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was involved in. I would feel the same way, if it were me.” Phillip drew in a breath and slowly let it out. “I’ve always felt the same way about my own parents. I looked for them for years, but never got anywhere. It took me a long time to accept the fact that they were probably dead. Or just didn’t care enough to try to find me themselves.”
    He growled out the last few words, but I could still hear the hurt in his voice. His shoulders slumped, and his body seemed to deflate, like air slowly leaking out of a balloon. He stared out the windshield instead of looking at me, but a muscle in his jaw ticked, as if he were grinding his teeth to keep from showing any more emotion. Something that I had more than a little experience with, especially these past few weeks.
    Phillip had been abandoned as a toddler and had grown up in some bad foster-care situations before finally running away and living on the streets. That’s where he’d met Owen and Eva, and the three of them had formed their own family, along with Cooper Stills, Owen’s blacksmith mentor. Phillip didn’t know anything about his parents, although he thought that one of them must have been a giant and the other a dwarf, given his own enormous strength.
    I reached over and squeezed his gloved hand with my own, telling him that I understood his pain, anger, and frustration. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, squeezed my hand back, and slipped his fingers out of mine.
    â€œEnough of that,” he said, his voice a little lighter than before. “Wouldn’t want Owen to get jealous.”
    â€œSomeone has a rather high opinion of himself.”
    â€œAlways.” Phillip grinned at my teasing, then jerked his head at the mansion again. “But what are you going to do about McAllister? If Tucker and the rest of the Circle want him dead, then he has to know something about them, right? Maybe he just doesn’t realize that he does.”
    The thought of what the slimy lawyer might or might not know sent little spikes of pain shooting through my temples. I rubbed my aching head. “I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore. Maybe McAllister knows something, maybe he doesn’t. Maybe Tucker just wants McAllister dead to prove a point. To prove that he can reach out and kill me and anyone else he likes anytime he wants to.”
    â€œBut?” This time, Phillip asked the question.
    â€œBut you’re right. I have to do something about him, as much as it pains me.”
    I sighed, pulled my phone out of my jacket pocket, and hit a number in the speed dial. He answered on the first ring, as though he’d been sitting by his own phone, waiting for my call. He probably had been. He was annoyingly efficient that way.
    â€œYes, Gin?” the smooth voice of Silvio Sanchez, my personal assistant, filled my ear. “I take it that something happened with Jonah McAllister.”
    I glanced over at the mansion. McAllister had disappeared back inside, shut the patio doors behind him, and cut off all the lights, as if that would keep him safe.
    â€œYou might say that. Someone tried to kill him.”
    Through the phone, I could hear Silvio pounding away on his keyboard. Even though it was after nine o’clock, he was still busy working, although I had no idea what or why he was typing right now. Most sane people would have been sprawled across the couch, watching TV or reading a good book, but the vamp was always available and always on his computer, no matter how late I called.
    â€œHmm,” Silvio murmured. “Well, that’s not an entirely unexpected development. You thought that the Circle might come after him to keep him quiet.”
    â€œI don’t think that he actually knows anything about them,” I said. “That’s the real problem.”
    I filled the vampire in on everything that had happened, including Fedora’s assassination attempt on the