“I came back twice earlier and your goons wouldn’t let me in.” Andrea landed in a chair. “I haven’t heard from Raphael.”

She had known I’d ask.

“Anything from Curran?”

I shook my head. “I have something to tell you and you won’t like it.”

I explained about Nick and the massacre at the chapterhouse.

Andrea’s face turned white. She locked her hands together into a fist and bent her head toward it. Her fingers went pale from the pressure. “All of them died?”

I nodded.

“And Mauro?”

“Yes.”

“Are you okay?” Andrea asked.

“I’m peachy.” My voice sounded brittle and bitter.

“I thought something might happen with the Order, but not this,” she said. “Not this bad.”

“You thought something bad would happen?”

She grimaced as if she’d bitten into a rotten lemon. “After Erra almost took out the Atlanta chapter, Ted fell out of favor.”

“Been keeping tabs?”

“Oh yes. I always keep tabs on people I may need to kill.”

She sounded just like Aunt B.

“Moynohan was never one of the best knight-protectors, but he’d been with the Order since the beginning.”

“A knight-founder, I know. Mauro told me.”

Andrea leaned back. “I started to guess which way the wind was blowing when I found out that he had repeatedly refused efforts to increase the chapter’s size.”

“Why?” I’d never understood why a city the size of Atlanta had only seven knights assigned to it.

“Because a chapter of ten members or more requires a knight-diviner,” Andrea said.

A knight-diviner functioned like a chaplain in regular Army units. Greg Feldman, my now-deceased guardian, had been one. He handled whatever personal issues the other knights could throw at him, and they threw quite a few.

“I spoke to a couple of the new knights who’d transferred in,” Andrea continued. “Ted wasn’t shy about bending the rules to get where he was going, and he wanted a group of knights loyal enough to bend the rules with him. A knight-diviner would’ve diluted his authority. That’s one of the reasons why he let you in, by the way. He saw you as a nobody with a talent and a chip on your shoulder after your guardian died. He thought that if he gave you your big chance, you’d spend the rest of your life thanking him for it.”

Well, wasn’t he in for a surprise. “I bet he opened a bottle when Greg died.”

“Probably.” Andrea sighed. “I never thought he would retire. His ego was too big. He’d want to go out in a blaze of glory. Well, he did it, the asshole. He got his last hurrah. People died for it. God, poor Nick. He must’ve been through hell and Ted just burned him. That’s years thrown away. I would’ve killed him.”

“He was kicking his corpse the last I saw him.”

Andrea grimaced.