“My father,” I answer. “Have fun with the cameras. Spencer needs to vanish until he’s out of our hair.”
Storm is already moving. He doesn’t ask why, doesn’t argue. His father appears in the hall like the house conjured him—coat already on, steel in his spine and something softer in his eyes. He and my father don’t mix; there’s a chemical symbol for it somewhere that ends in flame. And Storm’s mother is a knife who would rather cut a son than lose a war. We won’t give her any ammunition.
“East stairs,” I tell Spencer. “Maybe just take a walk? I’m sorry, Spencer.”
He nods once to me like thanks is a thing for later, squeezes his son’s shoulder, and is gone with a kind of economy of noise and movement that makes me like him even when I don’t want to.
Maverick leans in the kitchen entry, wiping his hands on a towel because he can’t stand still without doing something useful. “Do we have to be nice?” he asks, bright, feral.
“Be useful,” I say. “Nice is optional.”
The car takes forever to stop because he wants us to watch it arrive. He steps out the way men in photographs step—perfect coat, perfect line, perfect absence behind the eyes. He’s aged well. Of course he has. Viciousness preserves. The guard escorts him as if the man needed it. He doesn’t. He could find his way into a vault with his tongue out. But we don’t trust him, and our security team doesn’t give a fuck what his last name is.
He pauses on the threshold like he owns the air he’s about to inhale. He does that everywhere. It’s a trick. It still works on people who never saw him do it to a child.
But it doesn’t work here, and pretty soon it’ll never work again.
“Conrad,” he says, and allows himself the faintest exhale that could be a smile if you believed in miracles.
“That’s my name,” I answer, without yielding the step he expects. We do our old choreography—me just out of arm’s reach, him just out of range of the truth. “Still.”
“Don’t be facetious; it doesn’t suit.” He scans the room. The Tybee house is all clean lines and salt-burnished wood. It doesn’t look like us because we don’t belong to it; it belongs to a man who left before he died. My father notices the grid of painter’s tape Atticus and I have laid over the table, the lists, the red-dotted names. If he recognizes anything, he doesn’t let that show on his face.
“You seem to have turned a beach house into a bunker,” he says. “How…odd.”
“Functional,” I correct. “You remember function, right? Well, this serves two.”
He waves a hand—a little flick that saysstop being a child. “We have goals to meet,” he says, as if I’ve forgotten the quarterly, the contracts, the charity galas with crystal and wolves. “The Wynn’s expansion vote. The vendor shakeup. The off-books debt that we tolerate because the men who hold it prefer our table.”
“We’re on schedule,” Atticus says from the couch, not looking up. “Better than that actually. We’ve been working remotely.”
My father’s gaze slides to him like a knife adjusting in a sheath. “I suppose you’re the one who told my son he could lock me out of camera access.”
Atticus finally looks at him. “No,” he says. “I’m the one who did it without needing to tell anyone or ask anyone anything. Because unlike you, I know we’re equals.”
Something flickers at the corner of my father’s mouth—irritation or rage or both.
“You’re wasting time,” he says to me, bored now to hide the heat. “You’re wasting money. You have turned a personal mistake”—he glances without looking toward the hall where Phoenix sleeps, where she breathes—“into a public expenditure and an embarrassment. You are not a philanthropist. You are a steward.”
“Interesting,” I say, because it is. “You think a woman a mistake, and money is a moral. That tracks.”
He steps closer, not enough to threaten, enough to register. “You think love is relevant to a quarterly report? To a dynasty surviving? It isn’t. The Wynnfeedsobsession. It isn’t fed by it. While you’re playing house with your…friends—” He makes the word filth and dares me to flinch. “—your employees are hemorrhaging loyalty. Your floor managers are chewing on rumors like bones. You are not in the building where the money is made, and it’s causing people to question our power.”
“New record this week,” I say mildly. “Blackjack and baccarat both, even with high rollers spooked by Coast Guard helicopters two counties away. We cut three moles and two maintenance freezes. Atticus rewired the mezzanine feeds. Maverick shook hands with five different high rollers and had three favorsreturned. Storm has a list you’d frame of contracts signed and sealed. We’re fine. Butyou’re not. That’s what’s interesting to me, Father.”
He blinks. It’s quick, but it costs him. “Record?”
“Profits,” I clarify, like a teacher with a slow student. “As in, the numbers you pretend not to be above while you’re counting bread rolls at a donor dinner.”
A flush rises under his collar and vanishes so fast you’d think I imagined it. Blankness slides down his face like a shade. He does it like other men button jackets.
“Good,” he says, agreeable now as an undertaker. He straightens a cuff he already straightened. “Then there’s time for me to see the girl.”
The house goes quiet in a way that is not about sound. I set the coffee down so I don’t throw it.
“Phoenix isn’t a tour you can take or a doll you can play with,” I say. “Why do you want to see her?”
“She’s the reason you turned a hotel into a crusade,” he counters calmly. “The least you can do is let meevaluatethe variable that is causing all the problems.”
