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I’d seen the news about Ben Frasier and his psychopathic companion, Rory Ungerman. I remembered Rory as well as I remembered Ben; he and Frasier had been an inseparable puzzle at the time, and not only because I couldn’t for the life of me make out if they were a couple or not, despite Frasier supposedly being married to a woman.

Rory positively repelled me.

He went out of his way to be shallow, cruel, vile, and trollish. He reveled in his ability to do whatever he wanted behind theprotection of Ben’s wealth, and viewed anyone who wasn’t rich as less than human. He lorded his sick views over anyone who would listen.

I remember thinking Ben was the “normal” one.

Now I knew Ben was just the one who bothered to wear a mask.

So many of Black’s rich “colleagues” in New York City seemed to have something deeply wrong with them. That whole culture struck me as parasitic, anti-human, anti-decency, and extremely gross. Angel felt the same way I did. She said she desperately needed a shower after each of those meet-and-greets, and thought that entire group was badly in need of a serious ethical and moral transplant, if not full-blown lobotomies.

I shook the memories off with an effort.

Like everything else lately, that whole experience in New York felt much more emotionally immediate than it had in a long time.

I stuck my mug under the double spout of the espresso maker, and flicked the silver switch. The machine grumbled into life.

Seconds later, out poured out dark foamy liquid.

“She still asleep?” Black asked.

His voice was gruff that time, all the heat gone.

I forced myself to think about that, about her, about Black, about right now. I did it while I filled a metal pitcher with milk, and stuck it into the milk steamer.

I nodded. “Yes,” I said, turning it on. “I left Panther with her.”

My milk started to swirl in hypnotizing rings.

I thought of something then, and turned. “You know, I asked her again. About the photos. On your bureau?”

“Oh?” Black said politely.

“Yeah. It’s funny, but you know who she asked me about? Which person it was who interested her?” I paused, waiting to see if he’d have a guess. “It was Manny.”

“Manny?” Black blinked, real surprise in his eyes. “Why?”

I shrugged, holding up my hands. “No idea. When I asked her about him, she clammed up again. But Manny was the person she’d been staring at in your old Vietnam photos. She looked for him in every photo in the apartment.”

“Weird,” Black muttered.

Itwasweird. I suspected Black would have found it even weirder if he’d seen just how intense Aura had gotten about those pictures. She’d stared at Manny like she’d seen a ghost. She’d picked them up and looked at them like she was memorizing each one.

“You want one?” I asked him, motioning towards my drink.

He shook his head, but sent me a liquid pulse of warmth.

“We need to report in to Prometharis… Gorren, really.” Black exhaled. He rested his hands on the counter and leaned on them. “She left me some pretty pissed off messages about what we did to Rucker’s mansion. She doesn’t know the half of it, of course, but her tech team picked up that someone copied files off his private server. That was enough to have her frothing at the mouth and threatening to sue.”

“She can’t, can she?” I pulled the portafilter off the espresso machine, and knocked the wet grinds into our compost bin.

Black scoffed. “I’d love to see her try. I’ve got Larry on it, but I think he could do this one in his sleep. And I haven’t even started threateningheryet.”

Lawrence “Larry” Farraday was Black’s lawyer.

Well, one of his lawyers, but definitely hisbestlawyer, and the only one he considered a close, personal friend. Larry scared the crap out ofotherlawyers, despite being an incredibly sweet and almost derpy guy outside the courtroom. I wasn’t reallyworried about us being sued, especially given how many laws Prometharis was currently breaking, but also because of Larry.

I felt a flicker of apprehension, anyway.