Calanthe is chatting away with Gael. The conversation seems light and friendly, punctuated with bursts of sporadic laughter.
My friend’s approval means everything to me. The fact that she seems like she’s genuinely enjoying herself settles something deep in me. In spite of being vain, my biological father isn’t the monster everyone has made him out to be.
Probably because everyone based their impression of him on Ines’s opinion, and Ines is a judgmental, deceitful bitch.
“The footage is organized by month and year.” Alexander presses play on a grainy video, stretching it until it fills the screen. “We’ve got hours of recordings from about a year after the Hadezes moved to Boston. That’s when all the conspiracy stuff about our people started.”
I study the video footage of a brownstone. All the windows are boarded up, but light seeps around the boards, and shadows move on the rooftop.
I pinch the screen to get a clearer shot of the roof vigils, but the image is too pixelated to even understand if the body is female or male.
“Quality wasn’t all that great back in the day, but the Holy Hunters didn’t cover up like they do today. So when they weren’t hiding, we managed to grab some headshots to work with.” He reduces the video to a thumbnail and scrolls to a video taken in the early 2000s. “That’s how we ID’d Patriot, aka Levy Rafferty.”
It’s a side-profile shot of a guy who looks to be in his late thirties and in pro-wrestler shape. Reddish hair peeks from a baseball cap, and a bump adorns the man’s longish nose.
Alexander scrolls to the next shot, this time front-facing, that displays a heavy splash of freckles across the jagged bridge of the man’s nose.
“The balaclavas and gloves they started wearin’ make it harder for us to tell who’s who,” Alexander continues, “but sometimes their hair sticks out, or we get a clear shot of their eyes. Or better yet, we’ll spot a hackable smartwatch or some flashy, expensive timepiece we can trace back to where it was bought. That’s how we found Chairman—aka Dominic Caruso. Thanks to his Rolex. A one-of-a-kind model sold to a Ukrainian arms dealer back in 2012, which he traded for vials of Atlantean blood.”
“For haters, they certainly love what runs through our veins,” I muse as I drag my finger over the screen to flick to the next picture.
Another shot of Levy Rafferty, chatting on the rooftop of the brownstone with another massive male wearing a skullcap and an automatic weapon. Although the cap covers the man’s hair, it doesn’t cover his features, which look almost Nordic.
“That’s Handyman,” my half-brother explains.
“Let me guess…because he’s good with power tools?”
“If by power tools, you mean weapons, then yes. He replaced Patriot after we took the latter out and has remained at the top of the organization, serving the Caruso heir like he served DaddyCaruso. Handyman’s the guy they call when they need to torture and bleed.”
“We’ve been tryin’ to take him out for years,” Gael pipes up, breaking off his conversation to join ours.
Likely because his seatmate has gone to the restroom to offload the gallon of tomato juice she’s ingested. If she weren’t immortal, I’d be worried she was suffering from a life-ending deficiency of some kind.
“But he’s a slippery son of a gun,” Monta muses.
“I’m still convinced that if we can snatch his daughter,” Alexander says, “we can get himandCaruso, since the daughter’s married to Dominic’s son.”
Goddess, these two know so much about the hateful organization. I’m sort of jealous. Okay, not sort of… I’m very jealous. “Do we have a picture of the daughter?”
“A partial.” Alexander reduces the image of Patriot and Handyman, then skips through to a folder dated seven years back. “Her name’s Quinn Caruso. Codename Fox, probably ’cause she’s crafty.”
Quinn… Why does her first name feel familiar?
As I root around my mind for the answer, Alexander brings up the shot of two people passing through a subway turnstile—both in full black gear.
I cock an eyebrow. “You callthata partial? All you can tell is that she’s tiny. Or at least way more petite than the guy she’s with.” I squint as though that could help me see through the man’s balaclava. “Is that Caruso with her?”
“No. We assume it’s the girl’s bodyguard.” Gael folds one denim-clad leg over the other, revealing a pair of python cowboy boots that scream loaded rancher. “Dominic’s son never goes out without an army of guards. These two were on their own.”
“As for why we call it a partial…” My brother blows up the shot, revealing the eye holes of the mask. “We know she’s ablonde and that her eyes are this cat-like yellow-brown—same as Handyman.”
I recenter the image to see the face of her companion, but he’s turned away from the surveillance camera. “Interesting that Caruso lets his wife walk around with only one bodyguard…”
“She’s Handyman’s daughter and was born in the organization.” Gael rolls his neck as though it were stiff. It might be, seeing as he was apparently up all night.
“So what you’re saying is that the girl is as lethal as her dad?” I ask.
“Lions don’t give birth to pussy cats, darlin’.” Gael’s idiom gives me pause. And not because he’s reworded it, but because it reminds me of what Dorian told me the day I found out that Gael was my father.
