Ruby fever epb, p.5
Ruby Fever EPB, page 5
Berezin. As in House Berezin. The Russian Imperial Dynasty.
“Why are you here?” Alessandro’s voice was ice-cold.
“Because you need help.” The prince tried to sidestep Alessandro, except Alessandro moved with him, preventing him from entering the vault.
“Do we have to do this, Sasha?”
“Can I shoot him?” Leon asked me. “In the leg. I shoot him in the leg, we grab Linus and take off.”
“You can’t shoot him. He’s related to the Russian Emperor,” I told him.
“True,” Konstantin said. “When His Majesty wants to motivate me, he assures me that I’m his favorite nephew. Of course, he says that to all of us.”
“What do you want?” Alessandro demanded. His magic coiled about him, primed and ready.
If I beguiled a Russian prince in my capacity as a Deputy Warden, would that cause an international incident? Did it matter that he entered the house uninvited? What was the protocol here?
“It’s not a question of what I want. It’s what the Imperium wants. I am just a humble instrument of Rodina’s will. And right now, that will directs me to discuss things with the Deputy Warden. So, move aside or I will move you.”
Orange sparks flared around Alessandro. “Please do.”
Konstantin didn’t move. “I’d rather not. I’m taking great pains to be reasonable. I’m not here to brawl.”
“Turn around, leave the way you came, and you’ll survive. That’s my reasonable offer.”
Alessandro’s face had snapped into an expressionless mask. His voice was measured and calm. This wasn’t the Alessandro with whom I woke up every morning. This wasn’t the Sentinel, who was capable and decisive. This was the Artisan giving the first and final warning. Konstantin’s eyes told me he recognized who he was talking to. The charming warmth went out of him, as if an armored mental door had slammed into place.
I made it a rule to never jump off the cliff unless I knew where I would land. I had no idea what the ramifications of injuring a Russian prince would be. We could probably stop Konstantin between the three of us, but I wasn’t sure we could handle the consequences.
“Hypothetically, if I shot him, who would know?” Leon asked. “I could shoot him, hide the body, I know a place, and nobody could prove anything.”
The prince leaned to the side to get a better look at Leon. “We wouldn’t need to prove anything. We would only need to suspect.”
Linus was still unconscious. We didn’t have time for this.
I stood up.
The prince gave me a dazzling smile. “There you are, Ms. Baylor. Images don’t do you justice.”
“The Office of the Warden greets Your Highness. You are trespassing. Please leave this house.”
“We have things to discuss.”
“This isn’t a good time.”
“I’m afraid the matter is urgent,” Konstantin said. “I’ve been watching this house for the past three hours just to talk to you.”
I had no idea if anything coming out of his mouth could be trusted. He could’ve been involved in the hit on Linus, or he could have nothing to do with anything. Nothing mattered right now except getting Linus out of here.
“You know who I am, so you know where to find me. Right now, you’re interfering with my official duties. Leave immediately, or I will lodge a formal complaint with the Russian Embassy. I will be loud and public about it.”
“That would be . . . unfortunate.” Konstantin smiled again. “As I’ve said, I’m here to help.”
“The Office of the Warden thanks the Russian Imperium for its generous offer of assistance. At this time, we have to regretfully decline. Please leave.”
Konstantin sighed. “In that case, I have no choice but to respect your wishes. However, we do need to chat. Am I to understand that you wish to have this discussion at your place of business?”
Why did that sound like a threat? I needed to say something neutral that didn’t obligate me to anything.
“House Baylor welcomes clients during normal business hours. If you choose to visit us, we will be delighted to extend our hospitality.”
“Are you sure that’s what you want?”
Alessandro took a step forward. His voice promised violence. “Leave.”
Konstantin sighed and took a step back. “As you wish. I did my best. I hope neither of us has any regrets.”
He turned and walked up the stairs. Alessandro followed him.
“What the hell?” Leon muttered.
“I have no idea.”
Moments passed, dragging on.
Alessandro returned, picked up Linus like he weighed nothing, and slung him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. “Let’s go.”
Leon took point. Alessandro followed, and I brought up the rear. In seconds, we crossed the house and moved to the garage. Four armored vehicles waited on the concrete floor. I pulled the keys to a Duncan Arms Stormer off the key rack and started the engine with the remote. The huge white SUV roared in response. Of all the custom vehicles Linus owned, this was the best armored. It could withstand a mine detonation and a full blast from one of Linus’ turrets for ten seconds. Only his exosuits provided more protection.
I got behind the wheel. Alessandro loaded Linus into the backseat.
“Do you want me to ride with you or to follow?” Leon asked.
“Follow,” Alessandro said. “We may need a second vehicle.”
The only reason we’d need a second vehicle was if the Stormer were disabled.
Leon opened the garage door and jogged to his Shelby Cobra. Alessandro climbed into the passenger seat. Orange magic sparked, and a Duncan Arms rifle appeared in his hands.
I guided the massive vehicle around the driveway to the gates. We turned right on the one-way street, following Leon, made a U-turn, crawled over the first speed bump, and headed out of the subdivision.
“Sasha?” I asked.
He swore in Italian, too fast for me to follow.
“Who is he really?”
“Exactly who he says he is. The second son of Grand Duke Leonid Berezin, who is the younger brother of Emperor Mikhail II.”
“Alessandro, you are not giving me a lot to work with.”
He glanced at me, his eyes dark. “He has two brothers. His older brother is earnest, uncomplicated, the perfect heir of a Grand Duke, not too bright, not too dumb. His younger brother is a brawler, subtle like a bull on meth. Konstantin is a hedonist, who drinks, womanizes, and parties. You see what they want you to see. These are the roles they have been assigned. It’s not who they are. They are not men. They are wolves in human skin who guard the Russian throne. His presence here means the highest level of the Imperium is involved. He has a mission, and he will kill whoever interferes with it.”
“Can he kill us if we interfere?”
“One-on-one, I can take him. It would be a hard fight. But it wouldn’t be one-on-one. The Imperium would never send him here alone. He wasn’t lying. He might just be the Emperor’s favorite nephew.”
“None of this sounds good.”
“Yeah.”
“Could he be the one who attacked Linus?”
“I doubt it. Killing a Warden would be an act of war. At the very least, it would create a massive political mess. If he’d done it, he would’ve distanced himself from it. Instead, he presented himself complete with a grand entrance. No, my money is on Arkan.”
Before his life as an assassin kingpin, Arkan had been an agent for the Imperial Intelligence Service. The Russians let him retire instead of killing him, because they considered him too expensive to take out. Arkan had Luciana murdered, Linus had been attacked, and now a Russian prince was here with offers of assistance. All of this fit together somehow, but anything I thought up now would be pure speculation. We had to revive Linus.
We merged onto the Southwest Freeway. I picked up speed. “Is he still breathing?”
Alessandro turned around in his seat to look at Linus. “Yes.”
Leon’s vehicle slid behind us.
Linus had never mentioned any ties to House Berezin. As far as I knew, the Texas Warden had no interaction with the Imperium. We were a strictly domestic law enforcement agency.
I couldn’t lose him. He wasn’t just my mentor or my boss. He was a member of our family in everything except name. Arabella adored him, Nevada respected him, I relied on him. He was one of the cornerstones of my world. When I was in trouble, Linus would help. When I needed encouragement, he would offer it. When I needed a swift kick in the butt, he would deliver a scathing lecture.
I had taken all of this for granted. In my head, Linus was untouchable and eternal. Now he was an old man dying in the backseat of his car, and I couldn’t do a thing to help him.
Someone had hurt him. That someone would pay. I would hunt them down no matter where they went.
I told my phone to call home. We needed a medical team, a security lockdown, and a family meeting.
Chapter 4
I walked into my office, lowered the blinds with the remote, plunging the room into shadow, sat behind my desk, and took a long, deep breath.
Linus had been installed upstairs, in one of the numerous spare bedrooms of the main house. Dr. Patel, our House physician, was with him. The medical team inserted an IV, cleaned him, and checked him for additional injuries. There were none. All the blood had come from one epic nosebleed.
The prognosis wasn’t good. Linus was in a comatose, vegetative state. An MRI or CT would tell us nothing. We needed a positron emission tomography scan to evaluate his brain’s metabolism. Only the PET scan could predict if Linus would recover awareness. We didn’t have a PET machine on premises. Transporting Linus to a hospital was out of the question. Whoever tried to kill him might decide to finish the job, and a convoy would be a lot more vulnerable than keeping him here behind sturdy walls and constant guard.
A PET scan wouldn’t help Linus. It would be strictly for our benefit. Dr. Patel recommended taking the wait-and-see approach. Linus would either come out of it or he wouldn’t, and there was nothing any of us could do about it.
The Compound was on high alert. Patricia Taft, our security chief, was pulling in all off-duty personnel. In twenty minutes, the entire family would gather in the conference room across from my office. I needed to present a plan of action and I had to appear calm and unrattled.
I was very rattled. Calm wasn’t even in my vocabulary right now.
As I sat here, Linus could be slowly dying. He could be taking his final breath right this second, and I wouldn’t even know until they called me. A part of me had gone into a paranoid alert anticipating that any moment my phone would ring, and Dr. Patel would announce that Linus was gone.
What then? I didn’t know, but when we all met in a few minutes, somebody was bound to ask. I would have to give them an answer. And it would have to be an honest one, because while I could lie through my teeth to the entire state of Texas, I couldn’t bullshit my family.
A quiet scratching came from my door.
I swiped the tears from my eyes, got up, and opened it. Shadow slipped into the room. She was long and shaggy, with glossy black fur that curled backward and a surprisingly toothy mouth for a smallish dog.
“How did you even find me?”
Shadow wagged her tail. She was carrying a stuffed hamburger toy in her mouth. When I got upset, she would bring me her toys, and sometimes, if I didn’t pay attention to her efforts, she would climb up on the furniture and try to put the toy into my mouth to make me feel better.
I petted her and went back to the computer. Shadow curled up in the dog bed next to me.
I tapped my keyboard to bring my computer back to life, took the USB out of my pocket, and plugged it in. Lines of nonsense code filled the screen. Encrypted. Of course. I took the storage stick out. I would have to let Bern mess with it.
I logged into the Warden Interface with my credentials. The system let me in, and I selected “Emergency Notification” from the menu at the top of the page.
A new window popped up, blank. Linus had walked me through this. I was supposed to type out the nature of my emergency and wait for a response.
Speaker Luciana Cabera was murdered in a restaurant during lunch. Warden Duncan was attacked in his home and took Styxine. He is now in a vegetative state but stable and safe in my care. I suspect Arkan’s involvement. Prince Konstantin Berezin has approached me in my official capacity with an unspecified offer of assistance. Please advise.
I hit enter and waited. I had no idea if a Speaker of a State Assembly had been murdered before, but knowing the volatility of House politics, this probably wasn’t the first time. There were likely protocols in place to deal with dead Speakers, injured Wardens, and pushy foreign princes. Perhaps we would get some help, someone with more experience, a Warden from out of state or an agent from the National Assembly.
I got a tissue and dabbed at my eyes. If only I could stop crying, I would be okay. I wasn’t sobbing. The tears just kept leaking from my eyes, squeezed out by stress and pressure. If I walked into the meeting with my eyes all red, the entire family would focus on making me feel better instead of listening to what I had to say.
I needed to sort myself out and fast. Work was a great distraction. When you couldn’t deal with stress, sometimes it helped to sidestep it. I still had the Cabera murder, and I was overdue for a video call.
Agent Wahl answered immediately. “Agent Wahl.”
Some people looked exactly the way they were supposed to. Linus looked like a Prime, a top-tier mage who had been at the apex of power for decades. Similarly, Agent Wahl looked like an FBI agent: severe haircut, grave expression, athletic build, and that no-nonsense look in his eyes that suggested he knew you were up to no good even if you didn’t and he was not amused.
“You owe me a favor.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. That little affair involving two foreign Primes and a mysterious briefcase.”
“Still not ringing any bells.”
“The one that was rigged to explode if they didn’t open it in unison.”
“Oh, that briefcase. I’d nearly forgotten the whole thing.”
“Agent Wahl, it was two months ago. I dropped everything and came to your building on a Sunday. You owe the Office of the Warden a favor.”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?”
“It wouldn’t be a favor if you did.”
He sighed. “Lay it on me.”
I gave him the address of the warehouse. Our crew would be long gone by now.
“What’s there?”
“Something I need you to take point on. Consider this an anonymous tip.”
He gave a short chuckle and hung up.
I opened a browser and searched for Konstantin Berezin. A row of images popped up, followed by numerous links. Konstantin in a sharp dark-blue uniform with bloodred trim. Imperial Air Force. Konstantin next to his father, an older hard-faced man, both in suits and overcoats, posing for a publicity shot in the middle of a snow-strewn street, with the golden cupolas of some Russian cathedral behind them. Konstantin with his brothers, all in different military uniforms at some formal function.
One brother wore the black of the Imperial Navy and a magnanimous patient smile. The other brother, dark-haired like their father, looked like he wanted to punch somebody. Anybody. He didn’t seem to care who. His deep green Army uniform fit him like a second skin. Mom would call him squared away. Konstantin stood between them with a dreamy smile, as if he had just taken a long happy nap in a hammock under some tree.
Wolves in human skin, Alessandro called them. Now one of them was here. Why?
A soft beep announced an incoming message from the Wardens. Here we go. Help was on the way. I switched to the Warden Interface and clicked the message.
Understood, Acting Warden Baylor. Permission to investigate Speaker Cabera’s murder granted.
Godspeed.
Shit.
I stared at the screen.
Godspeed.
A soft knock made me raise my head. Mom stood in the doorway.
A spike of anxiety hammered into me. “Linus . . . ?”
“The same. You called the meeting in ten minutes, and the conference room is locked.”
Oh. I realized I was halfway out of my chair and sat down.
Mom shut the door and sat on the couch. Her leg bothered her today. I could tell by the way she moved, slightly stiff, careful how much weight she rested on it. For most of her life, Mom was athletic, strong, and fast. During a conflict in the Balkans, her unit had been caught between two enemy groups. The few survivors ended up in a POW camp in a small town taken over by Bosnians. Mom tried to escape and lead a group of soldiers out. She was caught.
They broke her leg and put her in a hole. It was a sewer shaft that led to a short maintenance tunnel, flooded with rainwater and sewage. The only dry spot was by the wall, about three feet wide. She slept sitting up. They would open the sewer cover once a day and throw down a bag of food, and if she was lucky and quick, she caught it before it fell into the foul water.
She didn’t know how long she stayed in the hole. When the camp was liberated, the military tried to fix her leg, but the damage was permanent. They gave her a handful of medals and an honorable discharge. She’d only told us about it once, to explain why her leg was damaged, and never spoke about it again.
In Mom’s head, she was never fast enough. She was always compensating. If a meeting was set for noon, she would get there by 11:45 a.m.
“What’s up with you?” Mom asked.
“I asked for backup,” I said.
“And?”
“It’s not coming.”
“Did you expect it would?”
“Yes, I kind of did. I asked them for advice, and they made me the Acting Warden and wished me Godspeed.”
“You got a promotion with extra responsibilities but without pay or additional benefits.” Mom smiled. “I’m so proud of you. You’re officially a successful adult.”
