Free Drowning in Fire by Hanna Martine Page A

handle it myself. Kelse is working late anyway.”
    Griffin understood. Back when his main job had been the safety of Gwen Carroway, the woman everyone had thought would be the next Ofarian leader, her protection had been his life. He’d hated handing over the responsibility to anyone else.
    “I’ll be just a couple hours. Want me to bring out leftovers?”
    “Hell, yeah.” David patted his gut as he ambled over to the bus stop bench across from the Aames’s apartment. Perfect sight lines in all directions.
    Griffin shouldn’t need all this protection in his own city, his own childhood neighborhood where he was about to have Sunday dinner with his family, but after the assassination attempt by Wes Pritchart five years ago, and the detractors that had since grown more vocal once his “relationship” with a Chimeran had come to light, they couldn’t be too careful.
    Griffin jogged to his family’s building and inserted his key, the same one he used to wear around his neck when he was young and his parents had been away on duty. Inside, the same stairs still creaked. The same carpet still welcomed him into his parents’ place, only now it was flattened and darker with permanent stains.
    “Hey, Pop.”
    Griffin’s father sat wide-legged on one of the couches making an L around the TV. He looked up from the baseball documentary whose volume was cranked all the way up to compensate for the driving beat of the music pumping from his sisters’ room.
    “Griffin,” Pop said with a nod toward the TV. “You’d like this. All about the Yankees.”
    Griffin grimaced and chuckled. He loved baseball, hated the Yankees.
    Pop lifted a beer bottle to his smiling lips. “I think your mother could use some help.”
    Nothing like a visit home to remind you that you aren’t leader of the Ofarians in every way.
    “Sure,” Griffin said, sliding around the pinch of furniture cramped into the tiny living room. How his parents had raised nine kids in here, he’d never know. But they’d stuck to their “Keep Ofarians Strong By Population” creed and had never once complained.
    Until Griffin had helped overthrow the old Board. Until he’d been given command. Until his father had to take a position in a Primary security firm to pay the bills. After that, the issue of struggling Ofarian classes and touchy Primary integration sat right in the middle of the dining room table along with the mashed potatoes and pork roast. Pop thought that being born into and serving in the Ofarian soldier class was the greatest honor ever, and its reduction in numbers was a slap in the face. He never missed an opportunity to tell Griffin as much.
    But then, Pop had never been an assassin.
    Despite Griffin’s difference of opinion, they were still his parents.
    Griffin leaned into the kitchen, where his mom was spooning green beans into a big bowl. “Hey,” he said, smiling. “Need help?”
    She looked up, her cheeks pink from the warm kitchen and hard work. She had the exact opposite coloring of Griffin and his father—her blond hair just starting to gray at age 52, her pale skin barely showing her distinguished wrinkles. “Hi, baby.”
    The endearment never failed to make him happy, even though she was only seventeen years older than he was.
    She added, “Could you go tell Henry and your sisters that dinner is in fifteen?”
    Down the short hallway, Griffin rapped on the door to his sixteen and seventeen year-old sisters’ room, which positively vibrated with the music’s bass. When no one answered, he cracked the door open. Meg, the older one, was teaching the younger, Eve, some sort of dance routine.
    “Fifteen minutes,” he shouted. “And turn that down. I could hear it on the street.” They stopped moving, and Meg gave him a classic eye roll. He pointed a finger, grinning. “I could give you nelicoda for that.”
    As he suspected, the threat of dosing her with the chemical that neutralized water magic did nothing, just made her