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“Father, I…”

One of the desk drawers opened and shut. “Here, daughter. Take into thy hands more than just a passage.”

She dragged her lids open…

And had to lean forward to make sure she was seeing things right. Between her father’s two palms was a perfectly aligned stack of white pages about an inch thick.

“This is my work,” he said simply. “A book for you, mine daughter.”

Downstairs in the Tudor safe house, Rehv waited by the windows in the living room, staring out over the rolling lawn. The clouds had cleared, and a half-assed moon hung winter-bright in the sky. In his numb hand, he held his new cell phone, which he had just clipped shut with a curse.

He couldn’t believe that above him his mother was on her deathbed and that at this very moment his sister and her hellren were speeding to beat the sunrise to get here…and yet work was raising its ugly horned head.

Another dead drug dealer. Which made three in the last twenty-four hours.

Xhex had been short and to the point, which was her way. Unlike Ricky Martinez and Isaac Rush, whose bodies had been found down by the river, this guy had turned up in his car in a strip mall parking lot with a bullet through the back of the skull. Which meant that the car had to have been driven there with the body in it: No way anyone would be stupid enough to pop a motherfucker in a place that undoubtedly had security-camera coverage. As the police scanner hadn’t reported anything further, though, they were going to have to wait for the newspapers and the morning news on TV tomorrow for more details.

But here was the problem, and the reason that he’d cursed.

All three of them had made buys from him within the last two nights.

Which was why Xhex had interrupted him at his mother’s. The drug business was not merely deregulated, but totally unregulated, and the stasis point that had been reached in Caldwell so that he and his high-level broker colleagues could make money was a very delicate kind of thing.

As a big player, his suppliers were a combination of Miami traffickers, New York harbor importers, Connecticut meth labbers, and Rhode Island X makers. They were all businessmen, just like him, and most of them were independents, i.e., unaffiliated with the mob here in the States. The relationships were solid, the men on the other end as careful and scrupulous as he was: what they did was simply a matter of financial transactions and product changing hands, just like any other legitimate segment of the economy. Shipments came into Caldwell to various residences and were transferred to ZeroSum, where Rally was in charge of the sampling and the cutting down and the packaging.

It was a well-oiled machine that had taken ten years to set up, and required a combination of well-reimbursed employees, threats of bodily harm, actual beatings, and constant relationship building to maintain.

Three dead bodies was enough to throw the whole arrangement into the shitter, causing not just an economic shortfall, but a power struggle on the lower levels that no one needed: Someone was picking off people on his turf, and his colleagues were going to wonder if he was doing a discipline or, worse, being disciplined himself. Prices would fluctuate, relationships would be strained, information would get twisted.

This needed tending to.

He had to make some calls to reassure his importers and producers that he was in control of Caldwell and that nothing was going to impede the sale of their goods. But Christ, why now?

Rehv’s eyes shifted to the ceiling.

For a moment, he fantasized about giving it all up, except that was just bullshit. As long as the princess was in his life, he had to stay in business, because there was no way in hell he was going to let that bitch take down his family’s fortunes. God knew Bella’s father had done enough in that direction by making bad financial decisions.

As long as the princess was aboveground, Rehv would remain the drug lord of Caldie and he would