“I’m going to have to put you on hold for just a second.”
“Ms. Bay—”
I marched to the door and opened it. Mad Rogan smiled at me. I jerked my hand toward my office. He walked in. I locked the door behind him. Mad Rogan stepped into my office and landed in a chair. Instantly my office shrank. There had been space before, and now there was Rogan.
I pushed the button again. “I’m back.”
“My patience is at an end,” Augustine said with diamond-sharp precision. “I have to report to House Pierce, and my report, apparently, will say that you’ve made no progress. You’re making MII look incompetent.”
I’m shaking in my slippers. “Why don’t you tell them the truth: you assigned this case to me because you expect me to fail. When I do, you will take my business and write it off.”
“I’m trying to give you a chance to keep your business,” Augustine said.
“She’ll have to call you back,” Mad Rogan said.
“What?” Augustine asked.
“I said, she’ll have to call you back, Pancakes. She’s busy right now.” He pushed the disconnect button.
He didn’t just hang up on Augustine. Yes, yes, he did.
“Pancakes?” I asked.
“When he was trying to enter the Arcana Club at Harvard, one of the initiation trials was eating the most food. That year, it was pancakes. He won and got admitted, but it took six months before he could walk by pancakes without getting sick.” Rogan smiled. “He’d smell them and run out of the room.”
“Well, Pancakes owns the mortgage on my business. You just hung up on my boss,” I said.
“He was talking in circles. He’ll get over it.”
“You know what your problem is? ‘You’ as in Primes, in general?”
“I think you’re about to tell me.” Mad Rogan leaned forward with rapt attention.
“Your problem is that nobody ever tells you no. You think you can do whatever you want, enter wherever you want . . .”
“Seduce whoever we want.” He grinned, a wicked, wolfish smile.
Oh no, we are not veering off the highway onto that road. “You play with people’s lives. When cops show up, you wave your hand and make them go away. Because you are Primes and the rest of us are, apparently, nothing.”
“Mhm,” he said. “The irony of this is so rich, it’s simply delicious.”
“I don’t see what’s so ironic about it.”
“I’d tell you, but it would ruin the fun.”
“Could you be more smug?”
He leaned on his elbow. “Possibly. I see you liked the flowers.”
I got a sudden urge to set the carnations on fire. “They are gorgeous. It’s not their fault you brought them.” I leaned over the table. “Mr. Rogan—”
“Mad,” he corrected. “Mad Rogan.”
“Mr. Rogan, here are some boundaries. You’re using me as bait for Adam Pierce. I’m using you as a means to capture Adam. I think you’re a dangerous man.”
“So formal,” Mad Rogan said.
“Here is the informal version: we have to work together, and when we’re done, we will go our separate ways. Don’t bring me flowers. We don’t have that kind of relationship.”
He laughed. It was a genuine, amused laugh. “You’re really mad at me.”
I was mad as hell, but saying it would be admitting that I’d let myself get emotionally involved, and he didn’t need to know that. “No, I just don’t want to compromise our professional relationship. It’s late and I’m tired. If you don’t have anything to tell me about Adam, please leave.”
“Thank you for keeping me alive earlier today,” he said. “I should’ve acknowledged it. I didn’t. In my defense, your circlework really is terrible.”
I opened my mouth to tell him where he could shove his circlework, when someone knocked on the door. What was it with the visitors tonight?
I went to the door and checked the monitor. Augustine Montgomery, wearing a silver suit, his glasses perched on his perfect face, his pale hair styled into a razor-precise haircut. Seriously?
“Who is it?” Mad Rogan came up behind me and peered over my shoulder. He was standing too close to me.
I didn’t want to let Pancakes in, but he still owned us. I unlocked the door.
Augustine stared over my shoulder, his eyes like ice. “What are you doing here?”
“I dropped in to borrow a cup of sugar,” Mad Rogan said.
“You shouldn’t be here.” Augustine looked at me. “He shouldn’t be here.”
“You got here rather quickly,” Rogan said.
“I was driving when I made the call.”
Behind Augustine, an elegant silver Porsche sat in a parking spot, all alone. We’d moved all of our cars inside, given that we couldn’t just order a brand-new one if one of them blew up.
“You might not want to park there,” Mad Rogan said. “I parked there yesterday and my Range Rover exploded.”
Augustine opened his mouth.
If we kept standing here with the door open, sooner or later my mother would come to investigate. If she realized that Augustine Montgomery—the cause of all our misfortunes—had appeared on our doorstep, she would shoot him. Just out of principle. Not to mention that we were sitting ducks here, lit up by the floodlight. The last thing I wanted was to have them both here at the same time, but I had no choice.
“Come inside,” I growled.
I led them both to my office. Augustine saw the flowers, blinked, and turned to Mad Rogan. “So you decided to involve yourself in this because of Gavin? Why the sudden concern for your relatives? So unlike you, Connor.”
Mad Rogan peered at him. “Why are you wearing glasses? I know for a fact that you have perfect vision.”
Here we go. This would end in them unzipping themselves to see who was bigger.
“You should’ve stayed retired.” Augustine’s voice was dry.
“And what’s going on with your hair?” Mad Rogan raised his eyebrows. “That’s a huge amount of illusion. What are you hiding up there? Are you prematurely balding?”
Augustine turned to me. “You have no idea who you’re dealing with. This man is extremely dangerous.”
Mad Rogan reached out toward Augustine’s hair, but lowered his hand. “I’d touch it, but I’m afraid I might cut myself.”
“Listen to me.” Urgency vibrated in Augustine’s voice. “You need to limit your association with this man. We exist in a fragile balance, and the core of that balance, the thing that restrains us, is our family. He feels no obligation to his family or anyone else’s. He has no restraint. You have no idea what kind of things he is involved in.”
And that, exactly that, was the problem with Primes. That right there.
“She needs to limit her association with you,” Mad Rogan said. “You’re trying to take her business.”
Augustine pulled off his glasses. “I may be putting her at risk financially, but you would take her life, if it was convenient, and make jokes about it later.”
Actually, Augustine was sending me after Adam Pierce, which was pretty much a death sentence.
Augustine kept going. “You have no code, Connor. You know nothing about duty or honor or self-sacrifice . . .”
Rogan moved, brutal and blindingly fast. Augustine’s back hit the wall, and Mad Rogan drove his left forearm into his neck, pinning him. His eyes turned cold and merciless.
“You spent your time after college sitting in a comfortable office learning the family trade.” His voice was precise and so filled with menace that the tiny hairs on the back of my neck rose. “This was your grand, self-serving sacrifice. You sat here, wrapped in your luxurious cocoon and wallowing in self-pity, while I spent six years starving and bleeding in a fucking jungle where all the money in the world couldn’t buy you a gulp of clean water. I did this so people I’ll never know could go to sleep in peace. What do you know about sacrifice? You never watched someone’s head explode from a bullet, then brushed pieces of human being off you and kept going. So how about you shut the fuck up?”
The room turned dark. Black bulges slid along the walls. Fear drained down my spine. Every instinct I had screamed at me that whatever was in the walls was bad and dangerous, and if it broke out, I needed to run.