“Bottom left of the nightstand.” My voice is steady—the feral in retreat, the rational back in command, the operational mind reengaging. “The invitations.”
He frowns but doesn’t question. Crosses the bedroom to the nightstand—navigating the bodies on the floor with the particular, unhurried care of a man who has learned to move through violent aftermath without disturbing evidence—and pulls open the bottom drawer.
Two red envelopes. Mine and hers. The invitations that someone sent thirty-plus armed operatives to retrieve, whichtells me everything I need to know about their value and nothing I need to know about who wants them.
Lucien takes them. Holds them up.
“You’re going to trust me to keep these safe?”
I shrug. The gesture is compromised by the woman unconscious in my arms and the kitten still perched on my head, but the communicative intent survives the physical limitations.
“Not really.” I adjust Victoria’s weight against my chest—her head settling into the hollow of my neck, her damp blue hair pressing against my throat, the particular arrangement of her body against mine that my arms have memorized through repetition. “But I trust you and your copy more than I do that douche with the shitty aim.”
Dominic, from the doorway: “Fuck off.”
“I will,” I say, and I’m already moving—rising from the floor with Victoria cradled against my chest and Ruby balanced on my skull, the combined weight of the two creatures I’m responsible for distributed across my frame with the particular load-bearing arrangement that my body defaults to when it’s carrying everything that matters. “But let’s go before they send a third round.”
Lucien glances around the destroyed bedroom—the bodies, the blood, the overturned furniture, the shattered remnants of a life that was modest to begin with and has been reduced to debris.
“Is there anything else of value?”
Value.
The valuables are in the stowaway. The ballet shoes, the documents, the photograph she doesn’t look at.
Everything else was just furniture in a cage.
“No.” I adjust my grip on Victoria. Feel her heartbeat against my chest—steady now, slowing toward rest, the rhythm of a bodythat has decided to trust the arms holding it enough to stop fighting. “So lead the way.”
CHAPTER 16
The Lore Of The Sinclair Heir
~DOMINIC~
“So you don’t think having an underground lair decorated in the finest silks and designer isn’t a mindfuck?”
All eyes are on Hawk.
He stands near the center of the twins’ subterranean workspace with his arms crossed over his chest and a cigarette between his lips, the filter clamped in the corner of his mouth with the particular dental precision of a man who has been smoking long enough that his jaw has developed a dedicated grip for the activity. His amber-gold eyes move across the room with the unhurried assessment of someone cataloging an environment that doesn’t match his expectations and is recalibrating accordingly.
I can’t blame him.
The underground lair—andlairis the only word that accurately describes what the twins have constructed beneath the residential unit Violet allocated to us upon arrival—is not what anyone would expect to find beneath a Savage Knot dormitory. The space is large—significantly larger than the structure above it, extending into the building’s foundation and beyond through what appears to be a pre-existing excavationthat the twins discovered and converted with the particular efficiency of men whose primary skill set involves transforming available resources into operational advantages.
The walls are draped in silk.
Actual silk. Bolts of it, hung from ceiling-mounted rods that the twins installed with the meticulous attention to fabric display that most people reserve for art galleries. The colors are curated—deep jewel tones that absorb the warm, amber lighting from recessed fixtures and convert the underground space from a concrete cavity into something that resembles a designer’s atelier crossed with a Renaissance workshop. Emerald green drapes the eastern wall. A rich burgundy occupies the western. Between them, swathes of midnight blue and antique gold and the particular shade of charcoal that Cassian favors for its versatility as a base for disguise work.
Mannequins stand at intervals along the perimeter—headless, armless torsos dressed in various stages of construction: half-finished jackets with pins protruding from their seams, trousers in fitting stages, a waistcoat that appears to be made entirely of something iridescent that changes color depending on the viewing angle. A cutting table occupies the room’s center—a massive, flat surface covered in pattern paper and fabric samples and the particular detritus of active garment construction: shears, chalk, measuring tape, spools of thread in colors that span the visible spectrum.
On the far side of the room, separated from the atelier by a heavy curtain that Cassian has partially drawn, sits the other half of their operation—the laboratory. Medical equipment. Chemical analysis stations. The precision instruments of a workspace that deals in substances rather than textiles, the clinical hardware of a man whose skill set apparently extends well beyond the disguise artistry that their dossier advertised.
Between the two halves, positioned against the silk-draped wall beneath the soft amber lighting, is the bed.
And on the bed is Victoria.
Hawk takes a long, unhurried inhale of his cigarette, the ember brightening in the underground lighting, and blows the smoke from the side of his mouth with the practiced redirection of a man who is aware of the unconscious woman fifteen feet away and is managing his exhalations accordingly.
