Here we go.

“You may or may not be a Prime. Your powers and abilities are open to debate. You’re an amateur with an inflated evaluation of your own abilities and importance. I have been a Prime all my life. I’m the head of a robust House with four living Primes, I run a multimillion-dollar international enterprise, and I have impeccable standing in the community. Victoria Tremaine is an old hag whose House is in decline.”

Okay, he’d moved from fact to complete exaggeration. I really made him mad.

“If I don’t feel like entertaining her presence, I won’t see her. If I do choose to allow her that courtesy, she’ll mind her manners and will do absolutely nothing to jeopardize her safety or I’ll have her ejected onto the street.”

I flipped the top piece of paper on the contract stack and pushed it toward him.

“The very idea that she would walk in here and I’ll simply tell her the contents of my mind is preposterous. Your presence in my office is preposterous. I have had enough.”

“Look down.”

Augustine glared at me, then at the paper. On it in neat numbers I had written out the routing and account numbers followed by his username and password.

“How did you get this?” he snarled.

“You told me.”

Augustine grabbed the camera, rewound the recording, and watched himself recite his password. His face lost all color. He held the rewind button and listened to himself again.

He dropped the camera and lunged across the table. I had no time to move. His hands clamped my shoulders and he jerked me to my feet. A furious grimace distorted his face and his features rippled as if the illusion threatened to slide off his face. “What else?”

“I took nothing else. Except your middle name, Julien. Feel free to check the record. I would let go if I were you. I have shocker implants and I don’t want to use them.”

He released me.

I sat back into the chair. “Dealing with Primes is new to me. I did manage to learn some things, including that Primes never divulge the full extent of our talents. Truthseekers are among the rarest of Primes. What most people believe to be our primary talent—determining if someone lies to us—is in fact a passive field talent. It’s a side-effect of being a truthseeker, something that we do casually with very little effort.”

Augustine was staring at me. Anger and worry warred in his eyes.

“Do you know how Rogan realized I was a Prime? Someone had tried to kill my grandmother. I thought it was him and so I locked him with my will and I forced him to answer my questions.”

I could only maintain that hold for a few seconds, because bending Rogan’s will was like trying to contain a tsunami, but for those few vital seconds I’d broken him.

I had never before seen a man’s mouth literally hang open. It was deeply satisfying.

“You’re right. I’m a new Prime. But Victoria Tremaine isn’t. I’m here to tell you that everything you heard about her is true. Every horror story and ugly rumor you’ve caught—assume she can do it. She hates my family and she’ll go to any length to hurt us and she is capable of horrible things.”

That conveniently skirted the full truth but wasn’t exactly a lie.

“If you refuse to see her, she’ll wait until an opportunity to be within earshot of you presents itself and destroy your mind. If you tell her everything you know, she’ll rummage in your head anyway looking for more. She doesn’t care about your Prime status, your connections, or the size of your business. She goes after what she wants and she gets it.”

Augustine finally closed his mouth. His eyes turned dark. “Why are you here?”

“Because I want to shield your mind.”

“You want to hex me?” He clenched his teeth. “Hexes take weeks.”

“No. I want to create the appearance of a hex. When I opened Mr. Emmens’ mind to find out what Adam Pierce was after, I got a good look at how it was structured. The hex forms barriers within your mind, tapping into the very essence of your magic, and then wraps it all in a hard shell, rooted deeply in your psyche. If you use brute force to smash the shell, you will kill the mind that fuels it. You can only peer under it, carefully and slowly, guessing at the contents. The stronger the magic user, the harder it is to break the hex. If you let me, I’ll imitate this shell in your mind. You’re a Prime with a huge magic reserve and the shell will appear to be impenetrable. If Victoria Tremaine probes your mind, she’ll encounter the shell. Breaking it wouldn’t be an option—you would die and take your secrets with you. Probing further would require too much time and preparation, likely a magic circle and some knowledge of the answer to the question she is asking. She’s looking for my identity, which is a very specific piece of information. She can’t just sit and pick at your brain indefinitely. You would feel it. She’ll realize that it’s out of her reach.”

“How long will this fake shell last?”

“A few days.” It was a guess on my part. The book I’d been studying claimed that a false wall could last up to a couple of months if done correctly. Given that I had never attempted it before, a few days was a more likely estimate. “And I’ll need your help to make it. You have to open your mind and want for the shell to be formed in the first place.”

“Have you ever done this before?” he demanded.

“No.”

He leaned back, exhaling frustration. “What are the risks?”

“I could damage your mind.”

“What does that mean, Ms. Baylor?”

“I don’t know. But it is the only scenario I can think of that doesn’t end with you dead,” I said.

“Will I be assassinated if I decline?”

There was no point in lying. “Yes.”

“Why do you care? Wouldn’t it be easier to simply murder me?”

Because I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. Because that’s not who I am. He wouldn’t understand. I had to give him a reason he could wrap his mind around, something calculated that would spare his pride. “Because should there ever be a House Baylor, it will need powerful allies.”

Minutes stretched.

Augustine put his glasses on the table. “Rogan called me half an hour before our meeting.”

I’d asked him not to kill Augustine. I didn’t ask not to call. “What did he say?”

“He said that when you make a sequence of wrong choices, eventually you’re left with no choice at all. I thought he was speaking about Howling at the time. I realize now he managed to meld a rebuke and a death threat into a single sentence.”

Augustine faced me, his gaze direct.

“We’re sitting here because of my hubris. I made a sequence of poor decisions. I allowed you to interrogate a serial killer against my better judgment, knowing that you were circumspect about your magic and realizing the full extent of your possible exposure. I did this because Cornelius is my friend and our respective social positions precluded me from offering him a handout and would’ve prevented him from accepting one, but I wanted you to take his case. I also allowed my name to be connected to that interrogation, because the idea of being associated with a truthseeker appealed to me. Then I made a deliberate choice to offer you an unfair contract. I could’ve treated you as what you are—a young, talented Prime with a rare skill set—but I chose instead to attempt to take advantage of your inexperience. Then, I resorted to manipulation to win a pissing match with Rogan, even though I had realized at that point that while my interest was purely professional, he was emotionally invested. And so here we are. You, my former employee, would like to violate my mind, and if I don’t allow it, my best friend will murder me.”