Ruby Fever EPB, page 22
“Do I want to know how you got hold of it?”
“Let’s say it was an anonymous tip. If you scroll down, there are notes at the end of the file. Point three is of particular interest.”
If you followed the trail of financial bread crumbs outlined in point three, you would find a record of payments from Arkan to Luciana Cabera.
There was another pause.
“Explain this to me.”
“How secure is this line?”
“As secure as it can get.”
That was debatable but I had to cooperate with him to get what I needed. “Five years ago, a group of Primes financed Arkan’s theft of an Osiris serum sample.”
“Go on.”
The tone of his voice told me that he understood the gravity of the situation. Anything regarding this theft had to be handled with kid gloves. The National Assembly and the US government had never acknowledged that the theft had taken place because the international ramifications would be disastrous. This was a massive show of trust on my part, and he understood and appreciated it.
“Luciana Cabera was part of that group.”
“Okay, I see where she sent him several payments years ago.”
She had done it very carefully, but Arabella and Bern were very good at untangling complex financial threads.
“I also see the trail of payments to her from the same account. What are those?”
“Dividends.”
Arkan had shared profits from his sale of the modified serum. He had five investors total. Connor and Nevada unknowingly took out two when they destroyed the conspiracy several years ago. Linus, Alessandro, and I removed two others. Cabera had been the only remaining investor.
“Can you freeze these accounts?” I asked.
“Yes. Yes, I can. It will take time and the right people.”
“How much time?”
“To do it carefully? Two days, maybe three. If you want it done ASAP, twenty-four hours.”
“I would take option #2 if possible. Will you tell me when it’s done?”
“Of course, Catalina.”
Catalina, even. First-name basis.
“You’ll need to prepare,” he warned me. “Arkan’s reaction will be significant.”
“That’s the plan. Also, MII is working on pulling the rest of Arkan’s moles off the street. They are planning a coordinated strike. Would you like to assist?”
“Let me make something clear: the FBI will not be assisting MII. Montgomery International Investigations will be assisting the FBI with this matter. We will take the lead on this. I’ll keep you in the loop.”
There was a tiny pause.
“Also,” Wahl said. “In the interests of trust and continued cooperation, there has been an event in Alaska.”
What did that mean?
“Take care.”
He hung up. Okay then.
Did he mean Sanders? That was the only operative Arkan had in Alaska, and we already knew that Arkan had pulled him out. Sanders was on his way here, and he had personal reasons to want Alessandro and me dead.
I dumped the chopped tomatoes into a bowl. Yellow tomatoes were next, followed by minced onion, cilantro, salt, and a bit of lime juice.
Arabella walked into the kitchen and plopped into a chair. “I came to tell you that the payment to the Office of Records has been issued.”
“That was fast.”
“It was only fourteen separate cases. I contacted everyone, wired the money, and had them sign off on it absolving us of all responsibility. The parking lot repairs will be handled by the Office of Records directly, so I issued them a lump payment.”
When the occasion called for it, my sister could be so efficient, it was scary.
“Also, imagine my surprise when I went to check on Linus and found our evil grandma passed out in the next bedroom. Trapped in an arcane circle. It was very considerate of you to give her access to the suite’s bathroom.”
It was a very elaborate arcane circle. It had taken forever to develop it, and I had tested it on both Nevada and Alessandro along the way. Everything in that suite had been designed to contain my grandmother. I even had a dumbwaiter installed two months ago during the latest round of renovations so we could feed her.
“I’m sorry. There wasn’t time to tell you about it.”
“You asked me to defend the Compound. You can’t put a dragon in the spare bedroom and not tell me about it.”
“Again, I’m sorry.”
“Are we going to be having soft tacos?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Will there be steak?”
I opened the fridge, took out the giant marinade container, opened it, and showed her several pounds of skirt steak soaking in my patented fajita marinade. It involved onion, pear, spices for a bit of heat, garlic, Worcestershire sauce, lime juice, and a dash of soy sauce, all put through a blender.
Arabella’s eyes lit up. “You’re forgiven.”
“How badly did that bill hurt our budget?”
“It’s a significant unplanned expense, Catalina. Our emergency fund is wiped out. We don’t have to go on a ramen diet just yet. Maybe a baked potato diet.”
“Potatoes are cheaper than ramen.”
“Not if you factor butter, salt, cheese, and preparation time into it.”
I split my pico de gallo into two bowls and started on peeling mangos. The family was evenly split on mango pico. Half of them loved it, the other half claimed it was an abomination, and both halves would be upset if their needs were not met.
A distant explosion of barks floated to the kitchen.
Arabella groaned.
The barks got closer, then died. Konstantin strode into the kitchen and landed in the chair next to Arabella, his expression tortured. Rooster padded close to him and lay down at his feet. The prince put his hand on his face. Even exasperated, he remained shockingly handsome. If Grandma Frida was around, she would be snapping pictures left and right. For “posterity.”
“Welcome, Your Highness and Faithful Hound,” Arabella declared.
Konstantin gave her a dark look.
Rooster wiggled on her belly, scooting a little closer, her gaze fixed on Konstantin’s face.
“This infernal dog,” the prince growled.
“If you don’t change shape, she’ll stay quiet,” my sister told him. “In your place, I would be grateful. She’s the only one here who likes you.”
“I didn’t try to change shape. I brushed my hair out of my face.”
“Uh-huh.” Arabella rolled her eyes.
Konstantin turned toward her. “Why is it you don’t like me?”
“Aside from my mother getting hurt, and my sister being hurt, and my grandmother being hurt, I have four hundred and seventy-two thousand reasons. Also, you think you’re better than everybody. Maybe at home you are, but here you don’t hold a candle to Augustine.”
Of all of us, Arabella ended up interacting with MII most often. Occasionally we passed cases to them, and they reciprocated. She was the one who handled the administrative and financial arrangements, and she had developed a certain respect for Augustine and his deep-water shark ways. They shared an instinctual understanding of money and power and the best ways of using one to get the other. Augustine treated Arabella as a promising younger sister.
“This Augustine, is he an illusion mage?” Konstantin asked.
If he had done any homework at all on us, he knew exactly who Augustine Montgomery was.
“Yes, and he is better than you,” Arabella said.
Konstantin shook his head. “No illusion mage alive today, anywhere, is better than me. That’s not arrogance, that’s a fact.”
“Augustine can turn invisible,” Arabella said.
“Impossible,” Konstantin said.
“No, I’ve seen it,” I told him. “So to speak.”
Konstantin frowned.
“Let’s see it.” Arabella planted her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands. “Do it. Turn invisible.”
The prince narrowed his eyes.
Leon floated into the kitchen and smiled, his face happy and dreamy. “What smells so good?”
“Sweet chili chicken.”
The smile on Leon’s face grew wider. “Soft tacos?”
“Soft tacos with sweet chili chicken and skirt steak, regular tacos with marinated shrimp and beef chuck, queso, hot and mild salsa, pico, both kinds, sautéed bell peppers, grilled corn, salad, rice, beans, and chips.”
Leon rubbed his hands together. “Serious question: On a scale from one to ten, how upset are you? Is it about a seven or eight?”
“Eleven,” I told him.
“Fantastic.”
Konstantin looked at him. “Why does it matter how upset she is?”
“She cooks to relieve stress,” Leon told him. “Eleven means we’re going to get all the food.”
I handed him the steak container. “Go make yourself useful.”
Leon saluted, did an about-face, and headed outside to the charcoal grills.
A sharp wail of outrage tore through the house.
Arabella rose. “That’s my cue.”
Konstantin glanced at me, a question in his eyes.
“Our evil grandmother is awake,” I told him.
“I’m going to talk to her,” Arabella said. “She likes me. All grandparents like me.”
“Don’t let her out of the circle,” I called after her.
“Catalina, I wasn’t born yesterday.” She walked off, humming to herself.
“You put your grandmother into an arcane circle?” the prince asked.
“Yes.”
The kitchen was quiet again. Just me and Konstantin. I finished the pico and put it in the fridge. I would need a dessert of some sort. Something easy. A pie. An apple and maybe a chocolate. Alessandro loved chocolate . . .
“One thing puzzles me,” Konstantin said.
“Mmmhmm.” Did I have any heavy cream in this fridge? And if I did, how old was it?
“You can have your pick of men. Any House, any country. Why Alessandro? What’s the attraction?”
I took the container of heavy cream out, set it on the island, and retrieved Granny Smith apples from the fruit drawer. This was a dangerous question.
“Why do you ask?”
“I find it puzzling.”
In my mind, Konstantin and I crossed our verbal rapiers.
“A few years ago, Alessandro was the god of Instagram. He is incredibly handsome.”
“He is,” Konstantin agreed. “And charming.”
“That too. Maybe I’m just smitten.”
“I don’t think so.”
Konstantin had rearranged himself in the chair. His pose was languid, yet elegant, and at the same time alluring. There was nothing specific in the way he sat that communicated seduction. It was the air around him. If Gustave Courbet was resurrected in this kitchen, he would’ve demanded canvas, paint, and brushes and refused to leave until the painting was complete.
This wasn’t a coincidence. He didn’t just happen to sit like that. Konstantin was a Prime and his appearance was as integral to his magic as my songs were to me. He wanted me to think of sex when I looked at him. It could have been simply habit. It could be calculated, or it could be vanity. Perhaps getting me emotionally engaged served as additional insurance. Perhaps he really was planning to recruit me to the Imperial side. That last thought was alarming.
“You and I are similar,” Konstantin said.
“How so?”
“We are both planners, forced into it by both natural inclination and circumstance. Our families have a similar structure. My older brother is a lot like your Nevada. Smart, competent, slightly scary, with a strong sense of responsibility. Arkadiy fully committed himself to becoming the next Duke. He is our father’s creature through and through. If he had any thought of taking the wheel and steering his life in any other direction, it has long been smothered by duty and destiny. He loves me and cares for me. Although I don’t know if he does it out of genuine affection or because that’s what an older brother should do. Arkadiy strives to be exemplary in every aspect.”
I had no doubt that Nevada genuinely loved me and Arabella and not out of obligation. But this wasn’t about me. This was about gathering as much information about Konstantin as he was willing to give.
“And your younger brother?”
The prince smiled. “He is very much like your Arabella. Mihail never met a rule he didn’t want to rebel against.”
He pronounced the name as Mee-high-eel and as he said it, a little distaste slipped through. Not on the best terms with the younger brother, are we?
“Sometimes his rebellion is justified; other times I think he does it because he’s bored, or because he has fallen into a pattern and that is the way he is comfortable interacting with life. He has a temper, a real one, and the longer he holds it in check, the more violently it eventually explodes. He is two years older than you, but if our parents, Arkadiy, and I perished, he would run our House into the ground in six months.”
Arabella did have a temper, but she was also willing to listen to reason.
“And you?” I asked.
“I’m the mediator. I intercede and soothe. I listen, I flatter when I must, reassure when it’s needed, I threaten, I plan, I take steps, and so on.”
“So what does any of this have to do with Alessandro?”
“Like your family, mine is loud and filled with strong personalities. We function as a unit because once a plan is laid out and agreed on, all of us stick to it. Even Misha, despite his relentless fight against all orders, does as he is told in a crisis. I’ve worked with Alessandro before. Alessandro rejects all plans except his own. He doesn’t rebel, because to rebel against authority one has to recognize it exists in the first place. My distant cousin is an army of one, a world unto himself. He might put himself on a leash for a short while, but he will never let you hold it, and when he decides to charge, all bets are off. In short, if I had to work with him on a daily basis, he would drive me insane within weeks.”
“But you did work with him.” Not that Alessandro told me anything about that—yet another thing we would have to discuss. It just seemed like the logical assumption.
“Briefly, three years ago.” Konstantin leaned forward. “I’ll be blunt. The Imperium would move heaven and earth to recruit a Prime of Alessandro’s caliber. Yet, we’ve made no effort to do so. He’s a liability.”
He was making Alessandro sound like an irrational, petulant man-child. That was so wildly off the mark, it wasn’t even funny. Alessandro was perfectly willing to follow Linus’ orders. He’d changed after Arkan almost killed him, but it was mostly about setting his priorities straight, not altering the core of who he was. There was more there that I would have to dig up.
“So, I ask again, what’s the attraction? Help me solve this puzzle.”
I shrugged. “You saw the Alessandro he wanted you to see and drew the conclusions he wanted you to draw. I see a different Alessandro.”
“How do you know the Alessandro he shows you is the real one?”
Because he loves me. I smiled at him. “I trust him.”
“That’s not an answer.”
I ignored him.
“He is so much trouble, Catalina. Is he worth it?”
“Yes,” I told him. “He is.”
You could always tell how good the meal was by how much talking was done at the table. The family stayed quiet for an entire ten minutes, so the dinner was a resounding success.
Now everyone was on the second helping or the fourth taco, if you were Leon, and the conversation slowly restarted.
“You hired Augustine?” Mom asked.
“We hired MII,” I told her.
“Oh, how the tables have turned.” Leon bit into his taco.
“It’s coming out of the Warden budget.” I glanced at Arabella, hoping to prevent another explosion of financial outrage. “Hopefully.”
“I think that’s a wonderful idea,” Arabella said, giving Konstantin a dirty look.
“These tacos are delicious,” the prince said. “The chicken especially.”
He rolled some shredded cheese into a ball and dropped it on the floor for Rooster. She snarfed it off the tile without ever taking her eyes off him.
“Rooster will not respond to bribes,” Cornelius informed Konstantin. He had been trying to rest and recuperate from his injuries. His color was good and Matilda at his side was smiling.
“Pass the mango pico, please,” Runa asked.
“Blasphemer,” Grandma Frida told her. “Pico is pico, it’s not a fruit salad.”
“Can we not start that again?” Mom asked.
The conversation floated around the table like playful currents clashing and winding around each other. In this happy little pond, Alessandro was a dark gloomy rock jutting next to me. The waters of banter flowed around him, while he remained silent. It didn’t stop him from consuming a record number of steak tacos. They were his favorite.
Augustine Montgomery walked in. He was wearing his normal persona, a marble demigod in his early thirties, tall, lean, with perfect features and light blond hair. Konstantin glanced at him. The two illusion Primes stared at each other.
Leon whistled a vaguely Western tune.
“Nice scar,” Konstantin said.
“So is yours,” Augustine told him.
Arabella got up and pulled a chair out for Augustine. “Please join us, Prime Montgomery.”
“I’d be delighted.” Augustine sat down and began loading his plate. “It’s done. The FBI was positively giddy.”
Great.
“What’s done?” Mom asked.
“We’ve removed all of Arkan’s operatives embedded in the state,” I said. “He is flying blind. Konstantin provided the intelligence, Matt the snitch confirmed it, and the MII and FBI jointly apprehended everyone.”
“The FBI called it Operation Beartrap.” Augustine rolled his eyes and bit into his taco. “The food is delightful as always, Catalina.”
Konstantin looked at me. “Does everyone come to your house to eat?”
