Diamond Fire

By the time he came back and tried to reach out, her jealousy and resentment had gone toxic. She hated him and the family so much she’d tried to kill Connor on multiple occasions. For this purpose, she gave her only son, Gavin, to a psychopathic Prime, who used him to murder an off-duty cop. Now Gavin sat in prison, and only Connor’s influence and a great deal of investigative work on my end had kept him from being shot on sight.

We would probably invite Gavin and his father. I was reasonably sure that the Rogan family name would buy Gavin a day pass. Kelly was a fugitive, from both the law and the House Assembly. If I saw Kelly, I would put a bullet between her eyes without hesitation. I wouldn’t try to apprehend her or talk to her. I would shoot her until I ran out of bullets.

Arrosa looked at him. “Is this a practice marriage for you? Are you planning on divorcing Nevada and doing this again?”

Rogan’s face took on that look of intense concentration that usually meant he expected someone to shoot at us. “No.”

Magic snapped out of my mother-in-law and I nearly fell out of my chair.

“You are my only son,” Arrosa Rogan declared.

The loving mother had vanished. Her expression hardened, her eyes narrowed, and the tone of command in her voice made me want to snap to obey. She would give Grandma Victoria a run for her money.

“If fortune smiles on us, this will be your only wedding. This will be a formal affair. Your bride will be wearing a breathtaking gown, you will be wearing a tuxedo, and I will watch you two exchange vows and kiss in front of our entire family and all of our friends, and I will glow with pride at this moment. You will not rob me of that joy. Later I will talk to your father about it and tell him how beautiful it was. Am I making myself clear?”

The Scourge of Mexico and the most terrifying Prime in Houston unhinged his manly jaws and said the only thing he could, “Yes, Mother.”

“Wonderful. We will set the date three months from now. That will give everyone time to rearrange their schedules.” Arrosa turned back to me and smiled, all warmth and sunshine again. “I’m so excited! My dear, the dress, the hair, the flowers. You have so many wonderful decisions to make.”

Chapter 1

Two months and two weeks later

Catalina

I fought my way through the hallway of Mountain Rose house trying to dodge the children. Everything I ever read about my future brother-in-law on Herald suggested that Connor Rogan was a loner with no immediate family besides his mother and his cousin, Kelly Waller, who didn’t count.

Herald lied.

The gaggle of children was coming right for me.

I clutched my tablet to my chest and braced myself.

They ran around me in circles, giggling, and dashed down the hallway, leaving a little girl holding a stuffed unicorn in their wake. I let out a breath.

Rogan had oodles of relatives, scattered all over the Mediterranean, and all of them descended on his mother’s house to attend the wedding. I liked kids, but there were somewhere between twenty and thirty children under the age of twelve on the premises and they traveled in packs. The last time I ran across this gang of preteens, they knocked the tablet out of my hands. Nothing could happen to the tablet. All of the wedding files were on there.

The little girl and I looked at each other. She was probably five and supercute, with brown hair and big dark eyes. She wore a pretty lavender dress decorated with tiny silk flowers. If Mom had put me into that dress when I was her age, it would be covered with mud and engine grease in about five minutes. When I was five, I either played outside or in Grandma Frida’s garage, while she repaired tanks and field artillery.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Catalina.”

“Mia Rosa García Ramírez Arroyo del Monte.”

I had seen her before, I realized. She always seemed to follow Mrs. Rogan around. She trailed her to the porch, to the study, to the media room. She even wanted to sit next to her in the dining room.

Mia Rosa thrust her unicorn up. It was almost as big as she was and decorated with blue and silver plastic jewels the size of grapes and way too many sparkles.

“This is Sapphire.”

“She is very pretty.”

“She lives in the midnight clouds and her horn glows with moonlight.”

Of course. Jewel Legends. It was a popular kid cartoon with mythical animals. I was too old for it, but Arabella, my younger sister, caught the very beginning of it. Everything had to be Jewel Legends for a while: notebooks, backpacks, phone cases . . . And then she went to high school and that was the end of that.

“I want a sparkly gun,” Mia Rosa announced in a slightly accented voice.

“Um, what?”

“There is a gun that lets you put more sparklies.”

“You want a bedazzler?”

Mia Rosa nodded several times. “Yes. My mommy said you were the go girl and I should ask you.”

Go girl. I hid a sigh. “I’ll see what I can do. What is your mommy’s name, so I know where to deliver the bedazzler?”

“Teresa Rosa Arroyo Roberto del Monte. Thank you. But don’t give it to mommy. Give it to me.”

Awww . She said thank you. “You’re welcome.”

She curtsied and ran after the kids, dragging her unicorn.

My phone chimed. I glanced at the text message. Arabella has written, “Where are you??? Get here!!!” and added a gif of a crying baby with photoshopped rivers of tears. I took off at a near run.

It all started with Nevada firing the wedding planner. The first wedding planner.

Usually my older sister was a perfectly reasonable person. Well, as reasonable as someone can be when she is a human lie detector. However, two weeks ago Simon Nightingale disappeared, and House Nightingale hired us to find him. Just three months ago our family registered as a House, and our small PI firm went from Baylor Investigative Agency to House Baylor Investigative Agency. The Nightingale case was our first investigation. The entire Houston elite was watching us, and it drove Nevada a little nuts. A lot nuts. She was pretty much a nutcase.

The first wedding planner was fired because she argued with Nevada. My sister would explain the way she wanted things done and the planner would tell why they couldn’t do it that way. Most of the time “couldn’t” meant “we won’t do it because it’s a Prime wedding and it’s not the way things are done.” Finally, the planner explained to Nevada that it wasn’t really her wedding, but a wedding of House Rogan and she needed to stop impeding it with “ridiculous demands,” such as serving queso as an appetizer at the rehearsal dinner. The planner was promptly escorted from the premises.

The second planner was fired, because she kept lying. Her approach to wedding planning was to pacify the bride by pretending that everything was under control even when it wasn’t. She didn’t want to be micromanaged. But, my sister was an epic control freak and her attention to detail was legendary within the family. Nevada would ask if something was a problem, and the planner would repeatedly assure her that things were fine, despite being warned that Nevada could sense her lies. Things came to a head when Nevada asked her point-blank if she and Mrs. Rogan had come to an agreement on the caterer. After being told for the tenth time to not worry about it, Nevada snapped. I realized that the second planner was let go when I saw her running to her car in five-inch heels with a look of pure panic on her face. My sister had burst onto the porch behind her, yelling, “Is it fine now? Is it still fine?”

We didn’t bother with a third wedding planner. Arabella and I took a weekend, armed ourselves with takeout, and after thirty odd episodes of Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? and four seasons of Bridezilla , we decided to plan the wedding ourselves. It was that or there would be no wedding.

Unfortunately, while Rogan and his mother treated us with perfect courtesy, the rest of his family wasn’t quite sure about our status. Both Arabella and I were registered as Primes, but our records were sealed. Also, our family wasn’t wealthy, and Rogan was a billionaire. With me being eighteen and Arabella turning sixteen, they didn’t feel we had any authority. I had a feeling we ranked as “poor relatives who run errands,” somewhere just above hired help. Apparently, I was the go girl. I didn’t even want to know what Arabella was.