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.