Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) - By Jenna Black Page 0,20

telling me the facts without falling apart or betraying any emotion whatsoever. She was in problem-solver mode, and she’d distanced herself from her own pain. Considering how much charity work she did, and how often she ended up in charge of the charity functions she worked on, she was better suited for the job than I was. She’d already been in touch with the insurance company and had even tracked down the builder who’d designed and constructed the house more than twenty years ago.

Not once did Steph hint that she blamed me for what had happened, but I didn’t know how she could not. I had already brought so much misery into her life. She’d been attacked by Alexis because of me, and now her childhood home had been destroyed. She didn’t need me to tell her the fire had something to do with me, not after it was declared arson. Guilt pounded at me relentlessly, and I didn’t know what to do with it. Big Sister Steph was the one I leaned on when I needed emotional support, but that wasn’t an option this time.

I tried burying myself in work, digging up my previous list of Olympian properties in the D.C. area and then doing some research to see if they’d bought anything else since last I’d checked. Let me tell you, the Olympians own a lot of property, both commercial and residential, and I doubted I’d identified all of it despite my research. They knew how to use shell corporations and offshore bank accounts and out-and-out bribery to hide their assets. And let’s not even talk about their worldwide holdings.

My gut told me Konstantin would not have left town, and the fact that he’d sent that email from a local FedEx seemed to support the theory. My ever-present voice of self-doubt pointed out that Konstantin could easily have hired someone to do the dirty work from afar. Maybe he was living like the king he thought himself to be in Monte Carlo or somewhere else far away from here. But if I had to search the whole world for him, I was in deep trouble.

I mapped out a driving route that would take me past many of the Olympian properties that I deemed likely candidates. It would take several nights to do a drive-by on every one, especially if I wanted to actually get some sleep once in a while. For the time being, I was skipping the places that were directly owned by known Olympians, figuring those were just too obvious, but that still left me with a daunting list of possibilities. Yet I had to start somewhere.

I got so caught up in what I was doing that I forgot to eat lunch, and when I finally was satisfied with my itinerary for the first night, the sun was on its way down and I was ravenous. I ventured downstairs into the kitchen, hoping someone was cooking a communal dinner.

It was something of a frail hope, as only Maggie and Logan did much in the way of cooking, and they usually let everyone know when they were doing it. Anderson made a vat of chili every once in a while, and Jack had once made some kind of stew that no one in the house had been willing to touch. Maybe he’d thought he’d fool me into tasting it, seeing as I was the new person, but I wasn’t stupid enough to eat something a trickster prepared.

There were no enticing aromas drifting from the kitchen, and I figured it would be a Lean Cuisine night for me. However, I was in luck after all. There were no enticing smells, but Logan was hard at work on some kind of cold noodle dish. A huge salad bowl filled with noodles in brown sauce sat on the counter, and Logan was shredding a head of bok choy with the ease and quickness of a professional.

“Need a sous chef?” I asked as he tossed the shredded bok choy in with the noodles.

Logan looked at me doubtfully as he sliced a red pepper into ribbons. If it had been me wielding the knife, I’d probably have sliced my own fingers off, even if I was looking at what I was doing. He jerked his chin toward the salad bowl.

“You can toss all of that together, if you’d like. I’m almost done with the knife-work.”

I was just as happy not to be put to work slicing veggies, as it would take me