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JUSTICE
My thick-soled boots squeak with each determined stride down the gleaming marble floors of the academy’s main building. Right now, I know the thing that sucks most about a family business—the family part.
Our family business is both complex and a cover. To most of the word, the Mantua Academy is an elite school on a one-hundred-and-sixty-acre pristine campus in Bucks County, PA. It’s filled with historic architecture and stone and spire buildings. It’s also a front for our family’s more clandestine operations. What it’s not is a mumbo-jumbo, feel-good, mantra-loving freak-fest. Which is exactly what I’m going to tell her.
Having worked up a good head of steam, I reach the threshold of my sister’s office… door? My eyes roll so far back in my head, I can see my ancestors. Great. Bridget followed through on her promise to have her door removed.
Trying to hold onto calm—not easy when she’s making trouble in my cover job which I can’t stand as it is—I rap on the wood frame.
She’d doesn’t move. My pale-skinned sister sits cross-legged on her mesh Ergohuman office chair, eyes closed. Her silky black strands, a testament to her Asian ancestry, stabbed with a silver comb, droops lopsidedly like a hairy modern art sculpture.
Despite my annoyance, I smile. This is so perfectly Bridget it almost deserves its own word, likefreaktacularorweirdiful.
I knock louder. “Bridge?”
Brown eyes, as serene as a gentle woodland, flutter open and lock onto me. Bridget is the kind of person who rarely blinks. It’s like she’s paying deep attention, always making me feel seen. Not in a good way. In a below the skin, all my broken secrets, my fear of suffocating, and dislike of the color blue way.
I fidget.
Shiva,uhm, Bridget quirks an eyebrow. “What can I do for you, Justice?”
“I need to talk to you about the yoga class. Is it true you have the girls chanting in Sanskrit?”
“Yes.” She furrows her brow. “I’m not sure why you ask. Is there a problem? I submitted the yoga for approval through the director’s office.”
Strolling into her office, I plop into a purple chair, kicking one leg up over an armrest. “You got approval for yoga, She-pak Chopra, not to have the girls chanting in Sanskrit. This isn’t good PR. And that’s bad for me. Means I have to do work.”
Work I’m not good at.
Thoughtfully, Bridget rests her hands on the desk. “I see. I will limit my teaching to poses and centering music.”
Gotta love her. “Dammit, Bridge, you’re so easy. Why can’t I have more sisters like you?”
“Perhaps because you are as abrasive as a starving boar,” a Spanish-accented voice says from the hall.
I know that voice.
I turn and see the beauty herself. Sheared head, lips painted bright red, skin as satiny smooth and dark as a starless sky, and cocked against the doorway, the generous curve of boys-can’t-help-but-wonder hips.
Dada, six-foot-two in spiked heels.
“This is the problem with having no doors,” I say. Standing and crossing the room, I give my returning sister a hug. “You’re home early? Aren’t you supposed to be digging up dirt in Mexico with your Brothers Grim informant?”
Dada’s forehead creases. She bites her full lower lip before peering down the hall. She needn’t bother. The school staff, a.k.a. no-idea-a-secret-society-of-vigilantes-exists-under-their-feet staff, aren’t in yet. Satisfied, she says, “Judging by your calm, I take it you haven’t checked your secure email recently.”
* * *
I’m sopissed that I practically bark at security at Momma’s office building when they make me walk the ring of metal detectors before I’m able to head upstairs to the headquarters of the Parish empire in Philadelphia.
Head full of steam, I march down corridors lined with sharp corners, glass walls, attractive twenty-, thirty-, forty-, and fifty-somethings in power suits.
I’m too pissed to respond to the repeated nods and hellos. After Dada clued me in, I read Momma’s morning email—which sent me scrambling for my Jeep keys. She’snotdoing this to me. I won’t let her put my mission on hold.
I don’t care if the Brothers Grim are on alert after my screwup with Tony last week. Who cares that the bad guys moved their meeting up by six weeks? Or that they’ve moved their meeting location to Jordan—one of the few places on the entire fucking globe where The Guild has no established cover? This is our best chance to take down a global trafficking ring. We find a way.
Yikes, having worked myself up, now I can’t breathe. I loosen the scarf around my neck and hope the bruises don’t look too bad now.
As I near Momma’s office, her executive assistant—straitlaced Lorena of the cotton button-downs and starched pantsuits—blocks my path to the closed mahogany doors.
