Murmurs of agreement. Eyes on me. Always on me.
I lean back in my chair, fingers steepled. “And if they’re baiting us?”
Kellin snorts. “Then we bite. Hard enough to rip off a limb.”
He’s young. That’s the problem with young men—they think power is loud.
“No.” I let the word hang. Silence falls. “We don’t move. Not yet.”
“But they?—”
“I said not yet.” My voice cuts the air like obsidian. Kellin pales. Good. “Rovek’s desperate. That makes him stupid. Let him make another mistake. Then we kill two snakes with one knife.”
There’s a beat of quiet. Then Mariq nods. “Patience, then.”
I nod. “Always.”
They file out, reassured. Or cowed. Either is useful. Alone again, I press a panel in the wall. A hidden terminal emerges. I key in a code, encrypted on sixteen layers of Reaper math. The screen flares to life.
Surveillance feeds. Building schematics. Names. Schedules. My revenge won’t come through the committee.
I already know who’s getting their throat cut first.
There’s a moment that happens when I’m alone, when the buzz of the city dies behind thick vaultglass and security barriers, and I let myself feel it.
The hunger.
Not the kind that comes with survival, with empire, with need. That one I know how to feed. I own a thousand ways to kill a man and ten thousand ways to make him beg. I’ve made this city kneel to me with a smile on its face.
No, this is different.
This is the hunger that burns behind my sternum, slow and molten. The kind that sings in my bones when she walks into a room with that pinched expression and that goddamn walk—back straight, chin high, like her spine’s made of starsteel. Aria Dawson.
I strip off my shirt and stand beneath the pulse-shower. The water hits hot, nearly scalding, beading on black skin that’s grown too familiar with violence. My bone spurs glint wetly under the red halolights. Steam curls up around me, thick as the thoughts I can’t drown.
The others think I’m celibate. Hell, maybe I am.
I don’t keep concubines, don’t let the dancers touch me. Not like they want to. Not like they whisper. They don’t understand. They think it’s control. Discipline.
They don’t know it’s about something deeper. Older.
Reaper instinct doesn’t crave distraction. It doesn’t want a woman who simpers or poses or whimpers under your gaze. It wants a partner in blood and flame. A mate. One who looks you in the eye and threatens your life with her tongue.
And Aria… she’d spit in my face before she kissed me. That’s what makes me ache for her.
After the shower, I walk barefoot across the heated stone floor of my private chambers, towel slung around my hips, thelights dimmed low. The glass wall to the city hums faintly, filtering the neon chaos into something almost soft. Goldwin glows like sin dressed in silk.
I pour myself another glass of venomwine, sip slow, the taste a sharp burn on my tongue. My mind goes back to her—again—like it always does now. I can see her on the stand, jaw tight, the way she didn’t flinch when the case fell apart. That spark in her eyes when she cornered me in the stairwell. That fire. That fuckingfire.
I’ve ruined prettier women.
But none of them had teeth.
And none of them looked at me like they wanted to conquer me as much as cage me.
I sink into the wide chair near the hearth, legs stretched out, one hand resting along the rim of my glass. The embers in the wall-furnace flicker and spit. It smells like cherry ash and old wood—a fake scent, artificially programmed. Still. Better than blood.
In the silence, I think about what it would mean to let her in.
