Ruby Fever (Hidden Legacy, #6)(22)

“PAC?” Bern asked.

Connor looked like he’d bitten into a rotten apple. “We’ll handle it.”

Principal Action Consulting, or the PAC as they called themselves, recently became a very sharp thorn in House Rogan’s side. Just like Connor, they offered a private army for hire and, just like Connor’s army, they were led by a powerful Prime, Matthew Berry, a tagger. Taggers marked a spot in a structure and then saturated it with arcane energy until it exploded. Matthew was a one-man artillery battery.

The PAC was started by Matthew’s father. Back then it had been called the Black Hurricane, and after Connor erupted onto the military scene, people kept asking them if Mad Rogan and their outfit were somehow involved. The father and son duo got tired of it and changed the name.

But the real trouble started last year. A group of archeologists was taken hostage in Pakistan, four of them American citizens. For complicated political reasons, the United States government wanted to rescue them quietly. They contacted the PAC. The father of one of the archeologists and Connor’s mother’s friend contacted Connor. While Berry and the government haggled, Connor went in with a small team and saved the hostages.

For no apparent reason, Berry viewed this as a flex. What should have been a business rivalry at best turned deeply personal and the younger Berry decided to wipe House Rogan off the planet’s surface. If Connor’s people took one side of a conflict, Berry made sure to get hired for the other. They’d clashed several times on foreign soil, and we all knew the final confrontation was coming and soon.

“Berry is massing his troops in Austin,” Connor said.

Berry was headquartered in Virginia. There was no reason for his people to be in Austin, only a few hours from us. He was preparing for an offensive against Connor. Everyone here knew it, and none of us would do anything about it. Whoever made the first move would have to bear the legal ramifications. It was smarter to get attacked than to land the first blow.

Berry was a significant threat, and the timing was very coincidental. I never counted on help from Connor and Nevada, although it was always available, simply because we needed to be self-sufficient. But now we knew for sure that we had to rely on ourselves. I needed to alter our plan a bit.

“Arabella?”

She looked at me. The fury in her eyes was still there.

“Whoever tried to kill Linus will likely want to finish the job,” I said.

“I hope they try. Nobody touches my family.”

I supposed we all saw Linus as family. Linus treated the three of us as his granddaughters and Bern and Leon as his grandsons, and he especially doted on Arabella. He let her steal his whiskey and cigars, and sometimes she would ask him for advice. Nevada got respect and guidance, I got education and lectures, but Arabella got beaming approval. If we lost Linus, she would be inconsolable. I would be inconsolable.

“You’re staying in,” I told her. “You don’t leave the Compound no matter what happens. You’re our final line of defense.”

“Fine by me.”

“We’re done,” I said. “Everyone knows what to do.”

Nevada waved and the laptop screen went dark.

I walked over to Bern and handed him the USB. “I need to know what’s on it.”

“Will do.”

He got up, and Runa and he left. Leon sauntered out the door. Mom nodded to Arabella. My sister jumped off her chair and the two of them went out of the room.

Cornelius also rose to his feet. He’d stayed so quiet throughout the meeting, it was easy to forget he was there.

“Just a moment.” I got up, went back to my office, took the Ziploc bag with Luciana’s brush out of my desk drawer, and brought it back to the conference room. “I’d like you to check something for me.”

“I’m all ears,” he told me.





Chapter 5




The sound of my phone pulled me away from the computer screen. I glanced at it. Linus.

Linus?!

“Yes?”

“I broke into Linus’ phone,” Bern said.

Damn it. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”

Bern made a deep rumble that was probably a chuckle.

“Did you find anything good?”

“The last call he took was at 6:43 p.m. Sunday night. All others went to voice mail. The first of these was at 10:51 p.m. That’s likely your window.”

“The first call that went to voice mail, who was it from?”

“Zahra Kabani.”

Zahra Kabani was the Warden of Michigan. Linus and she were working together on tracking a fugitive. He would’ve taken her call.

“Any progress on the security system?”

“Working on it. How’s Linus?”

“Still unconscious.”

“No change is better than a change for the worse.”

“True. What about my USB?”

“Working on it.”

He said goodbye and hung up.

I rubbed my face. Whatever happened to Linus likely happened between 6:43 p.m. and 10:51 p.m. on Sunday night. We would narrow it down even further once the coroner was done with Pete.

Pete’s face crisscrossed by the dark starburst of lines surfaced from my memory. I pushed the thought aside and stared back at the screen.