Milo
“Sir.”
I turned away from where I’d been staring at my own reflection or, more accurately, at the ornate vivid blue suit I was wearing, in the full length mirror and found Pax standing in the doorway of my bedroom. He glanced around to ensure we were alone before leaning in.
“Your wife?” he asked.
“Gone to pray,” I informed him, straightening my lapel as I turned to face him fully. “I’ll be joining her soon for services at the temple.”
“But you–”
“Best not to be seen as a wild heretic these days, Paxon. There’s no sense in giving Cosmo more fodder for his religious call to arms.”
Paxon nodded, understanding, before getting to the point of his impromptu visit.
“We found Olympia,” he told me.
I nodded and followed him out of my bedroom and down the hall. He didn’t say a word as we went and mentionednothing about our grandmother’s open door revealing her empty room which meant Paxon had likely known of mine and the Matriarch’s intent to attend temple this morning before I’d told him. Sometimes, I couldn’t help but wonder just how Paxon knew as much as he did and why he so often pretended he didn’t.
“What happened here?” Pax barked suddenly, drawing my attention to the hall in front of us. Just ahead, Nick was bent over, holding his groin, and Cleo was slumped against the wall with a hand to her throat, gasping for air.
“She–” Cleo gargled as Nick groaned.
“For the Geist’s sake,” Paxon exploded and shoved them both aside as he practically ran down the stairs into the foyer.
A few aunts were standing near a pillar at the bottom of the steps and looked up with raised brows of interest as Pax blew past them. I took a slower approach, raising my chin and keeping perfect posture as I strode down the steps after my attendant, nodding a greeting to the aunts as I passed.
“–told you to stay with Nick and Cleo,” Paxon was raging at Olympia when I met them several yards before the door.
“I don’t follow your orders,Paxon,” Olympia sneered. “And I definitely don’t let those goons you call enforcement hold me anywhere I don’t want to be. I don’t give a shit who gave the order. I’ll go where I need to go when I need to go there. And you. What are you, turning into grandmother now? Are you planning on locking me in my room next?”
“We need to talk, Olympia,” I answered her address to me as calmly as I could.
“It can wait,” she snapped and turned back to leave.
“Did you talk to him?”
She froze before slowly turning back to face me. I saw murder in her eyes. A sane man would have backed down, maybe even apologized, and let her be on her way. But I’d been questioningmy own sanity more and more lately and Olympia had never scared me.
“I did,” she answered, slowly, glancing in Pax’s direction.
Our cousin’s brow was furrowed as he looked between us, trying to reason out who we were talking about.
“I’d like to hear about how that went,” I told her.
“I have–”
“Now, Olympia.”
Her gaze narrowed into a glare formed by her sheer displeasure at being told what to do, but she followed me back up the stairs and into my office. I nodded once to Pax as we left, an order to remain behind and let us speak in private. He was still grimacing as we climbed the steps and headed into the study above.
“Tell me,” I said the moment we were inside.
She took a second to close the door behind us before answering.
“He claims he isn’t one of them,” she began. “He said he got the tattoo a year ago when he was drunk and some guys he didn’t know convinced him it meant something it didn’t. When they found him when he was sober and told him what it really was, he went to a few meetings before deciding he didn’t like their methods and maybe we weren’t all so terrible up here after all. He claims he’s never spoken to any of them since or taken part in any of their plots and that he would never commit an act as violent as what occurred during the trial yesterday.”
“Do you believe him?” I asked from where I leaned over my desk, organizing some papers before I had to leave.
