Burn for Me

My mother pinned me down with her stare. “What did the firemen say?”

“They said Grandma shouldn’t have been smoking next to a gasoline container.”

Grandma Frida spun toward me. If looks could burn, we’d all be incinerated.

“Mad Rogan’s arson guys said someone mixed a military-grade antipersonnel compound with some gasoline and applied a heat source to it.”

“Mad Rogan?” Bern asked.

At the table Leon suddenly came to life and put his phone down. “Mad Rogan?”

“Mad Rogan had nothing to do with the arson,” I said.

“How do you know?” Leon asked.

“I know,” I said. “I asked. I monitored his experts too, and they weren’t lying.”

“Mad Rogan was here?” Leon pointed at the table. “Here? And nobody told me?”

“A thousand pardons, Your Majesty,” Arabella said. “Everybody was too busy trying to save Grandma.”

Leon ignored her. “Did he do anything while he was here?”

“He cut down the garage door,” I told him.

Leon jumped off his seat like his butt had springs.

“Sit,” Mother said.

He landed back in the chair. Apparently my younger cousin was a secret Mad Rogan fan.

“How sure are you that this was done by Adam Pierce?” Mother asked.

“I’m pretty sure,” I said. “I’ll be one hundred percent sure after I ask him face-to-face.”

My mother put a small box on the table. Ten orange pills rested inside. “So find him and ask.”

“I’d like nothing better.” I swiped the pillbox off the table. Looked like I would be going to the bad part of town tonight. It was just past three o’clock. Plenty of time before it got dark. “I might have to get backup. The kind you won’t like.”

“Do whatever you have to do,” my mother said.

“Better you get Pierce, than us,” Grandma Frida said. “Because if Pierce shows up here again, we won’t be playing around.”

“After we’re done, we’ll put what’s left of him into a plastic grocery bag and you can take it to his family,” Mother promised. “And Nevada? If you’re even thinking of beating yourself up over what happened, forget it.”

“You were doing your job,” Grandma Frida said. “You didn’t cause this to happen. They started it, whoever they are. They will regret it, because we will finish it.”

“Thank you.” It didn’t kill the guilt, but right now guilt wasn’t as important as finding Adam and finding out if he was responsible.

I headed out of the room. I’d need to get my Ruger.

Behind me, Mom said, “Let’s talk about safety. Nobody goes anywhere alone . . .”

I went to the cage, unlocked it, and took out my P90. The pills were for Bug. It was barely three in the afternoon, but I’d need backup to go see Bug, even in daylight. Bug lived in Jersey Village, or, as it was better known, the Pit. I could call one of the freelancers except that right now most of them ran from us like we were on fire. It would also cost me an arm and a leg. Going into the Pit was bad for your health.

I split the pills, putting seven into a plastic bag and three in the jar to take with me. I might need to go see Bug more than once. Three would do for the first visit.

There was one person who could give me all the backup I needed and then some. I scrolled through my phone to Mad Rogan’s number. This was insanity, but the stakes had changed. Before, Adam was just talking. Now there was a chance he’d turned violent. If he had tried to burn my grandmother to death, nothing would stop him from incinerating me the moment I said something he didn’t like. And if I did find Adam Pierce, I had no way in hell to contain him.

I hesitated with my finger over the number.

This was a bad idea. Mad Rogan was violent, ruthless, and brutal. All of the things I normally avoided in my job. I had a feeling he had no brakes, and that scared me. If he went off the rails and started slaughtering people, there was very little I could do about it. I didn’t want to be responsible for any deaths. Nor did I want to be left holding the bag when the dust from his rampage cleared and cops came asking questions. He had expensive lawyers. I didn’t.

The way my body came to attention when he was near scared me too. He turned me on by just looking at me. Having sex with him would be an experience I would never forget, and some insane part of me wanted that experience. I wanted to see him naked. I wanted to have all of that overwhelming masculine intensity focused on me. I’d never before had a reaction like that to a man.

I couldn’t trust Mad Rogan. Not just because he was likely a sociopath but also because he was a Prime and head of an old House. To him I was a peon. If he needed a bullet shield in a fight, he’d use me without any hesitation. I was the hired help, the means to an end, and I had to draw some strict lines in the dirt for him and for myself, or I would come out of this crushed or not at all. And if I gave him any hint of being vulnerable, whether it was my love for my family, my pride, or my irrational craving to find out what his hands on my skin would feel like, he would use it against me.

Not to mention that I had locked him in place with my magic and pulled the answers out of him. Considering that I was still alive and uninjured, he’d handled it awfully well. That was something I would need to research. My magic was rare and information about it was sparse, mostly because the few people who had it worked in classified positions. I had done my best to learn as much as I could, but I had never seen any mention of that particular magic. It had come out of nowhere.

I stared at Mad Rogan’s number. Was there any other way to do this?

If Adam turned on me, any freelancer I took with me, even if I took two of them, would end up dead. I would end up dead. Adam thought he could use me; so did Mad Rogan. The best way to deal with them was to use them right back. I had to throw the two Primes at each other and wait quietly on the sidelines until the dust settled.

I took a deep breath and pushed the keys. He answered on the second ring.

“Yes?”

Hearing his voice was like being caressed. Chains, I reminded myself. Basement. Psycho. Boundaries. Boundaries were good. “I thought about your offer.”

“I’m aflutter with anticipation.”

Psycho who likes to mock me. Even better. “I don’t want your money. I don’t want to be employed by you. But I would like to have a partnership. I want to be very clear: I wouldn’t be working for you. I would be working with you on equal footing toward a common goal. And I have conditions.”