“Did you know?” I asked Nevada.
She nodded. “They spar sometimes.”
“And you didn’t tell us, why?” Mom asked.
Nevada looked sheepish. It almost never happened. “It didn’t occur to me. Like Connor said, he isn’t a threat. Connor and he had a moment a few years ago. It realigned Augustine’s worldview.”
“Trust me,” Connor said. “All of his veiled threats and scary promises are bullshit. He is a friend.”
“Could have fooled me,” Mom said, her voice flat.
Connor grimaced. “He has issues.”
“Konstantin Berezin can do everything Augustine can do and probably more,” Alessandro said. “If you encounter him, treat him like a cobra. Try to stay out of striking range. He kills quickly and without hesitation.”
“Agreed,” Patricia said. “A cornered illusion mage can be a very challenging opponent.”
In my mind, once an illusion mage was discovered, they were somehow rendered powerless. Clearly, that would be a deadly mistake to make. Being told Konstantin was lethal was one thing. Watching Augustine, whom we had all dismissed as a noncombatant, turn into a murder machine wasn’t something I would forget.
“Obviously, Konstantin complicates matters,” I said. “But our main priority is still protecting Linus and solving the Speaker’s murder.”
“On that note,” Nevada said. “We have some lousy news.”
“PAC?” Bern asked.
Connor looked like he’d bitten into a rotten apple. “We’ll handle it.”
Principal Action Consulting, or the PAC as they called themselves, recently became a very sharp thorn in House Rogan’s side. Just like Connor, they offered a private army for hire and, just like Connor’s army, they were led by a powerful Prime, Matthew Berry, a tagger. Taggers marked a spot in a structure and then saturated it with arcane energy until it exploded. Matthew was a one-man artillery battery.
The PAC was started by Matthew’s father. Back then it had been called the Black Hurricane, and after Connor erupted onto the military scene, people kept asking them if Mad Rogan and their outfit were somehow involved. The father and son duo got tired of it and changed the name.
But the real trouble started last year. A group of archeologists was taken hostage in Pakistan, four of them American citizens. For complicated political reasons, the United States government wanted to rescue them quietly. They contacted the PAC. The father of one of the archeologists and Connor’s mother’s friend contacted Connor. While Berry and the government haggled, Connor went in with a small team and saved the hostages.
For no apparent reason, Berry viewed this as a flex. What should have been a business rivalry at best turned deeply personal and the younger Berry decided to wipe House Rogan off the planet’s surface. If Connor’s people took one side of a conflict, Berry made sure to get hired for the other. They’d clashed several times on foreign soil, and we all knew the final confrontation was coming and soon.
“Berry is massing his troops in Austin,” Connor said.
Berry was headquartered in Virginia. There was no reason for his people to be in Austin, only a few hours from us. He was preparing for an offensive against Connor. Everyone here knew it, and none of us would do anything about it. Whoever made the first move would have to bear the legal ramifications. It was smarter to get attacked than to land the first blow.
Berry was a significant threat, and the timing was very coincidental. I never counted on help from Connor and Nevada, although it was always available, simply because we needed to be self-sufficient. But now we knew for sure that we had to rely on ourselves. I needed to alter our plan a bit.
“Arabella?”
She looked at me. The fury in her eyes was still there.
“Whoever tried to kill Linus will likely want to finish the job,” I said.
“I hope they try. Nobody touches my family.”
I supposed we all saw Linus as family. Linus treated the three of us as his granddaughters and Bern and Leon as his grandsons, and he especially doted on Arabella. He let her steal his whiskey and cigars, and sometimes she would ask him for advice. Nevada got respect and guidance, I got education and lectures, but Arabella got beaming approval. If we lost Linus, she would be inconsolable. I would be inconsolable.
“You’re staying in,” I told her. “You don’t leave the Compound no matter what happens. You’re our final line of defense.”
“Fine by me.”
“We’re done,” I said. “Everyone knows what to do.”