Илона Эндрюс - Emerald Blaze (Hidden Legacy)

“Extras,” I told him.

“Nice,” he said.

Not as nice as Linus’ blade, which I had already loaded into the console.

I shut the hatchback, climbed into the driver’s seat, while he got in next to me, and we were off.

Alessandro relaxed in the seat, long legs stretched out, broad shoulders resting against the back. Sunlight filtered through the window, playing on his hair. His face, halfway shaded, was heartbreaking. I could lift my phone and take a burst of twenty pictures and every single one would be a masterpiece.

A faint whiff of sandalwood mixed with vanilla and a hint of citrus floated through the car. The Alessandro scent. He’d smelled this way the day he kissed me, and I nearly stripped naked for him in the bathroom of the Wortham Theater. He’d smelled this way too when I came to tell him I was in love with him and found him packing.

I wanted to know what happened between him and Arkan. Whatever it was had shaken him to the core. It gnawed at me. I wanted to know.

If I asked him about it, he would tell me. It had to be awful, because nothing short of awful caused that kind of seismic shift in a person. He would tell me, and then I would know, and I would want to make him feel better. I would care. I couldn’t afford to care.

I turned right on Kempwood Drive. We could have taken Hempstead, but it was closed due to roadwork. There were three certainties in Houston: death, taxes, and never-ending roadwork. The joke was on me. The moment we merged onto the Sam Houston Tollway, the traffic ground to a halt. Sirens wailed ahead. We would be here awhile.

The hint of sandalwood and vanilla drifted to me. I needed a distraction.

I thought back to Augustine’s case summary. I had read it last night and forwarded it to Alessandro before passing out.

The MII investigators were worth their price. In the brief time they had the case, they put together a timeline of Felix’s movements, interviewed the other four Primes and some of their staff, and obtained the preliminary coroner’s report.

Felix died on Friday, July 15 th. That day he’d dropped off his children at their private school and arrived at his office at Morton Enterprises at 8:15 a.m., the same as he did every morning. He spent three hours at the office, placing several phone calls to the engineering firm involved with the reclamation project. He ate lunch at his desk—a gyro with chips from a place around the corner—worked some more after lunch, and at 2:17 p.m. exited the building. At 3:00 p.m., he was seen at the America Tower, where he’d bumped into Linus.

He left the America Tower by 3:30 p.m. and went back to the office. According to his secretary and his calendar, he had no plans for the evening and was supposed to go home to have dinner with his family. Instead, at 5:00 p.m., he called his housekeeper and told her that he had a change of plans and not to wait for him for dinner, then he left the office.

Twenty-five minutes later, an unknown person used the private after-hours code on the gate inside the Pit. The two guards swore nobody went in before Felix and the security feed confirmed their statement, so this person had to have arrived to the island by boat or some other means. Shortly after, the security booth logged Felix driving in. The inner gate code was used again at 5:49 p.m., presumably by Felix. That was his last sign of life.

It killed me that nobody thought to check on him, but Felix was a Prime and he had previously stayed at the site overnight when the occasion called for it. Because he’d called his housekeeper, his children assumed that he was working late. In the morning, Felix’s daughter tried to reach him, and when he still didn’t answer, she contacted her grandfather, who called security at the site. They began a systematic search and found him hanging off the cable, his body butchered.

He’d gone to the site to meet with someone. His cell phone was recovered and showed no phone calls or texts, so the arrangements for the meeting had to have been made in person, during his trip to the Assembly.

The MII investigators had come to the same conclusion, but the inner workings of the Texas Assembly were kept private. Whatever happened between the gleaming white walls of the America Tower stayed there. None of the other four Primes had visited the Assembly in person that day, but their family members had attended: Tatyana’s brother, Cheryl’s uncle, Marat’s brother, and Stephen’s father. Any of them could’ve passed on a message to Felix. Meet me in the Pit. It’s important. Come alone.

Each of the four living board members had an alibi. Stephen Jiang’s appeared to be the most solid. He was on a conference call with a firm in Tokyo, and according to MII’s summary, the conversation was too detailed for anyone to impersonate him. Marat was having dinner with his family, who would no doubt lie for him if he asked. Cheryl was also having dinner at a restaurant with a friend, who was yet to be identified. Tatyana’s alibi was the shakiest of the four. Supposedly she was at her office, but MII caught her vehicle leaving the parking lot of the Pierce Building in the middle of the day and didn’t show her coming back.

Felix’s legs were burned to a proverbial crisp. Tatyana could do it in seconds. But why?

I glanced away from the road and caught Alessandro looking at me. Something wistful and sad passed through his eyes, then the ice shutters crashed down, and the Artisan looked back at me.

“A penny for your thoughts,” he said.

“I don’t understand the burned legs.”

“Catalina, have you noticed that every time we meet, we end up discussing dead people?”

“Apparently that’s the nature of our relationship.”

A slow smile curved his lips.

“You don’t have to be so happy about it,” I told him.

“You can’t blame me. Lone killers have so few opportunities to talk shop.”

“Probably because you’re always busy killing people.”

“Not true. I haven’t killed anyone since landing in Houston.”

“Will wonders never cease?"

The knot of traffic finally dissolved, and we crawled forward, first slow, then faster.

“What about the legs bothers you?” he asked.

“In your professional opinion, was this a contract hit?”

“No. A contract killer would’ve set up in the swamp and put a bullet through his brain. Clean, efficient, and quick. The point is to ambush and get out fast.”

I had to stop looking at him. Every time I glanced at him I felt a little stab.

“Nobody murders anyone by burning their feet. The burns could mean he was tortured, but I have two problems with it. First, the burns are too severe.”

Physical torture was cyclical: pain followed by relief followed by pain until the subject broke. The promise to end the pain was the incentive to talk. Felix’s legs were practically burned off.

“Agreed,” Alessandro said. “Let me guess the second problem. He was a powerful geokinetic.”

“Yes.”

Geokinetics controlled the mineral component of the Earth’s crust: rocks, sand, some ores, and all gems. They excelled at raising defense barriers, they created sinkholes and earthquakes, and they were hard to kill when on the ground, because a geokinetic Prime could literally open the earth under his feet and vanish into it only to resurface a hundred yards away and drop his opponents into a bottomless pit.

“I just don’t see him sitting on his hands while they tortured him,” I said. “The method of murder had to be fast and sudden.”

“The preliminary report shows no water in the lungs,” Alessandro said. “That leaves us with the animal bite or the broken neck, which is the only thing that fits. It’s simple and instant: loop the power cable around his neck and shove him off the building. His weight would do the rest. Everything else, the drowning, being bitten, being burned, all of that takes too long.”