“Intelligence agency? November, your dad’s Strategia. Please tell me that you can see that.” He gives me a concerned look. “Being an intelligence officer is one of the most basic covers for our particular…skill sets if we’re ever caught doing something.”

I frown. When he says it like that, it all makes sense. In fact, it all seems terribly obvious. But the idea that Dad lied to me all these years isn’t funny in the least.

Ash sits back down next to me. “There are some Strategia in America, but we don’t tend to settle there. As I told you, most Families originated in what’s now Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. It’s not that it’s never happened; it’s just rare. We do our job, whatever it is, and then we go back to our Families. I would have heard if there was a highborn girl from the Bear Family who ran off to America. It would have been a huge scandal.” He pauses. “It was your mother who Matteo recognized, right?”

I nod. I’ve thoroughly broken Blackwood’s sacred rule number one, and I still don’t know any more about my family, except that apparently I don’t know them at all. “Okay, wait, back up. Start from the beginning.”

“The beginning?”

“Am I right that you’re a secret society?”

“We, November,” Ash says gently. “You’re part of this, too.” There is amazement in his look. “And yes, I suppose that’s what most people would think about us.”

“And…are we assassins?” I say, and almost choke on the word.

“When we need to be, but we’re also so much more than that. We can be selfish and competitive in advancing our own agendas, for sure. But we also help the world avoid catastrophe. Most people look forward, without ever bothering to consider the cyclical nature of history, and inevitably re-create the same disasters over and over again. Strategia stop the mechanisms that create those disasters.”

I nod and jump into my next question before he decides to stop answering them, because for the first time since I got here, some of what I’ve observed at this school is starting to make sense. “So there’s a system in each Family, right? Different jobs within Strategia—governing, leadership, servants, guards?”

“Yes,” he says slowly, and he sounds different, like for once he’s present and not five steps ahead. “Strategia Families grew in numbers after they stopped working for the rulers of their given empires and became independent. Everyone needed to pitch in to keep the Families functional and hidden.”

“And what about us specifically, what about people who go to this school?” I ask.

“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation,” he says, more to himself than to me. “We’re the heartbeat of Strategia—the best strategists in our Families.”