up or something happens . . .”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said.

True. He meant it.

“Thank you,” I told him. “I’ll see you both in the morning.”

I left the kitchen and went to my room, almost running. I closed the door, sat on the bed, and pulled my knees to my chest. There was a big, gaping hole inside me. It was growing bigger, and I didn’t know how to close it.

A knock sounded on my door. It was probably my mother. For a moment I considered pretending that I didn’t hear her. But I wanted her to come in. I wanted her to hug me and tell me everything would be okay. “Who is it?”

“It’s me,” my mother called.

“It’s open.”

My mother walked in carrying a tablet. She was moving slower than usual. Her leg was really hurting and I felt it because she climbed the stairs. She sat beside me on the bed and swiped her hand across the tablet. A video clip came on. It had been taken with someone’s phone. On-screen, Adam Pierce, his phantom spikes and claws glowing, belched fire. The side of the tower where Rogan and I had our little adventure loomed on the right.

The front entrance of the tower blew out with an ear-splitting thunder. The building shook. A man gasped, “Holy shit!”

The video switched to a view of a hand. Whoever had been filming had grabbed his phone and hightailed it out of there.

“Were you inside?” Mom asked.

I nodded. “Adam was a diversion. While he was spitting fire, a team went into this building to retrieve some sort of trinket hidden in the wall. We stopped them.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Mom asked.

I shook my head.

“Can I help?” she asked softly. “Can I do anything?”

I shook my head and leaned against her. She put her arm around me. I wouldn’t cry. I was twenty-five years old. I would not cry.

“Rogan’s people are analyzing the jewelry we found,” I said, my voice sounding dull. “I sent a picture of it to Bern. He’s looking too. There is something really big and nasty going on, Mom. I feel like I’m on the edge of it. It scares me. I scared myself today.”

“You’re doing what needs to be done,” Mom said and hugged me to her. “Remember the rules: we have to be able to look ourselves in the mirror. Sometimes that means doing terrible things because there is no other choice. Are you doing the right thing?”

“I think so. It’s just spun out of control so fast. Pierce was willing to burn down a building to get that thing. He gave a bomb to a kid Leon’s age. Who does that?”

“Someone who needs to be stopped.”

“I keep thinking, if MII didn’t get involved and call me into their office, this would be happening to someone else. We would be watching all this on TV and going, ‘Oh my God, isn’t that crazy?’”

“You can’t go there,” Mom said. “That’s how you’ll drive yourself nuts. Trust me on this: wondering, What if this didn’t happen? never helped anybody. It just drowns you in self-pity and makes you less alert. There is no backing out now. Nevada, view it as a job. As something you have to do. Get the job done and come home.”

“I think Rogan is using me as bait,” I said.

“Use him back,” Mom said. “Throw him at Pierce and let him take him down.”

“What if he kills Pierce?”

“Bigger problem if Pierce kills him,” Mom said. “But if he kills Pierce, it becomes a matter between House Pierce and House Rogan. Let them sort it out. Your primary objective here is to survive. Then to bring Pierce in, if possible.”

I rested my head on her shoulder. “I’m going to need more ammo.”

“How was the Ruger?” my mother asked softly. She’d figured it out.

“I hit my target,” I told her.