Page 60 of Nineteen Seventy-Six

“Come again?”

“You need to make up with your mistress, Charles. And you need to do it before that baby is born.”

Charles scoffed. “Things are fine. She’s pregnant. Pregnant women are moody.”

“Finding out their lover is a cold-blooded killer will do that.”

“All bullshit,” Charles insisted, but he couldn’t look at her. He instead focused on Nicolas, wishing the connection between them was what it once was, and that he had the power to recover what he’d broken in his madness. “Just you grasping at shit that doesn’t exist.”

Cordelia laughed. “Okay, Charles. But if she goes off script and decides not to play our little game you’ve set up, where I’m the mommy and she’s just the pretty nanny raising our kids, we’re going to have a problem.”

“She won’t.”

“Can you be so sure?”

How did Cordelia know so goddamn much? The Evers thing was a rumor even Augustus couldn’t completely kill, but the transient kids? Colleen’s boyfriend? Ekatherina?

And now, this. He supposed it wasn’t exactly a state secret that Lisette had gone cold toward him. The house was big, but not that big. He had the urge to kick Cordelia back to her townhouse in New Orleans, but—and he hated to admit it—she was right. Lisette committing to this arrangement was just as important as Cordelia staying the course.

“Our marriage is what it is, and will never be more than what it is,” she said. “But this family is worth protecting. On that, and maybe only that, we can agree.”

“Hey, that shit at dinner. What were you on about, going after Cat like that? She’s been through enough.”

“Of course you’d defend her.”

“Cut the shit. You seem to know everything, so you know it’s been over between us for a long time.”

“Yes, well, some things never truly end, now do they?”

CHAPTER 17

The Magi Network

“You can’t really be considering this.”

“For the last time, Elizabeth, stop going through my mail.”

“You didn’t go to great pains to hide it. In my defense.”

“There is no defense. You read my mail. Violated my privacy.”

“And damn good thing, too, because now I can stop you from making a horrible mistake!”

Augustus set Anasofiya in her high chair and transferred the soft food to her tray. “I never said what I planned to do.”

“Aha!” she cried. “You said planned to do, which means, you are in fact, planning to do something, instead of nothing.”

“You’re impossible.”

“I’m a voice of reason in a field of bad decisions.”

“I see no field.”

“You’re in it, bro.”

“Did you see something? Is that it?”

Elizabeth recoiled. “No, actually, I didn’t, or I wouldn’t have found it out by reading your mail, would I?”

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