Diamond Fire

“Xavier!” Samanta glared at him.

Elba grinned. “Don’t be jealous. If I were you, I would be doing everything I could to help us. The way Lucian sleeps around, you’ll have to share your inheritance with an army of bastards.”

“Ugh!” Adriana spun and walked away. Samanta looked after her, glanced at Xavier and Elba, and hurried after Adriana.

“Don’t worry,” Elba said. “Samanta is a coward, and Adriana won’t say anything. She’s bought Isabella’s pills off me a couple of times. She’s got ‘anxiety’ and if her mom finds out, she’ll skin her alive.”

Xavier grimaced. “Good, keep them under control and I’ll handle the rest.”

The recording stopped.

“I’ll fucking kill him.” Leon growled. “I’ll drown him in that damn fountain and then I’ll CPR him back and drown him again.”

A pit had opened in my stomach. I tasted acid on my tongue and swallowed it back down. Hot tears wet my cheeks, burning the skin. It was as if I had been poisoned and my body was desperately trying to expel it.

“Don’t cry, Catalina—he’s not worth it. Don’t let him make you sad.” Leon hovered next to me. “Please don’t cry. I’ll make it okay somehow. Just don’t cry, or I might cry with you, and then you’ll tell everybody, and I’ll be embarrassed. Do you need tissues? I have tissues.”

He grabbed a box of tissues from the backseat and thrust them in my hands. “Don’t be sad.”

“I’m not sad,” I ground through clenched teeth. “I’m angry.”

Leon blinked. “You don’t get angry.”

I turned and looked at him. He shied back.

“That waste of space actually thinks that he has a chance against us. He thinks that I’m so flattered that he paid attention to me for ten minutes that I’ll just do whatever he wants. He thinks he dazzled me. That arrogant prick!”

Leon flinched.

“And their brilliant plan! They’ll get ahold of my tablet, because that’s where we keep all our family’s deep shameful secrets.”

“Do we have those?” Leon asked.

“No, but they do, and I will find every last one of them. They think they can break up the wedding, so in some distant future Rogan will die alone. I can’t even! This is the dumbest thing I ever heard. It’s like a tv movie for tweeners.”

“Yes, that is some Parent Trap level shit, right there.”

“It’s something a twelve-year-old would come up with. Xavier is an adult! Elba is sixteen years old. They can’t take care of themselves, they’re petulant, they’re immature, they don’t know basic things, they’re dumb, and their magic is nowhere near ours. Where does this superior attitude come from exactly?”

Leon started the car and locked the doors. “Okay,” he said in a soothing voice. “Your face is turning purple and I’ve never seen it do that before. I really think we should just go home.”

“No, we’re going back to Mountain Rose and I will feed him this tablet.”

“Well, I’m driving so I say we’re going home.”

“Leon!”

“Just keep in mind,” Leon said, merging onto the highway, “I’m your cousin and you love me. If you attack me while I’m driving, we will both die and then he wins. Don’t let him win, Catalina.”

I sat in the kitchen, going through the background files. Leon had taken off for his room and a shower. Bern was working in the computer room we called Hut of Evil. It was just me, Arabella, Mom, and Grandma Frida in the kitchen.

I had looked at the files some yesterday, but they were a mile long, and I didn’t review them as thoroughly as I needed to. Thanks to Xavier’s little rant, I had some nice suspects.

I focused on Mikel, who managed Ramírez Capital, and was the husband of Maria of many cocktails, white clothes, and loud gold jewelry and father to Elba, who was a vicious little bitch. When Xavier put on his little performance for me as we walked by the fountain and he told Elba off, he said something about Mikel paying off the house staff. On the way back to the warehouse, I had scoured his file. On paper, Mikel drew a salary equivalent to one point four million dollars. He had no other significant sources of income. Maria spent money at an alarming rate. They lived in a seven-million-dollar mansion; they had a second home in Barcelona, valued at five million; they owned four luxury cars, totaling over eight hundred thousand dollars; a yacht; and they showed no signs of slowing down. Where was all the money coming from?

I had asked Bug to comb through his financial statements and to let me know as soon as he found something.

Lucian de Baldivia was the next on my list. He was married to June, but it seemed everyone in the family knew he was having affairs. I’d been tracking cheaters down for years and I knew that affairs weren’t free. They left a trail. Hotels, gifts, dates, luxury getaways disguised as work conferences or conventions, more gifts, this time to the wronged spouse. Rogan’s files listed twenty-three women Lucian had slept with since marrying June twenty years ago, and twelve of these relationships were long-term affairs. Every couple of years he got the itch and found someone to scratch it. His last affair ended eighteen months ago. He was about due for a new one, and the Sealight would make a pretty present.

There was still Paul Sarmiento, the boy toy, who appeared to have materialized out of thin air. He was a mystery: nobody knew him, nobody knew how Ane knew him, and nobody knew what he did. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars might not be a huge windfall for the Ramírez and de Baldivias, but it was an attractive prize for the average thief . . .

Arabella moaned and dramatically slammed her head on the table.

Mom and Grandma Frida put down their utensils and clapped.

“I’ve had it,” my sister announced. “She is not getting those damn lilacs and that’s final.”

“If she wants lilacs, just let her have lilacs. What’s the harm?” Grandma Frida asked.

“Her colors scheme is sage, pink, and white. Blue is going to clash with it. It’s going to be ugly. The bouquet will be in all the important photographs and everybody is going to notice how ugly it looks. You don’t understand, Grandma. People on Herald are vicious. I don’t want Nevada to be torn apart. They’re going to be mean. They’re jealous. Nobody wants to hear a story about a beautiful wedding, but everyone is going to make fun of a Prime bride who is marrying a billionaire but couldn’t afford to coordinate her bouquet. No!”

“Since when do we care what people on Herald think?” Mom asked.

“Since we became a House and everyone thinks we’re country bumpkins.” Arabella spun to me. “Catalina, tell them.”

Everyone looked at me.

“Fuck Herald,” I said.

Grandma Frida dropped her fork.

“Fuck Primes, fuck their paparazzi, and if Nevada wants lilacs, she should have all the lilacs ever. I will buy the damn lilacs myself, with my own money.” I took my tablet and walked out.

Behind me, Arabella said, “Mom?”

“I think your sister is a little stressed out,” Mom said.

I made a left turn to another hallway and walked to the Hut of Evil. When we sold our house to pay for Dad’s medical treatment and moved into the warehouse, the original plan was to set it up as homelike as possible. But instead we just threw walls up wherever they were needed and ended up with some unusual spots. To a stranger, our layout wouldn’t make much sense but to us, it worked great. The Hut of Evil was one of those odd places. It was a small room inside a larger space complete with the door and a roof and raised off the ground to accommodate all the cables and the cooling. I had to walk up three steps to get in.

The temperature inside was at least five degrees cooler than in the rest of the house. Bern sat in his usual seat in front of three monitors. I took a seat in Leon’s chair.

“Rough day,” Bern said.

“They lie, and cheat, and steal. And they think they’re better than us, because we work, and we don’t have as much money. This is the kind of family Nevada is marrying into.”