Her hands curl against her sleeves.
“He’s my half-brother.”
Half-brother.I stare at her blankly, waiting for the correction. Waiting for her to say she misspoke. Waiting for the part where this makes sense.
“Same father,” she says quietly. “Different mother.”
The air feels like it was sucked out of the room. My mind tries to reorganize everything I know about her. About him. And about the last few months.
“You’re telling me,” I say slowly, because if I rush it, I might miss something, “that the man who just walked out that door…”
My voice trails off, and she answers with a single nod. The room goes quiet, but it doesn’t feel calm. I try to line the pieces up in my head. Her, him, the last few months, the way she defended him, and none of it fits where it used to.
My best friend. The man who orchestrated this. Herbrother.
The connections rearrange themselves whether I want them to or not, and I realize with a slow, sick certainty that nothing in this room feels familiar anymore.
4
KIREN
The cold in Charlotte has a way of seeping into everything. It gets under the collar, finds the seams of the coat, and slides along the back of your neck as if it has every right.
A thin layer of snow clings to the edges of the long driveway inside the gates, pushed into ridges by passing vehicles. The security lights throw hard white cones across it, making the surface glitter and look clean. Nothing about tonight is clean.
I cross the courtyard without rushing. Two guards on the far side pull open the door to the security wing on the lower level of the estate before I reach it. The warm air that leaks out smells damp concrete and the faint bite of bleach. I step inside, and the door closes behind me with a heavy thud.
The hallway down here is narrow, built for utility rather than comfort. The overhead lights hum softly, and my footsteps disappear into the flooring designed to absorb sound. It keeps conversations private and death quiet.
Karp stands near the stairwell junction, his broad shoulders filling the space effortlessly. He doesn’t straighten when hesees me. He doesn’t need to. His respect is constant, not performative.
“He’s ready,” Karp reports, his voice low and even.
“Is he alone?”
“One guard outside the door. No one else.”
I give a short nod and continue down the corridor. Karp falls in beside me, his heavy boots muted against the flooring.
“Arkady?” I prompt.
“Quiet,” he replies. “His captains are moving. Avoiding their usual routes.”
Of course he is. We have eyes on everything we can. That’s the problem. Eyes won’t rescue her.
Rowan’s face forces its way into my thoughts. I don’t know where she is, but my mind supplies it. Her dark hair against bloodstained concrete, a bruise forming along her cheekbone, her hands bound behind her back. I don’t know if any of it’s true, but that doesn’t stop the picture from building. Worse than the image is the certainty that she’s surrounded by men who treat people like property.
I keep my face still. If my rage gets loose, it’ll burn down the wrong house.
We pass through two doors and enter a corridor lined with reinforced panels. The security here comes in layers. A keypad first, then a reinforced lock, then a manual bolt driven deep into the steel frame. The overhead camera records but doesn’t transmit. What happens in this hallway stays here until I decide otherwise.
At the end, a final door stands closed. A single guard is posted at it. He straightens when he sees me, then steps aside and pulls it open.
The room is bare except for a steel chair bolted into the floor and a drain cut into the concrete. The walls are painted a dull gray. There’s no window, and the light overhead leaves nowhere to look but forward.
A man sits in the chair with his wrists cuffed to the arms. His face is bruised along one cheek, purple and yellow layered together. A split lip has dried dark. He holds himself upright anyway, his chin lifted in stubborn defiance.
He isn’t one of Arkady’s outsiders. He’s one of mine. That’s what makes this fracture inside my own house dangerous.
