I stared at her, feeling my face tighten with irritation I couldn’t hold back. “Couldn’t put them in a safety deposit box? Or tell me where they are, and I can get them now?”

“No. That’s not how this works,” she said. Of course it wasn’t.

“Or leave them with someone for me? What about Hattie?” My voice was rising. Footsteps clattered up the stairs. I didn’t care. “Gran, you are going to be the death of me!”

She sniffed at me and disappeared as Crash and Monica reached the doorway. Monica’s eyes were wide. “Who were you talking to?”

“A ghost,” I said.

Monica’s eyes lit up. “Oh, that’s perfect. I was just saying to Mr. Crash here that I would like to try something new with this place. And it being haunted is perfect! You know that in Australia they sell houses completely different than we do here.”

Crash looked past me, but it was pretty obvious there was nobody there.

I nodded as though I cared to hear how she was going to sell the house that I wanted so badly to save.

Monica all but beamed at me. “It will go on the live auction block.”

14

Sweat and rain ran down the middle of my back as I tried to work through the anger that had caught me by surprise when Monica had announced that Gran’s house was going on the auction block.

The training grounds were slick with mud from a sudden rain, and the dark made the run that much more treacherous.

I did my laps slowly, still walking part of the way. But it was better than the first run. Kind of. The anger pushed me forward, and by the end of the run, the worst of it had passed through me.

“What’s got your knickers in a knot, lass?” Eammon asked as I clumped into the underground training area.

“You’re talking to me now?” I shot him a look. “Very mature of you.”

Eammon beckoned for me to follow him. I considered ignoring him the way he’d ignored me most of the week. Then again, he was supposed to be helping me get through this training so I could make enough money to buy back Gran’s house. Something I wanted more than ever. An auction maybe wasn’t the worst thing. If no one wanted the house it could go cheaper than a list price. Of course, the opposite was true too, and I had no doubt that Crash’s pockets were deeper than my own.

Yes, I had a crap ton of debt, but the debt wasn’t really mine, and I needed to save Gran’s house. I needed to. That was all there was to that.