Arabella Saves the Day #2
The entire Madero clan thought Tia was a precious treasure.
She was the first girl born into the family in four generations, and they weren’t quite sure how to deal with that.
They were so paranoid that something could happen to her that they homeschooled her until high school.
She hadn’t even been mentioned in their family registry until last year.
If they got wind of this mess with Phillip, they would level half of Houston in retaliation.
People would get hurt, House Madero would land in scalding-hot water, and the guilt would eat Tia alive.
I kept going. “I barely got any sleep last night, because I spent half of it stalking you and Phillip online. I don’t get it.”
Thud! Whoosh.
“I mean, I get him, but I don’t understand why you were with him in the first place. You could do so much better.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“You would be surprised how much you can find out on socials. This selfie, for example.”
I pulled up one of her pics on my phone and showed it to her. She glanced at it and turned away.
“It’s a very pretty pic.”
It really was. Tia wore a white skater dress with a plunging neckline, all lace and soft pleats.
She stood poised against a stone column, holding a small purse with a cartoon girl drawn in pink with two puffs of pink hair on either side of her head.
Tia’s own hair fell in gentle curls, and her makeup was light and romantic.
She looked like she was going to a wedding.
“This is an original Renata dress.”
Tia paused for a millisecond.
Ray suddenly came to life. “What does that mean?”
“It was designed by Lucian Brady for his wife, Renata. She was a Magus Hoplomorphosis, like Tia.”
And, like Tia, Renata Brady was muscular and broad-shouldered and wanted to look softer.
“This dress is super rare. There are only fourteen Renatas, and they had a tiny run, only ten units for each design.”
“How much did you spend?” Ray asked.
“I found it in a thrift shop for fifty bucks,” she told him. “They had no idea what it was. Calm down.”
“And this bag.” I zoomed the picture in on the cartoon girl. “I always liked the pink Poppy-Chan best.”
Ray looked at Tia. She groaned.
Ray turned to me. “Is the bag rare?”
“Yes. During the last recession, Coach released a very small run of these bags in Japan. They got a bunch of crap for it, because these are aimed at teenagers, and people complained that it was manipulative and would make kids beg their parents to buy them luxury bags. Coach pulled Poppy-Chan off the market in a year. They hid these so well, even most Coach employees don’t know about them. ”
“Yes, but they’re still in the Coach database,” Tia said. “If you give them the serial number, they can confirm if it’s authentic.”
“Tia?” A warning vibrated in Ray’s voice.
“Two hundred and twelve bucks on eBay and only because someone else wanted it and kept bidding a dollar over me for, like, hours.”
What was it with Ray and the money questions? It wasn’t like the Maderos lacked money, and she wasn’t spending that much. By most Prime standards, this was pennies.
“See? This tells me a lot about you,” I said.
“Like what?” she growled.
“You don’t like expensive things. You like rare things—special, secret finds that you have to search for. They make you happy. You like going out in an outfit like that exactly because you know something about it that others don’t.”
She opened her mouth and closed it.
“Phillip doesn’t get it.” I scrolled through the comments under the pic, found his, and showed it to her.
what’s with the weird bag
She spun away from me. Ray had abandoned the punching bag a few feet short. She marched to it and kicked it hard.
“His family is looking for him,” I said. “His mom is losing her mind. They turned his laptop over to me. Did you know that he was a Derek Areston fanboy?”
Derek Areston was an alpha-male bro. He made his money hawking his self-improvement courses and writing books about how testosterone made you rich and sexy.
“Whatever,” Tia said.
Ray let out a derisive snarl. “Areston is an asshat.”
“Phillip doesn’t just follow Areston. He hypes him up on Reddit.”
“What?”
I pulled it up on my phone. “The Vertex Blueprint: Wealth, Women, and Relentless Drive is peak, man. Absolute fucking peak. It’s peak, Tia. Peak cringe.”
She marched over and grabbed the phone out of my hand. “PrimeAlphaProtocol? Is that Phillip?”
I nodded.
For a second she looked like she would smash my phone into the ground, then she thrust it back at me and stomped away.
Phew. Crisis averted.
“This is why I don’t get it,” I told her. “You don’t seem like the kind of person who would put up with that. The secondhand embarrassment alone is so much.”
“He didn’t used to be like that,” she squeezed out.
“But he is like that now. I figured out why you broke up with him, by the way. It was this.”
I pulled up Emelline Lily’s Insta and found the right pic.
In it, a willowy girl with long legs and dark hair posed in a short, black bodycon dress.
The dress was strategically cut. Three horizontal slashes stretched over her torso, baring wide sections of her tan chest and flat stomach.
She was holding a flute of golden liquid that was likely champagne but could pass for cider if someone freaked out about underage drinking.
Her makeup was perfect, her eyebrows were razor-precise, and she held her glass while staring pensively at the evening city from a high-rise balcony. The caption said, “A very long day.”
“This isn’t even a good thirst trap.” I shrugged. “Like she barely tried.”
Tia pummeled the bag, sinking a flurry of punches. The bag danced, bouncing farther and farther down the rail.
“What the fuck did he do?” Ray growled.
I pulled up the comments and showed it to him.
“‘Your body is fire emoji.’” Ray frowned. “A heart. A face with heart eyes. Heart on fire…”
Tia charged at us, her eyes blazing.
“She goes to Heritage, Ray! She sits one row down from me in History. He left that stupid comment about Poppy-Chan, and then he went and slobbered all over her, and the saddest thing is, she doesn’t even fucking know he exists.
He’s probably falling all over himself in her DMs, and she is leaving him on read.
He’s pathetic. This whole thing is pathetic.
He spouts stupid bullshit, he ignores my texts, and now he’s embarrassed me in front of the whole fucking school.
He embarrassed himself! Everybody saw it.
People are making jokes about me. Someone slapped together a meme.
Emelline is a princess, Phillip is a chihuahua with a hard-on, and I’m a troll chasing after both of them. ”
Ouch. That was so brutal. And immature as hell for high school. That was the kind of shit that you would expect from middle school kids.
Ray blinked.
“Yes, I broke up with him!” Tia threw her hands in the air. “Happy now? Is that what you wanted to know?”
“Like I said, I already knew you broke up with him. I figured that out. Emelline posted this pic on Friday. It took you till next morning to see the fallout. On Saturday Phillip locked himself in his room. When the housekeeper came to get him for dinner, he screamed at her to leave him alone and slammed the door in her face. Phillip is a gift. Anyway, the housekeeper didn’t hear any raised voices, which tells me that you dumped him by text and refused to take his calls. ”
Tia stared at me.
“Phillip is reading alpha male books, which tell him that alpha males don’t get dumped.
He must’ve spent the whole night blowing up your phone and worn you down.
You agreed to meet him, because both of you left your houses a little before noon on Sunday.
I know that Phillip drove west on I-10. His phone died en route, probably because he spent the whole night texting and didn’t charge it. ”
She didn’t interrupt.
“You already broke up with him, so you should be cooling off, but you’re still breathing fire.
He did something when you met. Probably something violent and stupid.
You came home. He didn’t. His car was found on a small rural road north of the highway.
It’s Monday morning now, you didn’t go to school today, and nobody has seen Phillip. ”
“Tia, what did you do?” Ray asked.
She raised her hand, and he shut up.
“Poor Phillip,” she ground out. “His family must’ve pulled all the strings, because they’ve got a Prime looking for him. Because he is such a good kid from a respected family.”
She must’ve looked me up at some point.
“Actually, I don’t care too much about Phillip,” I told her. “It’s my job to find him. I care about what happens to you and your family when his family finds out. House warfare is an ugly thing.”
“His family isn’t a House.”
“His aunt married into House Seaton. They’re large, wealthy, and powerful. If I don’t find Phillip soon, they will drag the cops into it, or, worse, they will accuse you directly of hurting him.”
“Because I’m a Madero. Because we solve all of our problems with our fists.”
“Yes.”
She glared at me.
“Tia, when my evil grandmother needed someone to kidnap my older sister, she went to your House. There is a reason for that. Your House built their reputation punch by punch. When your father finds out that you’re being accused of kidnapping or murder, he will explode like a nuclear warhead.
He will attack House Seaton and start a feud. ”
And it would be a really bad feud.
“Look, I’m not trying to lecture you. I’m just telling you like it is: this will blow up and get really nasty.
Phillip has already done enough damage. Why let him ruin your family’s life?
He isn’t worth it. Besides, I don’t believe for a second that you want something truly bad to happen to him. He is a shithead, but you are not.”
Her face frosted over.
Shit. I fucked up. I’d had her for a little while, and now I lost her.