I opened the beer and took a long swallow. I barely tasted it, but it was cold, and that was enough. “He has nothing to apologize for.”
“He thinks he does.”
I tried to get past her to the table, but she stayed where she was, trapping me between the island and the fridge. I had a feeling that if I turned around and circled the island, she would just step to the side and block my way again.
“Initially I thought he might have threatened you,” she said.
“Albert?”
“Yes. But after five minutes of his apologizing, I realized that he wouldn’t have, which means you threatened him. I asked Bern to trace your phone route.”
Crap. I drank more beer.
“You went to see her. Then you went straight to Albert’s house. Now he wants to apologize. His exact words were ‘beg forgiveness.’”
Technically, all of that was accurate.
“What did she make you do?”
I couldn’t lie and say going to see Albert was my idea. “That’s between me and her.” The less Nevada was involved, the safer it was.
My sister’s eyes blazed. “I told you to stop talking to her. I warned you. I know you think she’s some sort of mentor, but you have no idea how dangerous she is. She told you to do something cruel, and you went and did it. Is that who you want to be?”
Nobody could compare with my sister. She hits the bull’s-eye on the first try. Right into the knot of guilt and doubt.
“It’s not that simple.” I sounded lame, even to myself.
Nevada locked her teeth and nodded. “I’ll make it simple. Tomorrow I’ll go and tell her to leave you alone.”
Panic smashed into me in a blinding explosion of white. My fingertips went cold. Victoria let Alessandro’s stunt go because she found him amusing. If Nevada marched in there tomorrow and started issuing ultimatums, Victoria would punish her. She viewed Alessandro as my teenage crush, ultimately harmless. But Nevada wielded a great deal of influence over me. Victoria already saw her as a rival. She would act to consolidate her grip on me. She would retaliate.
She would hurt the baby.
“Please don’t do this. I’m begging you.”
Nevada’s eyes were clear. “You’re my sister and I love you. You’re trapped, but I’ll get you out.”
No, no, no.
Nevada turned away from me. She’d made up her mind. I had seconds to stop her. I needed a lever, a gap in her armor, something to make her listen.
“You always took care of us when we were kids. But now I’m an adult. You taught me that being an adult means making informed decisions. I want to tell you something, and if, when I’m done, you still want to confront Victoria, I won’t fight you.”
Nevada turned around and sat at the table. “Okay. I’ll hear you out.”
I would regret this conversation for the rest of my life, but I had to keep her away from Victoria. I pulled out a chair, sat, and took another swig of my beer. It tasted bitter. My adrenaline was through the roof.
“Do you remember when you gave up being the Head of our House?”
Nevada narrowed her eyes. “I remember.”
“I told that story to Alessandro. The whole thing. How you were working yourself into the ground trying to earn money for us and to deal with the threats against Connor, how you wouldn’t rest, wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t let anybody help, until you collapsed and we had to call an ambulance. I explained that we begged you to slow down and recover, and you promised to do it, and then less than twenty-four hours later, I found you back in the office rummaging through files. How Arabella and I had inherited shares of the business from Dad, and we voted to ban you from making money for the business, forcing you to keep everything you earned, and then you freaked out and declared that we didn’t trust you anymore and you couldn’t be the Head of our House.”
Nevada’s mouth thinned. She didn’t like remembering that any more than I did.
My sister waved her hand at me to keep going.
“Something Alessandro said stuck with me. He said that you knew we were right, but you didn’t think you were wrong. The more I thought about that, the less sense it made. You rebuilt the business from the ground up after Dad got sick. You put your life on hold and sacrificed for it. You loved the business. It was Dad’s legacy, and you honored it.”
Nevada shrugged.
“You also loved us. You worked sixty-hour weeks and then still found time to be our big sister. And you are the most grounded, levelheaded person I know. Tantrum isn’t even in your vocabulary. But somehow you threw one, and then you got so butt-hurt, you quit the business and almost quit the family. You didn’t speak to me for three weeks.”
Nevada’s expression softened. “I’m sorry I hurt you.”
“At the time I felt so guilty. I came up with this wonderful idea to get you to work less and stop you from driving yourself into the ground for us, and it all went horribly wrong. I didn’t know what to do. And you were so angry. That same day you went down to the Keeper of Records and officially abdicated leadership of the House. That put me in charge of the family. I was twenty years old. I knew nothing about running a House. Here we were, less than a year away from emerging from the new House grace period, and you dropped it all in my lap. My big sister wouldn’t have done that in a million years.”
Hurt flashed in Nevada’s stare. She hid it instantly, but I saw it. I wanted to throw my arms around her, but I had to get through this.
“I’m so sorry,” she said again. “You hurt my feelings, I was overworked, and I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
I shook my head. “No, you were thinking very clearly. What Alessandro said was true. You knew we were right, but you didn’t think you were wrong. You made the best possible decision under the circumstances. It wasn’t emotional. It was calculated.”
Nevada frowned. “Where are you going with this?”
“About two months before you collapsed, Connor was still dealing with the fallout of exposing the Sturm-Charles conspiracy. Friends and allies of the people whose Houses fell as the result of that investigation were gunning for him. You received a USB drive with a series of recordings showing Connor engaged in human trafficking.”
No reaction. One day I would be as good as her.
“The recordings were graphic and horrible. Girls, barely teenagers, transported in cages, tortured, and raped. You started digging and found a wealth of supporting evidence. Bogus shipping records that couldn’t pass even the slightest check. A secret account Connor didn’t know he had with deposits from a known human trafficker who had been conveniently murdered, so it would look like Connor tried to cover up his sins. But all of that wasn’t sensational. The recordings, however, that was the glue-you-to-your-screen evidence. Except the recordings alone weren’t enough, not when a powerful illusion Prime could duplicate Connor’s appearance. Someone had to validate them.”
My sister leaned forward, focused on me. I could practically feel the wheels turning in her head. She was trying to figure out how I knew.
“Robert J. Merritt,” I said. “Forty-one years old, born and raised in Sycamore, Illinois, white, married, two children, one golden retriever, a war hero. Also, one of the sixteen people who walked with Connor out of the jungle in Belize.”
Again, no reaction. If someone watched us from a distance, they would think we were discussing buying kitchen towels.
“Merritt called and told you he intended to vouch for the authenticity of the recordings. The bond between Connor and the Sixteen is unshakable. They’ve been through hunger and captivity and torture, and they would literally die for each other. Any of the remaining Sixteen would say so on the witness stand. If Robert Merritt testified that the recordings were authentic, he would be unimpeachable. He was a bulletproof witness.”
“He was a liar.”
“Yes. But it didn’t matter. This had all the makings of an incredible media blitz: a war hero, torn between loyalty to his officer and friend and his
conscience, chooses truth and decency over keeping his savior’s disgusting secret. Connor would exist under a cloud of suspicion for the rest of his life and so would you. You knew that he was innocent, because every time stamp on those recordings corresponded to times when you and Connor were away together. You were his only alibi.”
Her eyes were clear, her voice steady. “He didn’t do it.”
“I know. That’s not who Connor is. But you couldn’t prove it. All the elements of his alibi depended on his employees and you. They owed their livelihood to him. He held all of their loans, every mortgage, every credit card account, because he likes to make his people secure from outside manipulation. And you? You loved him. You would do anything for him, even lie. You knew you wouldn’t be believed. You tried to find Robert Merritt but he’d disappeared into thin air. He would call you occasionally, to taunt you and to hint at compensation, but there was never anything concrete. No demand for money. No explanation why.”
“He was a ghost,” Nevada said. “I threw everything I had at him. Rogan’s entire force searched for him. Nobody could find Merritt, not even Bug.”
“On the day you collapsed, he called you and promised to release the first video in a week. You knew you couldn’t stop it. You knew that if you stood by Connor, the press would paint you as a vile, awful woman who supported a monster. Merritt told you that he would implicate you during his testimony. He would tell everyone that you were aware of what Connor was doing and you encouraged it. You would be a pariah. Our society despises male criminals, but it rips the female ones to pieces. As women, we are supposed to nurture, care, and defend children, not enable others to prey on them.”
Nevada’s face turned haggard and exhausted, as if the ghost of some other woman had settled onto her face. It was there for just a fraction of a breath, but seeing it was like being cut. It must’ve been so awful, and she’d kept it all inside and kept going, trying to save him, trying to keep us out of it. It’d been over a year and a half and still that wound hurt, and now I’d reopened it. I was a terrible person.
“How do you know?” Nevada asked.
“I’ll get to that. You had a choice. You could stand by Connor and go down with him, dragging our family into the gutter. We would not recover from something like that. You were the Head of our House and nobody knew anything about us. People would ask questions. How much did we know? Did we participate? Did we get off on it? Did we make money from the suffering of human beings? You could stay with the man you love and watch the whole Baylor family go down in flames with you or you could abandon Connor and publicly cut all ties with House Rogan. He told you to do it, didn’t he?”
Nevada nodded. “He did. He had divorce papers drawn up. He is completely innocent, Catalina.”
My poor sister. Every time I thought about her and Connor waiting for this to break, trying so hard and failing, my heart squeezed itself into a painful little ball.
“You decided to stand by him,” I said.
“I love him.”
It was really that simple for her. When Nevada loved someone, she gave all of herself to them.
“You knew that if you told us about it, we would stand by you. You were desperate to separate us from this nightmare, so instead you manipulated us into cutting you out. When I was in that hospital room with you, you told me that we needed the money and that just because Arabella and I owned shares didn’t mean we could tell you what to do. Then when you came back to the office the day after and I busted you, you told me again how you needed to make money for the family. You put the building blocks into my head, and I clicked them together. If I’d just had some time to think about it, I would’ve realized it. I remember looking at the accounts after you left and seeing that we had more than enough money. I could’ve figured it out, but we were all so freaked out and afraid you would die just like Dad.”
Nevada sighed. “I love you so much. If there had been any other way, I would’ve taken it. But there wasn’t.”
“And then you made the break appear as real as possible. You ran to the Keeper of Records, abdicated, and stopped talking to us. You made sure people knew we were estranged. You sacrificed everything you’d built so we could have a future.”
“I did what I had to do. You, Arabella, and the boys, all of you deserve a life. I’m the oldest. It’s my job to protect all of you.”
I felt like crying and pushed it down. Not now. I still had things to say.
“You waited for the video release, but it was never uploaded. And then you got a phone call. Nothing was said. Just a few moments of silence and then a disconnect signal. You traced the phone’s location to a house in the Third Ward, right in the most dangerous part of it. You and Connor raided the house and found Robert Merritt dead, with a confession written in his handwriting and sealed with his fingerprint, which said that the entire thing was a fabrication and a plot to get money. The only other existing copies of the doctored recordings were in a safe next to him. It was over, just like that.”
A vicious light sparked in Nevada’s eyes. “Except that Merritt didn’t have the resources to manufacture something like that. And the confession claimed that he killed himself out of guilt. I spoke to that weasel for two months. He didn’t have an ounce of guilt in him. He reveled in torturing us.”
I leaned forward. “Have you ever wondered who was behind all of that? What the point was?”
“Go on,” Nevada said.
“It was a test. You failed.”
My sister shook her head. “Is that what Victoria told you?”
“She wanted to know where your loyalty lay, so she made you choose between Connor and us. Either you put the needs of House Baylor first and proved to her that you were a suitable Head of the House or you would remove yourself so she could put someone else in your place. You chose Connor, and she got what she wanted. I know all of this because she told me exactly how she did it, step by step, every little detail, so if I ever needed to engineer something like this, I would have a detailed plan on how to do it.”
Nevada laughed softly. “She’s filling your head with nonsense. I suspected her and eliminated her from my list.”
I took a deep breath. “The combination to the safe, which you found in Merritt’s left pant pocket. 060149. June 1st, 1949. It’s her birthday.”
Nevada went white.
Silence stretched between us.
“It can’t be,” she murmured.
“She worked on it for almost two years, building this enormous complex web of bribes, blackmail, and violence. She bought Merritt for five million dollars. She had the trafficker kidnapped, broke him, and then used the information to make the deposits. She has a clan of Vietnamese illusion mages in her pocket. It’s a large family, powerful, but poor, because they have issues with the Vietnamese government. They will do whatever she asks. If you ever worried that the children in the videos were hurt, they weren’t. They weren’t even children. Like the part where they break the girl’s arms and hang her off a hook—she’s an adult woman, an illusion mage. The guy who assumes Connor’s image and rapes her is actually her husband. I’ve seen the before and after footage. They laughed about it.”
Nevada struggled to say something. “Connor . . .”
“I know that Connor would have given Merritt the money. Merritt wouldn’t have taken it. He hated Connor, because he thought Connor was the reason they were on that mission in the first place.”
“The reason they went on that mission was because they were in the military, they had orders, and it was their job to go,” Nevada growled.
“Merritt hurt his back in the jungle. The military denied him disability. The family was on food stamps. Victoria found him at his lowest, used him, and then had him killed once he’d served his purpose.”
Nevada stared at me.
I stood up. The words poured out of me, messy and stupid, but honest. “I love you so much, and Connor, and the baby. I love Arabella, and Leon, and Bern, and Mom, and Grandma Frida
. You can’t fight Victoria. You don’t think like her. You don’t know her secrets. But I do.”
My sister blinked. “Catalina . . .”
I couldn’t stop. I had to make her see. “She’s grooming me to be her successor. I go there every two weeks and I learn everything I can, no matter what it costs me. I’m building my own web around our grandmother. It requires time and careful planning. When the right moment comes, I will collapse her world. But that moment is years away. If you go there tomorrow, you’ll wreck everything I’ve built, because she’ll attack you and your baby, and I will defend you with my life. We won’t win, Nevada. She has contingency plans in place in case of such an attack. Even if we kill her, we will lose. You trusted me with the responsibility of keeping our family safe, and I won’t let you down. Please trust me again. I know how much you gave up for our sake. I promise you I won’t let you get hurt. I won’t let any of you get hurt.”
Nevada stood up, her eyes wide. I hugged her, squeezing her to me, and fled the room.
I climbed the stairs past the third floor, all the way to the top, where a brick utility building offered access to the paved roof. I walked out into the night, skirted the utility structure, and came to the narrow space that served as my hiding spot.
I’d claimed it soon after we moved into the building. I brought up plants and set them along the edge of the roof—Texas lantanas with their clusters of red and yellow blossoms, wild mint with humble purple flowers, white and pink zonal geraniums, and lush golden pothos. Bern and Leon installed an overhang for me and built a stone rail along the roof, Nevada bought me an outdoor couch, and Runa helped me string outdoor lights from the overhang to the rail. Arabella found a small fire pit filled with blue glass pebbles and Grandma Frida hooked it up to the gas line. Mom made me a blanket and bought pillows.
Alessandro once told me that I was loved by many people. He was right. But right now, I felt completely and utterly alone.
I leaned on the stone rail. Below, across the street, warm electric light spilled onto the pavement from industrial-sized bay doorways. After the warehouse collapsed, Connor gifted Grandma Frida one of the buildings he’d bought when he was trying to keep us secure. It used to be a massive industrial garage where semitrucks were repaired and Grandma Frida had pounced on it, so she could keep her business running. She didn’t know how to not work. Tanks, mobile guns, and cars spoke to her in the same way computers and code whispered to Bern and she loved talking to them.
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