So that’s where the spiked barricades came from. I should’ve known. When you worked for Rogan, he made sure you were defended. He went so far as to make you immune to financial pressure from outside sources: his companies provided your car loan, your kids’ college loans, your mortgage . . .

Oh no. No, he wouldn’t.

My voice could’ve frozen the air in the warehouse. “Rogan, do you own my mortgage?”

“Not personally.”

“Damn it!” He couldn’t have touched our business. Augustine would never sell, so he went after my home instead.

“Nevada, it’s in a trust. I don’t personally own it. One of my companies owns it. I can’t foreclose on it and I can’t sell it. The terms remained exactly the same.”

“You had no right to buy my mortgage!”

“I had every right. It was right there. Anybody could’ve bought it and used it as leverage.”

“You and I’ll never be financially equal; I get that. But you can’t just buy up chunks of my life. For anything between us to work, I have to be able to say no to you. If you own my house, I lose that ability. I lose my independence.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“There is no such thing as a simple meeting now. Any communication from you will be an invitation from a man who owns my house.”

“Have I used it as leverage? Have I mentioned it? Did I wrap it up with a pretty ribbon and offer it to you on a silver platter and said, ‘Here is your mortgage, sleep with me?’”

“You didn’t have to. It’s enough I know you could.”

“So now you’re blaming me for the things I could theoretically do?”

“I’m blaming you for the thing you already did. You bought every business around me and then you bought my mortgage. For any kind of relationship to work, I have to have a choice to walk away from it. You’re taking that ability away from me. You know I would do anything to keep the roof over my family’s head.”

“That’s not even logical,” he said, his voice precise and sharp.

“Oh? Then why didn’t you tell me about it?”

“I did tell you when you asked.”

“Let’s look at the sequence of events: you proposition me, I tell you no, you buy my mortgage. The fact that you don’t tell me about it just reinforces the fact that you may have used it as leverage. Because you would, Rogan. You will use every resource at your disposal to win.”

“I don’t want to win.” He locked his jaw. “This isn’t some idiotic competition between you and me to see if I can wear you down. I didn’t tell you because I knew you would react just like this.”

“You knew it was the wrong move.”

“Wake up,” he growled. “Tonight sixteen trained killers came here to murder you. They had military-grade weapons and equipment. They would’ve driven a tanker truck into this place, detonated the charges, and shot all of you as you ran out with your skin on fire. Do you honestly think that your seventy-three-year-old grandmother in an aging tank, your mother with a permanent injury and a sniper rifle, and a cage full of guns can protect you? This is House warfare. You were vulnerable. You were vulnerable physically and financially. I eliminated those vulnerabilities.”

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?”