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Two minutes later, I get down to the entrance to welcome…everybody—except Ollie, who went to pick up Sully.

They go into the kitchen after hugging or patting my head, and I close the door behind Lori.

“Why are you smiling like that?” I ask him as he keeps staring at me.

We follow the others. “I’m trying not to think about the boners that popped up all around because of your tree shag the other day in the forest.”

“There was nobody around,” I whisper as my neck and cheeks turn scarlet red.

“Animals,” Lori counters.

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Raph exclaims.

I see Gabe ready to reply to his brother, but Lori’s hand on his chest stops him. “Hey, feelings here! Yeah, who am I kidding. I don’t give a damn, bully boy!”

I rush to the kitchen, wanting to forget about Lori’s statement. I see Rami and Rague placing five cake boxes on the counter. When I turn, I notice Ezra sitting at the table.

“How did you get in here?” I ask him. He wasn’t with the others.

He smirks.

“By boat. But when in the city he uses the maze of tunnels beneath the ground to move around undetected,” Uri reveals, entering the kitchen.

“Bravo. It took you long enough.” Ezra taps his nose before taking a sip from his coffee mug. How long has he been here? Did he hear us in the bedroom? Does everybody know how we sound when we have sex? Jesus!

“Pretty sure Sari meant inside the house,” Gabe clarifies.

“I asked Rami to add Ezra’s details into the house’s security,” Uri states simply, landing a kiss on my head before moving toward the cabinets to grab plates and forks.

“So, he can get in while we have to stay outside your house?” I can’t see Lori, since I’m making more coffee and tea, but I know he is pouting.

“He has information Uri wants. That we all want,” Raph explains. “And speaking of information, I want to know where Uri hid my sunglasses.”

Uri flips him off. “I had to go inside a freezing lake to retrieve my moccasins, which were fucking ruined.”

“Let’s pause on your idiotic nicking game for a moment.” Rami sounds grim.

Hunter tucks him to his side, while holding Albert E.

in one hand. “After the firemen, the police, the fire marshal and arson team—who were all thanked for their discretion—left what remained of Meg’s house, Rague investigated the fire.

Checking with Serena, we know it originated in the shack in the backyard, near the garden. Someone with a fireman’s uniform?—”

“Phoenix, the sleepless malice!” Rague growls threateningly.

“I analyzed the burn path, found the point of origin, and checked for signs of accelerant like kerosene which were left in different places around the house to assure it would all burn to the ground. They used potassium permanganate and glycerin to start the fire, then added the kerosene, which caused some of the explosions we witnessed. The flames propagated very quickly, enveloping the house in less than ten minutes.”

“Phoenix didn’t leave any fingerprints anywhere,” Gabe let us know as he stops behind Lori.

“Fingerprints rarely survive high temperature fires, and if they do they’d be corrupted by soot or debris. So it’s highly unlikely we would have been able to find any.”

A heavy silence falls on the room, filled with memories of what we have lost. It’s like we are driving further into the storm when the visibility is zero.

Having Meg in a coma for more than two months has been agonizing, but losing her house and all her things as well?

It’s too much. Linda really hated that old mausoleum, but she too cussed like a sailor when we told her about the fire.

She’s now trying to cover the cause behind it, calling favors and bribing the people in charge.

We can’t afford to get law enforcement agencies entangled in this Phoenix mess, as well.

“Thank God, nobody was harmed,” I break the silence, squeezing Uri’s hand for a moment before letting it go.

“The light turns waxy and brown when someone burns to death in a room because human fat gets congealed in the light bulbs,” Michael reminds me of an article that I read a while ago about fires and human remains.

“Ugh,” Rami makes a gagging face.

“I don’t think I have the stomach for this,” Bez declares.

“Says the guy who scooped up a donor’s eyeball with his fingers and then squashed it in his palm,” Uri says, while I start plating slices of pie.

Yeah, we are still going to eat, regardless of the gory topic. There’s a vanilla sponge cake, red velvet, coconut, chocolate, and tiramisu. They all look yummy. Michael is passing coffee or tea mugs around, while Lori offers the slices.

I leave the last plate in front of Ezra, who’s looking at us eating sweets with a frown on his face. Right, he doesn’t know about our Sunday family meals.

“We usually gather together once a week to eat,” I tell him, patting his shoulder. He saved Uri, I’m grateful to him. All those jealous feelings have disappeared. I know where I stand with my boyfriend, and his brother, as far as I’m concerned, is part of this family, if he wants to be.

I move toward the counter since there are no chairs available anymore. Uri suddenly grabs my wrist.

“You sit on my lap,” he orders me. “Ass on my cock.” The second part is whispered in my ear as I oblige him. His voice has taken on that husky quality it gets when we have sex. My body is conditioned to yield to it, and I shiver against him as I feel the urge to wrap myself around him.

“What are you going to do without your base now?” Ezra asks.

“I can build a new one,” Rague states, shoving a big piece of coconut cake inside his mouth.

“We can’t stop the bloody family side business, though. So in the meantime we will improvise,” Rami adds. He already bought a warehouse—using his favorite shell company Cinderella he grabs Gabe’s arms and curls them around his waist.

“He kept his gun pointed at me after shooting twice, what do you think?” Uri snaps.

“Super Model, when I tell you to go fuck yourself, it’s because I care. Orgasms are good for your health. They lower stress levels. So, fuck you!”

I hurriedly lift my fork and push my red velvet cake inside Uri’s mouth to stop the banter before it worsens.

“Maybe he was wearing gloves in the shed when he started the fire and then took them off,” I offer.

“I won’t let you put the big brother guilt on me,” I suddenly hear Sully’s sweet voice as Ollie enters the kitchen before him.

“No need for that. Lori or Serena are always on your ass.”

Sully sniffs with outrage as his shoulder bumps the doorframe with a thud. I still feel sorry for being the cause of canceling his going away/ twentieth birthday party.

I smile at them and wave when they greet us. I introduce them to Ezra since he’s never met them before. The way he’s looking at Sully, the undisguised curiosity in his eyes, I have never seen any kind of emotion in him. It’s a little disconcerting.

“Now that everybody is here,” Gabe starts, turning to Ezra. “You saved Sari and Uri. But you are still keeping information from us.”

“I told you about Marlon Finch,” he declares in a bored tone.

“The chemist who allegedly provided Phoenix the poison to kill Meg.” Hunter says. Rami and Linda have been reaching out to their contacts in New York to try to find him. Gabe and Lori will fly there tonight.

“The way I see it, since you appeared, Meg was poisoned, her house got destroyed, Uri almost killed, Sari was kidnapped. Phoenix admitted to Uri that they are out for revenge toward us for some reason. So why should we trust you?” Raph challenges him. Psycho to psycho.

Ezra makes a tsk sound, not looking fazed by the many suspicious eyes aimed at him. “So needy,” he utters in a calm tone. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

“It highlights a logical fallacy,” I interject. Looking at all the confused faces around me, I continue, “It means that the lack of evidence supporting a claim does not automatically prove that the claim is false. Essentially, not finding something doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

Michael nods. “It points out the fallacy of arguing that something is not true because there’s no evidence for it,” Michael explains further, perching on Raph’s knees. “Why are you bringing that up?”

Ezra replies straight away this time, “The lack of evidence can be informative. Adermatoglyphia.”

One word, and I understand.

“The condition in which a person has no fingerprints,” Sully voices my thought out loud, earning a sharp look from Ezra.

Phoenix! Doesn’t matter if they were wearing gloves or not.

“Adermatoglyphia is the absence of ridges on the pads of the fingers and toes, as well as on the palms of the hands and soles of the feet. The patterns of these ridges, called dermatoglyphs, form whorls, arches, and loops that are the basis for each person’s unique fingerprints,” I recite part of a study I read online.

“Fucking hell!” Rague mutters as he scratches his stubbled cheek. Ollie has rushed to his side, probably to keep him calm.

“Damn!” More curses and surprised exclamations rise in the kitchen.

“You must know Phoenix well to have discovered that,” Uri states, his body feels tense under mine.

“To a certain degree.” Ezra has a real vague way of answering. “Phoenix will lie low to lick their wounds and plan their next move. In the meantime?—”

“Cut the crap!” Raph barks, pulling Michael more firmly to his chest.

“Do you know Phoenix’s identity?” Hunter asks in a demanding voice.

“Yes,” Ezra states.

“Bloody Mary Magdalene, enough with the dramatic pauses. Just spit it out!” Lori clips.

Ezra’s eyes move to Uri and me.

“Ezra, if my boyfriend wasn’t sitting on my lap, I would shoot you then leave the room and find someone else to work on,” Uri threatens.

I snuggle further into him as Ezra finally utters, “She’s Subject Nine.”

Nine?

She?

The End