Emerald Blaze

“You should run,” I told Alessandro. “You’re vastly outnumbered. It’s not too late to give up and go home.”

“You! Don’t you walk away. I have things to say to you.” Runa caught up with us. “Catalina, have you lost your mind?”

Probably. “How did you even know he was here?”

“Intuition,” she said and turned bright red.

Bern. Had to be.

Runa stared at Alessandro. “You saved my brother. I owe you a debt. If you need a favor, I’ll take care of it.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Catalina is my best friend. I don’t know what’s going on, but don’t get any ideas. She’s too good for you.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“If you hurt her again, I’ll find you and then I’ll make you wish you were dead.”

“Okay.” I grabbed her by the shoulders and steered her toward the front door. “Thank you for your input, Prime Etterson.”

“Dead!” Runa called out over her shoulder.

Chapter 8

Alessandro stared at Rhino. His eyebrows came together.

“Why don’t we just take my car?”

“Because we’re going to the Pit, which means we have to navigate the deserted and possibly flooded area with many hazards.”

“My car is fast and maneuverable.”

I raised my hand and held my thumb and index finger an inch apart. “And it sits this low to the ground.”

“Can you even reach the speed limit in this monstrosity?”

“Yes.”

He pondered the blocky SUV. The corners of his mouth curled a little. “What if something chases us and we have to jump a hole in the bridge?”

“If something chases us, I’ll reverse, ram them, and then drive back and forth over their broken body until it’s flat as a pancake.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“If you want to jump bridges, you can follow me in your car, but I’m taking this one. You want to roll up to the Pit Reclamation HQ in your Spider because it’s consistent with your character of House scion. It would make Marat think less of you, which is to your advantage. I empathize. Yesterday I wanted to appear incompetent and vulnerable and you told them that my powers gave you pause. We are taking Rhino.”

He raised his hands. “Fine.”

“Thank you so much for your cooperation.”

“You’re welcome.”

He strode to his car and popped the trunk. He dug in it and came out with an assault rifle.

“What is that?”

“This is an M4 carbine. It’s air-cooled, gas-operated, magazine-fed, and it fires 5.56 rounds.”

“I know what an M4 carbine is. What is that attached to it?”

Alessandro made a show of looking at the rifle. “Oh that.”

“Is that an M320 grenade launcher?”

“It appears to be.”

“Just out of curiosity, do you have a SAW stashed somewhere in that tiny car?”

“I don’t remember.” He leaned toward me, his amber eyes speculative. “Would you like to crawl around in there with me and look for one?”

Asking him things was clearly a mistake.

I opened the hatchback and he loaded the M4 into it. Two portable pistol cases followed. Then another case, which he stacked on top of the pistol ones.

“What’s in there?”

“Knives.”

I pulled my sword case open. Two feet high and four feet long, it unfolded like a toolbox, with the top shelf holding my favorite blades, the tactical gladius, the rapier, and a tactical machete. The bottom shelf offered a variety of knives in every shape and size.

“Extras,” I told him.

“Nice,” he said.

Not as nice as Linus’ blade, which I had already loaded into the console.

I shut the hatchback, climbed into the driver’s seat, while he got in next to me, and we were off.

Alessandro relaxed in the seat, long legs stretched out, broad shoulders resting against the back. Sunlight filtered through the window, playing on his hair. His face, halfway shaded, was heartbreaking. I could lift my phone and take a burst of twenty pictures and every single one would be a masterpiece.

A faint whiff of sandalwood mixed with vanilla and a hint of citrus floated through the car. The Alessandro scent. He’d smelled this way the day he kissed me, and I nearly stripped naked for him in the bathroom of the Wortham Theater. He’d smelled this way too when I came to tell him I was in love with him and found him packing.

I wanted to know what happened between him and Arkan. Whatever it was had shaken him to the core. It gnawed at me. I wanted to know.

If I asked him about it, he would tell me. It had to be awful, because nothing short of awful caused that kind of seismic shift in a person. He would tell me, and then I would know, and I would want to make him feel better. I would care. I couldn’t afford to care.

I turned right on Kempwood Drive. We could have taken Hempstead, but it was closed due to roadwork. There were three certainties in Houston: death, taxes, and never-ending roadwork. The joke was on me. The moment we merged onto the Sam Houston Tollway, the traffic ground to a halt. Sirens wailed ahead. We would be here awhile.

The hint of sandalwood and vanilla drifted to me. I needed a distraction.

I thought back to Augustine’s case summary. I had read it last night and forwarded it to Alessandro before passing out.

The MII investigators were worth their price. In the brief time they had the case, they put together a timeline of Felix’s movements, interviewed the other four Primes and some of their staff, and obtained the preliminary coroner’s report.

Felix died on Friday, July 15th. That day he’d dropped off his children at their private school and arrived at his office at Morton Enterprises at 8:15 a.m., the same as he did every morning. He spent three hours at the office, placing several phone calls to the engineering firm involved with the reclamation project. He ate lunch at his desk—a gyro with chips from a place around the corner—worked some more after lunch, and at 2:17 p.m. exited the building. At 3:00 p.m., he was seen at the America Tower, where he’d bumped into Linus.

He left the America Tower by 3:30 p.m. and went back to the office. According to his secretary and his calendar, he had no plans for the evening and was supposed to go home to have dinner with his family. Instead, at 5:00 p.m., he called his housekeeper and told her that he had a change of plans and not to wait for him for dinner, then he left the office.

Twenty-five minutes later, an unknown person used the private after-hours code on the gate inside the Pit. The two guards swore nobody went in before Felix and the security feed confirmed their statement, so this person had to have arrived to the island by boat or some other means. Shortly after, the security booth logged Felix driving in. The inner gate code was used again at 5:49 p.m., presumably by Felix. That was his last sign of life.

It killed me that nobody thought to check on him, but Felix was a Prime and he had previously stayed at the site overnight when the occasion called for it. Because he’d called his housekeeper, his children assumed that he was working late. In the morning, Felix’s daughter tried to reach him, and when he still didn’t answer, she contacted her grandfather, who called security at the site. They began a systematic search and found him hanging off the cable, his body butchered.

He’d gone to the site to meet with someone. His cell phone was recovered and showed no phone calls or texts, so the arrangements for the meeting had to have been made in person, during his trip to the Assembly.

The MII investigators had come to the same conclusion, but the inner workings of the Texas Assembly were kept private. Whatever happened between the gleaming white walls of the America Tower stayed there. None of the other four Primes had visited the Assembly in person that day, but their family members had attended: Tatyana’s brother, Cheryl’s uncle, Marat’s brother, and Stephen’s father. Any of them could’ve passed on a message to Felix. Meet me in the Pit. It’s important. Come alone.

Each of the four living board members had an alibi. Stephen Jiang’s appeared to be the most solid. He was on a conference call with a firm in Tokyo, and according to MII’s summary, the conversation was too detailed for anyone to impersonate him. Marat was having dinner with his family, who would no doubt lie for him if he asked. Cheryl was also having dinner at a restaurant with a friend, who was yet to be identified. Tatyana’s alibi was the shakiest of the four. Supposedly she was at her office, but MII caught her vehicle leaving the parking lot of the Pierce Building in the middle of the day and didn’t show her coming back.

Felix’s legs were burned to a proverbial crisp. Tatyana could do it in seconds. But why?

I glanced away from the road and caught Alessandro looking at me. Something wistful and sad passed through his eyes, then the ice shutters crashed down, and the Artisan looked back at me.

“A penny for your thoughts,” he said.

“I don’t understand the burned legs.”

“Catalina, have you noticed that every time we meet, we end up discussing dead people?”

“Apparently that’s the nature of our relationship.”

A slow smile curved his lips.

“You don’t have to be so happy about it,” I told him.