Free Cassidy Jones and the Luminous (Cassidy Jones Adventures Book 4) by Elise Stokes

to race him to it. No one moved a muscle. We all knew Chazz would get it.
    “Hello!” Chazz’s head bobbed vigorously as he listened to the caller. He pulled the phone from his ear and ordered with an air of importance: “Cassidy, Serena wants your blood— now .”
    I cracked a smile over Serena’s protest of the usage of “now.” That had been Chazz’s touch.
    “Well, you heard him,” I said, rising to my feet. “I have to go now . Guess that means you’re doing the dishes, Nate.”
    He chucked a wadded napkin at me, which I let nail my face. It was the least I could do.
    “Want to come?” I invited Jared. “You might as well see what my housecleaning duties for Serena entail.”
     
    ~~~
     
    “Let me guess,” Jared said as we crossed the street to the Phillips’s. “You don’t vacuum or mop floors.”
    “Sometimes I do.” I waved at Cristiano. He smiled around the bottle of water he was chugging and waved back. “Wonder what’s made him so happy lately?” I mused in a lowered voice to Jared. “He never smiles.”
    “The construction worker?” Jared inquired. He discreetly studied Cristiano, who was assisting a coworker named Briggs in removing a beam from the van. After yesterday, Jared had caught on that nothing was as it seemed, even the Phillips’s remodeling.
     
    ~~~
     
    “Knock, knock,” I called from the front door threshold.
    “Come on up,” Gavin called from upstairs.
    Jared and I moved aside so Briggs and Cristiano could carry the beam inside the house. The four other workers must have been in the basement, shoveling dirt or something. Cristiano flashed us another smile as they walked by. If his breath hadn’t indicated differently, I would have suspected the bottle I’d seen him gulping from contained something other than water.
    “Are you in love, Cristiano?” This was the next logical explanation.
    Jared stifled a snicker.
    Briggs and Cristiano hooted, their feet crunching along the plastic that was protecting the hallway floor.
    “Only with himself!” Briggs ribbed.
    “I can’t believe you asked him that!” Jared whispered, grinning, as we jogged up the stairs.
    “Well, he looks like he’s in love.” I touched the stair rail and immediately pulled my hand back. There was a thick coating of dust on it, just like there was on every flat surface of the house, due to the construction. “I seriously don’t know how they live like this,” I remarked, wiping my filthy palm on my jeans.
    “About Cristiano,” Emery called from the spare room at the top of the stairs, having overheard my question. “You do know what killed the cat.”
    “Curiosity,” I answered. We stepped up to the landing. “Now it makes perfect sense why I’m curious.”
    We veered left into the spare room. Jared’s eyes roamed the thirteen-by-thirteen-square-foot space.
    “Welcome,” I said with flourish, shutting and locking the door, “—to the temporary laboratory of the world-famous geneticist, Professor Serena Phillips, and headquarters to the finest spy on Earth, Gavin Phillips.”
    “You’re making me blush,” Gavin teased from his desk. His eyes scanned the screen of his laptop. A live feed of the inside and the outside of the house streamed in each of the eight blocks on a large monitor mounted over the desk. Gavin had hidden the cameras so expertly that even I’d had a challenging time locating them.
    “I’m the consigned lab technician,” Emery said from behind the steel cart, where he’d prepared for the blood draw. He held up a syringe with a sinister smile. “And the spy’s zealous interrogation assistant, when persuasion is necessary.”
    Serena clucked her tongue with disapproval as she prepared a slide for her microscope.
    “Ha-ha.” I slid Jared a concerned look. “He’s kidding, you know.”
    “Oh, am I?” Emery wiggled his eyebrows.
    “Psychoactive drugs are rarely necessary,” Gavin chimed in. “My suspects usually break when Emery lectures them on