His magic flared around him, raging, and met mine. Our powers collided.

“I didn’t ask you to eliminate them. They were not yours!”

“Your normal existence is over, Nevada. It was over when you took Harrison’s contract. The first time you popped on these people’s radar, you were forced to go after Adam Pierce. This time you voluntarily put yourself in the crosshairs. They can no longer ignore you. This isn’t about ethics, laws, or noble adherence to the rules. This is about survival. I didn’t tell you about it because you desperately cling to the illusion that you’re still a normal person living a normal life, and I tried to preserve it for you, because I wanted to keep your head above the river of shit and blood as long as I could.”

“I waded into that river on my own. I don’t need your help. Get off my property,” I ground out.

Rogan marched through the open garage door to the middle of the street, turned toward me, and spread his arms. “I’m on my property now. Is everything fine now? Did all of your problems disappear and none of this happened?”

“I’m going to shoot him,” I squeezed through my teeth.

“No, that would be murder,” Grandma Frida told me, her voice soothing. “You’ve had a long day. Let’s put your magic away. You know what you need? A nice cup of chamomile tea and a tranquilizer . . .”

I turned and marched out of the motor pool. It was that or I would explode.

Chapter 8

It was morning and my mother made breakfast. Various animals ate from different bowls on the floor, all with the exception of Bunny, who dutifully sat by Matilda’s side and tried his best not to drool at the smell of bacon. As I watched, Matilda quietly dropped a piece on the floor. Bunny wolfed it down and resumed his vigil.

My mother had her patient face on. Catalina cut strawberries on Matilda’s plate. Arabella made odd patterns in her pancake with the tines of her fork. Leon, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed enough for me to want to strangle him, shoveled bacon into his mouth. Bern devoured his food in a methodical fashion. One day he would drop all pretense and just divide his plate into a grid. Everyone looked tired. Nobody talked.

Bern had done an audit of our finances. Mad Rogan owned our mortgage. He also owned our car loans and our business line of credit. We’d received paperwork regarding the change in ownership for all those things, but our mortgage had already been sold once, so my mother simply shrugged and filed it. A small college loan Bernard had taken out last year in addition to his scholarship was the only thing Rogan left alone, probably because it came through a federal financial aid program and couldn’t be acquired.

“We can pay off the vehicles,” Grandma Frida said. “I let that girl have the last ATV, so we’ve got two and a burned-out wreck, but the two vehicles are in decent condition with only some damage. They’re state of the art. I have the buyers lined up. We can unload them for about three hundred thousand each.”

“We should keep one,” Mom said. “We may need it the way things are going.”

Grandma Frida made big eyes and tried to inconspicuously point in my direction.

“Keep one,” I said, struggling to swallow my pancake. Overnight the red welts on my neck had matured into a spectacular bruise. My throat hurt. “It doesn’t matter. We still owe a million four hundred thousand on the mortgage.”

I had reached a seething point last night. Eventually my anger boiled over, and now only quiet determination remained. Rogan owned our mortgage. I would just have to work very hard and take it back from him. There was no other way to do it. We were Baylors. We paid our debts, and when life knocked us down, we picked ourselves up and punched it in the teeth. Sometimes that hurt more, but we still did it.

“A million and four hundred thousand? That’s almost the original price of the warehouse,” Arabella said. “We’ve been paying on it for seven years. How is that possible?”

“Interest,” Catalina said with a distant look that manifested when she did complicated math in her head. “With the 4.5 percent interest and finance charges, that’s about right. I can crunch the exact numbers for you.”

“That’s not fair. Buying on credit sucks,” Arabella declared.

“We would have to be attacked about three more times before we can pay the mortgage off,” I said. “We’d need six more ATVs to sell to buy Rogan out.”

Leon speared his strawberry with a fork. “I, for one, welcome our new Mad Rogan Overlord. I’m eager to learn and prove to be a valuable member of his team.”

“Shut up,” Catalina, Bernard, and Arabella said at the same time.

Leon squinted at them. “Maybe he’d let me have a gun, unlike some people.”

“You don’t need a gun,” Mom snapped.

“Do you even know where that overlord line is from?” Bern asked.

“A TV show.”

“No, you idiot, it’s from a movie called the Empire of the Ants. Look it up.” Bern’s phone chirped. He looked at it. “It’s Bug. Okay, so, two things. One, I have the video of the mercenary dude being loaded on the plane to Johannesburg, alive, like Rogan promised. Do you want to see it?”

“No.” Rogan was a controlling overbearing asshole, but when he gave his word, he kept it.

“Two, this morning I made a door in Scorpion’s server and Bug spent the last hour waltzing around in their confidential files. Scorpion was hired through an intermediary and paid by electronic transfer. Rogan’s people found the intermediary. He was paid in cash by an unidentified man.”

“How much?”

“Half a million.”

“We’re expensive, yus!” Arabella said.

“I left Scorpion a little present,” Bern said. “Bug activated it a couple of minutes ago, before hightailing it out of their servers.”

“What’s the present?” I asked.

“When they try to access their confidential files, they will find a marathon of Hello Kitty’s Paradise. All twelve years of it in the original Japanese.”

“I like Hello Kitty,” Matilda said.

Cornelius cleared his throat. “I feel partially responsible for this situation.”

Matilda reached over and petted his arm. “It’s okay, Daddy.”

Everything stopped as all of us collectively struggled with an overload of cute.

“Thank you,” Cornelius told her. “But I’m responsible. I knew what was to come, or at least I suspected, yet I minimized that risk in our initial conversation.”

I sighed. “You didn’t minimize anything. I was aware of the risk when I took the job. The responsibility for everything that happened is on me.”

“Your outrage over Rogan’s actions is well warranted,” Cornelius said, obviously choosing his words carefully. “But the danger of your family being harmed or put under pressure is very real. He isn’t wrong.”

I dropped my napkin on the table. “I know he isn’t wrong in his assessment, Cornelius. I’m upset because he refuses to acknowledge that I’m also right.”

“If he’d come to you with all of it, you would never have agreed to the purchase,” Bernard said.

“Probably not, but at least I would’ve had a choice.”

“What choice?” he said.

“I don’t know.” I got up and went to rinse my plate.

“Are we going to school today?” Leon asked.

“No,” my mother said.

“Great.” Leon smiled. “Then I’m going to go outside and see if I can get a gun. Since my own family won’t let me have one, I’ll have to beg strangers.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Catalina asked.

“Do you think guns are just lying around outside?” Arabella asked. “Or did someone plant a gun tree in our parking lot?”

“Have any of you looked outside?” Leon asked. “Since the sunrise, I mean.”

Bern poked his phone. “He’s right. I think we should look outside.”

I got up and marched down the hallway, through the office, and to the front door, my entire family behind me. I pushed the door open.