Then came her quiet “Okay.”
“Okay,” he repeated, relief loosening the knots as he flexed his bloodless fingers on the steering wheel.
“You said Russ wasn’t behind the hex.”
“He didn’t set it, but that doesn’t mean someone else isn’t using him as a stalking horse.” He gave it a beat. “Do you have any idea what the Cabal would gain by targeting your sister?”
She didn’t rush to answer. “I don’t know.” She fidgeted with the hem of her skirt. “There’s always a chance she’s got a client who’s the target, but unless things have drastically changed, her clients wouldn’t rate that kind of attention. High-level clients, the kind more likely to earn Cabal attention—those would be handled by my parents.”
If that was the case, Zane would sniff it out.
“But…” she said.
When she fell quiet, he prodded, “But…?”
“Okay, I need you to stick with me because this convoluted, but it makes a twisted sort of sense when you consider the services Pythia provides.”
He caught a glimmer of where she was headed. “Prediction.”
“Right, and the majority of Pythia’s mages are Mystics.”
“Because predictive magic is intuitive in nature.” He caught her nod as he checked his mirrors.
She turned in her seat until she was facing him. “Which is directly opposed to what the Cabal practice.”
She wasn’t wrong. The Cabal earned their nightmarish reputation by having zero qualms about mixing horrific science with darker magics, and they had less than zero reservations about using the results to get what they wanted.
“If they’re behind all these supposed ‘incidents’”—she used finger quotes on the last word—“and trying to stay off the Families’ radar, they would have two choices to get what they wanted. Hire Pythia or cripple it.”
His gut soured, and he hated that he had to even ask. “Would your mother work for the Cabal?”
“Knowingly? No.” She sounded resigned. “But if a client waved enough money around, she wouldn’t ask questions.”
That was far from reassuring. “The second option?”
“To cripple Pythia’s operations and keep them from getting in the way, they’d be more likely to target my mother, not Sofia.”
Maybe. He flipped the turn signal for the upcoming exit as an ugly suspicion crept in. “Cass, how sure are you that Iris died of natural causes?”
She stared at his profile. “No, that’s not…” she said, her voice cracking. She turned away, shaking her head. “No, if anything was hinky with Yaya’s death, Mother would be on the warpath.”
He didn’t say anything because he had his doubts and Cass had had a hell of a day. Still, it might be worth adding a deeper dive into Rhea’s client list to Zane’s research. He turned onto the surface streets, grateful that the traffic was light.
Accurately interpreting his silence, Cass touched his knee. “It wasn’t murder, Grayson.”
He didn’t want to hurt her, but from the outside looking in, her family was a problematic nightmare. “How can you be so sure?”
“Because my mother would have looked,” she said calmly.
Right. Because Sages can see the past. “But would she?”
“Yes.”
The depth of her certainty threw him off. “You sound awfully sure.” He shot her a look. “What happened while I was gone?”
“She and I had a long-overdue conversation.”
As she shared the details involving her aunt’s prediction and her mother’s resulting decisions, he didn’t miss the hints of compassion and flashes of anger as she repeated Rhea’s justifications. Cass was struggling to come to terms with what her mother had revealed. But the more she shared, the more his concern grew, and he had to wonder if she was too emotionally tied to the situation to see the same glaring warning signs he saw—Rhea’s deliberate decision to climb into bed with the Families, the way she manipulated situations and people to get what she wanted, and how she justified hurting those she loved. That last one tripped his personal trigger in a big way and made him wonder just how far Rhea would go to get what she wanted.
