Ruby Fever (Hidden Legacy, #6)(56)

Alessandro spoke, his voice tinted with detachment, as if he were discussing a chore. “He has a mole in the Harris County DA’s office.”

Leon whistled.

I’d cursed when I found out.

“There are other informants as well, but that one is the most important,” Alessandro said.

“Are you going to expose him?” Arabella asked.

“No. I’m going to take care of him personally,” the Artisan said.

There was an awful finality in his voice. I had forgotten how angry he was.

Arabella smiled. “I like that part.”

I turned to Leon. “What exactly happened with the FBI?”

Leon shrugged. “Nothing much.”

I waited.

He sighed. “I followed them to the Caberas.”

“I didn’t see you.”

“You weren’t supposed to see me. You said ‘shadow.’ You didn’t say ‘make yourself seen.’”

He had a point.

“Arkan’s people hit us on the Justice Park Drive,” Leon continued. “Literally forty-five seconds from the FBI field office. An enerkinetic and some other weird shithead. The enerkinetic lit up their vehicle with projectiles. It blew up a little bit . . .”

“Define a little bit,” Mom said.

“Driver’s side door blew off and the engine flew out and landed on their SUV’s roof. It crushed the top of the car but didn’t fall all the way through.” Leon raised his hand and tilted it side to side. “Halfway in, halfway out type of thing. Of course, the windows shattered because the roof came down.”

“Cheap-assed armored glass,” Grandma Frida opined. “That’s government contract work for you.”

I killed a groan.

“I dropped the enerkinetic, but the other asshole snuck up from the opposite side. He shot bursts of this glowing crap, looked like seaweed, stung like a jellyfish, and things got serious when it wrapped around the car and the metal started smoking.”

“Where were the FBI agents at this point?” Mom growled.

“Inside the car.”

Oh no.

“It took me a second to find him,” Leon said. “The car was smoking, and the fumes made it difficult to see and breathe, and then the seaweed kind of contracted, and there was a crunchy noise, so it was hard to hear.”

Arabella put her head on the table, face down.

“Then he tried to shoot that shit at me, and I saw the direction it was coming from, and the rest is history.” Leon grinned.

“What happened to the FBI agents breathing in toxic fumes while trapped in a car that was being crushed?” Alessandro asked.

“I pulled them out. Agent Garcia was mostly okay. Wahl wasn’t breathing, so I did CPR until the FBI guys ran out of the building and helped.”

“That’s my boy!” Grandma Frida said.

I stared at him.

“What?” He raised his arms. “He was breathing fine when I left. They put one of those masks on his face and he kept taking it off to curse. All is well that ended well. And now I’ve got cool scars. Chicks dig scars.”

“Such a fascinating family,” Konstantin said.

He didn’t know the half of it.

“Okay,” I said. “We all know what we’re doing. Arabella, you are guarding, I’m going to deal with Arkan’s accounts, Alessandro and Konstantin will go after the mole.”

“What about us?” Ragnar asked.

“You recuperate. We don’t know when we will get attacked again.”

“Before we adjourn,” Cornelius said. “Has anyone seen the spider?”

“There is a spider?” Konstantin asked.

Arabella opened her eyes wide. “Yes, very large, very venomous.”

Bern tapped his laptop. The security feed from the office hallway ignited on the screen on the wall. On it, Jadwiga leisurely made her way across the carpet and scurried into Arabella’s office. The timestamp said 03:41 a.m.

“Well, she’s still alive,” Cornelius said.

“She’s in there.” Matilda pointed at the side wall. “I will try to coax her out when it’s quiet.”

“I want to stress that an attack can come at any time,” I said. “He will throw everything he can at us. Nevada and Connor are dealing with Matthew Berry and his PAC mercenaries. The government is pretending that this problem doesn’t exist. The National Assembly is trying to manage the death of its Speaker. We are on our own.”

Everyone nodded. Nobody seemed alarmed or surprised. They just accepted it. Somewhere along the line in the last three or four years, House Baylor had become a combat House. If Arkan thought his blitz would break us, he was in for a lot of disappointment.

“You should make some of those little sandwiches with Hawaiian rolls and leftover pork tenderloin,” Grandma Frida told me. “So your mother won’t starve in her crow’s nest.”



The conference room emptied.

Leon paused by Alessandro on his way out. “How did you know about Buller being vulnerable to knives?”

“Watched a recording of him fighting a praelia once,” Alessandro said.

Mages with the praelia talent summoned weapons and amplified them with their magic. They were usually called warrior mages and they were hell in a fight at close range.