“Introductions,” Rook says.
At that, every one of them looks at me. The air shifts, and I feel it down my spine.
Introductions—not interrogation. Not test, or their leverage. Introduction.
Like I’m being presented. Like this is the part where they stop hiding what they are.
Saint gives me a soft little smile. It doesn’t belong on his face, which is probably why it hits. “Stay close,” he says quietly.
“Don’t touch anything sharp unless you’re told to,” Vale adds, amused.
“You can touch me,” Vale adds with a wink.
“Mateo.” Rook’s tone is a warning with teeth.
Vale just grins. Wraith opens the door, not for Rook—forme.
The morning air is cold and damp and tastes faintly like salt and petrol. London always tastes a little like machinery when it’s wet. The car waiting in the drive is black and expensive and forgettable in the way only the most expensive cars manage to be. Rook takes front passenger. Wraith drives. Vale and Saint take the back. I move to slide in between them out of pure habit, but Rook stops me with two fingers around my wrist.
“No,” he says.
I blink. “No?”
“You ride with me today,” he says simply.
I don’t argue. Not because I accept it, but because I know he’ll win if I try and I don’t feel like losing right now.
So I sit back passenger, with him. His knee brushes mine when I settle. He doesn’t move it away. Wraith pulls out of the drive so smooth I barely feel it. We fall into motion.
“Where are we going first?” Vale asks, stretching like a cat with a knife in its paw.
“The foundation of our house,” Rook says.
I glance at him, confusion furrowing my brow. “I don’t understand.”
“One of the biggest fronts of our incomes,” he says. “Today… We show youeverything.”
We cut through the city, past money and stone and polite decay, until we’re past what London shows tourists and into the London that feeds on itself. Warehouses. Alleys. Boarded windows with lights on behind them. The sky is pale and low, like it’s sitting on the rooftops.
We stop in Shoreditch. From the outside it just looks like a club. Like every other over-priced, over-sexed, under-lit London vice pit curated for people who tell themselves they’re dangerous because they drink whiskey neat.
But even from the car, I can feel it. This place doesn’t pretend.
The building is old brick, blacked windows, steel door with a scan pad. There’s already bass bleeding through the walls, even this early; not music yet, just system checks. The air smells like last night — sweat, alcohol, perfume, sex — and something iron beneath all of it, like old blood and coins.
“This is ours,” Rook says.
It’s not a boast. It’s a statement of fact.
Wraith kills the engine. Vale’s grin sharpens.
Saint leans in close enough to speak just for me. “Stay on Caelum’s left when we’re inside. Don’t drift.”
“Why?”
“Because left means protected,” he says. “Right means visible.”
My heart does a low, stupid little kick. I nod.
