She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting: denial, maybe, or laughter; but his face crumpling up like a car wreck wasn’t on the list. “Damn,” he said quietly. “Shit.”

Her mouth went dry. “Who?” she asked.

Roland looked away from her. “He showed me pictures,” he said quietly. “Pictures of us. Can you believe it?”

“Who? Who are you talking about?” Miriam took a step back, suddenly feeling naked. Ask and ye shall learn.

Roland sat down heavily on a kitchen chair. “Matthias.”

“Jesus, Roland, you could have told me!” Anger lent her words the force of bullets: He winced before them. “What—”

“Cameras. All the cameras in Fort Lofstrom. Not just the ordinary security ones—he’s got bugs in some of the rooms, hidden and wired into the surveillance net. You can’t sweep for them, they don’t show up, and they’re not supposed to be there. He’s a spider, Miriam. We were in his web.” Roland’s face was turned toward her, white and tortured. “If he tells the old man—”

“Damn.” Miriam shook her head in disgust. “When?”

“After you disappeared, I swear it. Miriam, he’s blackmailing me. Not you, you might survive. Angbard’d kill me. He’d be honor-bound to, if it came out.”

Miriam glared at him. “What. What did he ask. You to do?”

“Nothing!” Roland cried out. He was right on the edge. I’m scaring him, she realized, an echo of grim satisfaction cutting through the numbness around her. Good. “At least, nothing yet. He says he wants you out of the picture. Not dead, just out of the Clan politics. Invisible. What you’re doing now—he thinks I’m behind it.”

“Give me that coffee,” Miriam demanded.

“When you called about the body in the warehouse, I told Matthias because he’s in charge of internal security,” Roland explained as he poured a mug from the filter machine. “Then when you told me there was a bomb, I couldn’t figure it out. Because if he wants to blackmail me he needs you to be alive, don’t you see? So I can’t see why he’d plant it, but at the same time—”

“Roland.”

“Yes?”

“Shut up. I’m trying to think.”

Shit. Matthias. Cameras everywhere. She remembered the servant’s staircase. Roland’s bedroom. So Matthias wants us out of the way? It was tempting. “Two million dollars.”

“Huh?”

“We could go a long way on two million bucks,” she heard herself say.

“But not far enough to outrun the Clan.”

“You want to—”