Page 125 of The Bones in the Yard

“Now you don’t think so?” Doc asked.

“Now I don’t know what to think,” came the tearful reply.

So someone in her family was at the center of this—maybe the mother-in-law, maybe the brother—but that still left me with one very big question.

“You said your family—your husband’s family—has ties to politics.”

She nodded, lip caught in her teeth.

“But your family isn’t Ordo.”

“Ordo?” she repeated, and her expression was confused.

“The Antiquus Ordo Arcanum.”

Still blank.

I sighed.Double fuck.

“Would your brother talk to me?” I asked her.

Her eyes went wide. “What? Why?”

There was fear there. I didn’t have to see Doc’s nostrils flare to know that if I’d been an orc or shifter I would have smelled it.

“Why don’t you want me to talk to him?” I asked her, my voice sounding sharper to my ears than I intended.

Doc unnecessarily shot me another look.

“Julian… He doesn’t do well with Arcanids.”

“‘Do well with,’” I repeated. “He is aware that we make up six percent of his potential voting bloc, right?”

Her face flickered through several expressions, too quickly for me to be able to tell precisely what each of them were. “He… tries,” she whispered. “He’s… not cruel. But he… He thinks that it means there’s somethingwrongwith us. Nothing we can help, but that we’re to be pitied.”

“Remind me not to vote for him,” I muttered.

Doc grunted.

I tugged on the end of my braid. “Izar.”

She looked up at me, her eyes wide and her face tight.

“There have been at least three people connected to your brother killed by the Antiquus Ordo Arcanum in the last month. Three people. That means that your brother hassomethingto do with it. Maybe not—” I kept going, overriding whatever she’d been about to say “—something he intended or even knew about, but that’s a big… coincidence.” I kept myself from swearing, again. I was doing really well keeping my language clean, not that anyone was going to pat me on the back for it.

Tears spilled from Izar’s brown goat-eyes. “I—I don’t know about that,” she whispered. “But…” She swallowed. “He’s gotten more secretive in the past year.”

I nodded, listening. “What happened in the past year?”

But Izar shook her head. “I don’t know,” she replied, her voice soft and sad. “He’s been working toward the election, preparing. Trying to raise money. Gain supporters. It’s… like he’s becoming a different person.”

I could tell from her voice how much she wanted him to be innocent. And how afraid she was that he wasn’t.

“And this happened about the same time you last saw your… pendant?”

Her face crumpled, and even I am not enough of an asshole that I didn’t feel that like a sucker punch to the gut. She nodded, burying her face in her hands.

I felt like a complete jerk, but it seemed to me that Julian Vidal was person of interestnumero uno.

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