The bolt snapped clean out of the frame.
I didn’t tell him to slow down.
When Rome was calm, you could negotiate with him. When he moved like this, your window to redirect him had already passed.
Two guards flanked the door inside, suits, earpieces, good enough for any other dynasty prince.
Not for a Crow who’d just been told two heirs had laid hands on a dynasty daughter in his club.
Rome’s club.
“Out.” I took my eyes off my brother long enough to look at them.
They looked at me, then at the six-foot-something wall of tattooed rage pacing toward the lounge.
They cleared.
Good.
I followed him in.
The twins and Rome had been born into a very specific kind of pressure. Bastion packed it into muscle and guns. Luca buried it in systems and surveillance. Rome burned it through iron bars and ink.
The tattoos had started as armour, cover the skin graft scars on his legs, turn what our father had done to him into something he chose, and then they’d just… kept going.
Head shaved, skull and neck all tattooed. Arms. Hands, fingers, throat, chest. Until there was more ink than untouched skin.
He was as big as me now.
Most days it amused me.
Tonight it didn’t.
Two men were waiting in the lounge. Both heirs wearing expensive suits, drinking top-shelf whisky like they hadn’t just made themselves a problem.
Rome didn’t look at their faces first.
He looked at their hands.
His gaze dropped to the knuckles that had been on a girl they had no right to touch.
The smaller heir tried to swagger. There’s always one.
“You can’t just storm in here. We’re heirs to?—”
Rome’s fist hit him before the sentence finished.
A brutal punch that snapped the heir’s head sideways and sent him crashing over the back of the couch. Glass shattered on impact. A bottle rolled, spilling twenty-year-old whisky across the floor like it was nothing.
He pivoted to the second heir, grip already closing on the man’s collar, yanking him forward so hard his feet left the ground. The guy’s shoes scraped uselessly at the marble.
“You booked a fantasy room. You signed a contract. You read the rules.” Rome’s voice came out flat.
The heir’s hands clawed at Rome’s wrist.
He got nowhere.
“No unnegotiated touch. No ignoring safewords. No removing masks without consent. No filming. No closing doors on a woman in my building without her permission.”
