Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) (19 page)

And yet at that moment, I felt . . . nothing.

I’d experienced this kind of emotional numbness before. It meant my psyche wasn’t ready to deal with my emotions just yet, so it had shut them down entirely.

Even numb as I was, I understood why my emotions had shut down. Despite all the many years I’d lived with the Glasses; despite the fact that they’d
adopted me, and treated me in every way as though I were their biological daughter; despite the fact that even if they were living in San Francisco, I could see them as many times as I was willing to endure the long flight, I couldn’t help flashing back to the many times in my childhood when I’d been abandoned. First, my biological mother had abandoned me in a church. Then foster family after foster family had given up on me and sent me away. The small child who lived in my core felt like she was being abandoned yet again, and it was more than I could deal with.

Steph was openly crying now and had moved to the sofa to hug her mother. I should have made a similar gesture, but I sat rooted in my chair, wondering when the dam within me would burst. Mr. Glass shot me a look of undiluted sympathy as he reached over to pat Steph’s back, and I knew he understood. At least my less-than-normal reaction to the news wasn’t hurting his feelings, and probably wasn’t hurting Mrs. Glass’s, either. They both knew me well enough to understand my abandonment issues. Maybe that was even part of the reason why they hadn’t before now gotten past the stage of
talking
about moving.

My cell phone chirped. After the bombshell the Glasses had just dropped, I probably should have ignored it, but I dug my phone out of my purse anyway, acting more on reflex than considered thought. The caller ID announced the call was from Cyrus.

“I’m sorry,” I said to no one in particular, “but I have to take this.”

I didn’t wait for anyone to acknowledge my words, bolting from my seat in search of privacy.

It wasn’t until I was halfway to my rendezvous with
Cyrus that I saw the similarity between my current situation and the series of bad choices that had landed me in my new and confusing life in the first place. That time, I’d been on the blind date from hell. I’d gotten a call from Emmitt, asking me to meet him under mysterious circumstances. My gut had been telling me something was wrong, and I’d ignored it, desperate for any excuse to get out of my date. This time, it wasn’t a bad date I was running away from, it was the turmoil of my emotions. I had left Steph and her parents with a flurry of excuses, no doubt causing them to worry about me even more. But running away was easier than dealing with the announcement, and I was all for easy.

It could be argued that running off to meet Cyrus without Anderson or any of his other
Liberi
to back me up might be dangerous—and stupid. I didn’t think there was any danger that he would hurt me, but he was a devious son of a bitch and could be setting me up for . . . something.

If I’d been able to put my finger on a specific suspicion, I probably would have turned around before I reached the rendezvous. However, I couldn’t think of anything Cyrus could do to me in the middle of a public coffee bar, not when the truce between the Olympians and us was still intact. He wouldn’t want to piss me off and have me start hunting for Konstantin again.

I drove past the coffee bar, trying to get a look inside before fully committing myself to the meeting, but the cheerfully sunny sky meant all I saw was a reflection of the street with a few shadowy figures moving behind it. I gave a mental shrug, then found myself a parking space. If I was walking into some kind of an ambush, then so be it.

To my surprise and relief, Cyrus was alone this time. At least, he appeared to be. I took a quick visual survey of the rest of the people milling around the coffee bar, and didn’t spot anyone with any visible glyphs. Cyrus rose from his table and beckoned to me, like he thought I couldn’t find him. I’m sure he knew exactly why I didn’t immediately rush to join him. He then shouted an order to the barista—a different one this time, but she seemed just as unflustered by his manner as the previous one—for two espressos.

“I’m not a big espresso fan,” I informed him as I approached.

“Make that a latte,” he called to the barista, then smiled charmingly at me. “Better?”

Arguing with him over a beverage order seemed like more trouble than it was worth. “Whatever,” I said, taking a seat. “I’ve had a long day already. Can we just cut to the chase without the whole dog and pony show?”

The espresso machine let out a shriek that set my teeth on edge, and Cyrus waited until it went silent before answering.

“No theatrics, I promise.”

The barista brought our coffees over. I hadn’t been planning to drink mine, but the scent was so enticing I couldn’t resist.

“You don’t think calling me for an urgent, private meeting is theatrical?” I asked.

He huffed. “Well, I wasn’t trying to be, but I guess it was a bit at that. Sorry.”

I sipped at my strong, rich coffee, being careful not to burn my tongue. “So what’s the big emergency? And why did you need to talk to
me
particularly?”

“I said it was important, not that it was an emergency. But I don’t think Anderson will like what I have to say, and I’m trying to spare everyone some drama.”

This didn’t sound good. I put down the coffee. “What is it?”

“We were speculating the other day about who might be behind the attacks against you. I promised I would warn all my people off, and I did. But I found I was curious myself, so I did a little investigating.”

My heart gave a loud ka-thump in my chest. If Cyrus thought Anderson wasn’t going to like what he was going to say, then that meant . . .

“It was Emma, wasn’t it?”

Cyrus nodded. He pulled a folded sheet of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket. “I stopped by her place and poked around on her computer for a bit while she was out.”

I must have looked shocked at his blatant invasion of Emma’s privacy, because Cyrus gave me one
of his wry grins. “I’m her boss, and she’s living in a house that I pay for. I have every right to keep an eye on her, especially when her loyalty’s been questionable from the start.”

Add one more item to the long list of reasons I never wanted to be an Olympian.

Cyrus slid the paper across to me. “I didn’t find anything interesting in her files or browser history. But I did find this in her recycle bin.”

I unfolded the paper and saw a screen shot of a computer’s recycle bin full of junk files. A number of them with nonsense names had been highlighted, and I could see a bunch of tiled windows that had opened up in WordPad.

“I found seven different versions in her recycle bin,” Cyrus continued. “I don’t remember exactly what the email you showed me said, but the one on top in that shot is the closest to what I remember.”

I had memorized “Konstantin’s” email claiming responsibility for the fire at the Glasses’ house, and although the one on the screen shot wasn’t
exactly
the same, it was close enough. Looked like I’d been right all along to suspect Emma as the author of all my woes. I reread the letter a couple of times as I tried to process what I’d learned. Obviously, Emma was the firebug and was responsible for the fires at the Glasses’ house and my condo, but I had to conclude that the fire at my office was every bit as accidental as it had originally seemed. It predated my feud with Emma, and the circumstances were very different. Perhaps what had happened at my office
had sparked the whole idea in Emma’s head. No pun intended.

“I had a talk with her,” Cyrus continued. “She claims she didn’t write it and she has no idea how it showed up on her computer.”

I gave a little snort of disbelief, and Cyrus’s cynical smile said he was with me. The smile faded into a look of grave intensity.

“None of this changes anything in the long run,” he told me. “Emma is still an Olympian and under my protection. I have made it abundantly clear that you are off-limits and that I won’t tolerate disobedience. I don’t expect you to have any more trouble with her. But I thought you should know. I’ll leave it up to you whether you want to tell Anderson or not.”

I stared at the incriminating paper, shaking my head once more at the irrational depths of Emma’s hatred. Anderson wouldn’t want to know how low she’d sunk. He had a hard enough time reconciling his image of Emma with the woman who had betrayed Erin to her death just to spite him, but this was even worse. However, this might be something he
needed
to know, whether he wanted to or not.

“Thanks,” I said, putting a heavy dose of sarcasm in my voice.

Cyrus smiled. “You can see now why I didn’t want him to hear it from me.”

I rubbed my eyes, feeling tired and headachy. I didn’t exactly want Anderson to hear it from
me,
either.

I wondered if Cyrus thought I was rubbing my
eyes to stave off tears, because his voice suddenly went all soft and sympathetic. “I wouldn’t take it personally if I were you. Emma’s . . . not well.”

“No kidding?”

“Her maid tells me she has nightmares every night,” Cyrus continued after giving me a reproachful look. “I can see with my own two eyes that she’s losing weight. She shouldn’t have left Anderson when she did. In retrospect, I can see she was being self-destructive, and I probably served as an enabler.”

I’d been so furious at Emma and the things she’d done that I’d never put a moment’s thought into what her life might be like now. She was jealous, vindictive, and spiteful as all hell. More than once, I’d thought of her as crazy, but I’d never quite made the jump from “crazy” to “clinically insane.” Until now.

“I’m trying to help her,” Cyrus said, “but I don’t think she’s too interested in being helped. I made it very, very clear to her what the consequences of disobeying me would be, but I’m not sure she doesn’t have a death wish. I’ll try to keep an eye on her, but watch your back, just in case.”

My stomach felt sour. I’d be the first to admit I’d disliked Emma from the moment she’d recovered from the catatonic state she’d been in when we first dragged her from the pond. She’d started out being merely annoying with her self-centeredness and bitchy comments, then graduated to being downright mean, consumed by unfounded jealousy and her understandable desire for revenge. She’d stopped
having any redeeming features in my mind when she’d threatened Steph. And yet . . .

And yet, I had saved her life. Saved her from an eternity of repeatedly drowning to death. Finding her and rescuing her had been the single greatest victory of my life. I didn’t want her to die after all that, didn’t want to undo the good I had done.

Of course, I also didn’t want her setting another fire.

“You’d better keep more than an eye on her, Cyrus,” I said, though I had no ammunition with which to back up my ultimatum.

“I’ll do my best.”

His assurance didn’t exactly fill me with confidence, but then nothing he said would. I picked up the incriminating screen shot. “Can I keep this?”

Cyrus nodded. “Be my guest. And if you tell Anderson and he takes the news as badly as I fear he might, let me remind you that you will always be welcome among the Olympians.”

I paused with the paper halfway to my purse as a disturbing thought hit me. “How do I know this isn’t all some kind of twisted setup so I’ll have a falling-out with Anderson?” I asked. That would certainly explain his reluctance to break the news to Anderson himself. Hell, if I was going to be paranoid, I could even imagine he’d created the screen shots just so he could give me bad news to deliver.

He laughed. “An interesting idea. My father is capable of scheming and manipulation on that level, but I’m not as complicated as he is.”

“Yeah, you’re just a plain old everyman.”

“Well, I didn’t say
that
. But I wouldn’t make trouble for you with Anderson unless I was sure it would make you join the Olympians. I’m not much of a gambler. Give me the sure thing any day.”

Is it weird that Cyrus admitting his own potential for dishonesty made me more inclined to believe him?

What tipped the scales in the end was my absolute conviction that Cyrus wasn’t an idiot. He knew that if Anderson kicked me out, I’d make a run for it rather than join the Olympians.

“I’m
never
going to become an Olympian,” I told him, just to hammer home the point.

There was a glint in his eye when he smiled at me, and I wondered if making myself into a challenge to be conquered had been a tactical error. “Never is a long time, Nikki. A long, long time.”

I wasn’t in any
hurry to deliver Cyrus’s news to Anderson, so I decided to go for a run as soon as I got back to the mansion. As luck would have it, Maggie had the same idea, so I had company. I wasn’t exactly feeling sociable, but running with Maggie isn’t much of a social occasion for me anyway. She’s five eleven to my five two, and she can cover a daunting amount of ground in a single stride. I have to run like my life depends on it to keep up, and I don’t usually last all that long or have the breath to do a lot of talking.

On a day like today, running like my life depended on it was just what I needed. The effort of keeping up the aggressive pace left no room in my mind for inconvenient thoughts and worries. For just a little while, I left my problems behind me and didn’t think about anything at all. My muscles burned and protested, my chest heaved with effort, I was sweating buckets despite the chilly temperature,
and I adored every painful, oblivious moment of it. I pushed well past my usual limits and didn’t even notice I was doing it.

By the time we started our cool-down walk, my legs were shaking with fatigue, and I was really glad I wasn’t just an ordinary human being anymore or I’d never have been able to get out of bed the next day. Much of my hair had slipped free of the ponytail I’d tied it in, damp tendrils clinging to my face and neck. Maggie was panting delicately, and her face was glowing a bit with the exertion and a touch of sweat, but her curly auburn hair was pristine in its French braid. She looked like she was just about to
start
a run, while I looked more like someone staggering over the finish line of a marathon. She gave me almost as much of an inferiority complex as Steph did, but she was a good friend anyway.