The hard question finds the soft places beneath my armor. I tighten my grip on the steering wheel until my knuckles ache, the leather groaning in protest, and keep my eyes fixed on the road ahead. The city slides past in shades of shadow and neon, beautiful and indifferent, a tapestry of lives being lived by people who have never had to choose between bad options and worse ones.
"I don't own her." The words feel important, even as they scrape against the inside of my mouth like a lie I'm trying to believe. "I'm giving her a choice."
Luca's laugh is short and sharp, cutting through the quiet hum of the engine. There's no cruelty in it, just the weary amusement of a man who has watched me make bad decisions before and survived to tell the tale. The sound bounces off the windows and settles into my bones, unwelcome but impossible to ignore.
"Some choice. She gets to pick between two evils." He shakes his head slowly, the movement catching the flash of passing headlights and casting strange shadows across his features. "You or Victor. That's not freedom, brother. That's just a different cage with nicer furniture."
I don't have an answer for that. The truth of it sits heavy in my chest, a stone I can't seem to swallow or spit out. It mingles with the weight of the wish in my pocket and the memory of Katriana's eyes going wide when I touched her bruised cheek. The electricity that arced between us when my thumb brushed her skin, gentle as a whisper, and she flinched like I'd struck her.
She looked at me like I might be salvation or damnation, and she couldn't tell which.
Maybe she was right to be uncertain.
Maybe I can't tell either. But I do know I need to make another correction. I take a left and point the car back in the direction of Redthorne Holdings.
“Did I change your mind?”
I stay quiet and ignore Luca’s question. The car eats up the distance between Tsarina and Redthorne Holdings, and I findmyself slowing as we approach the familiar glass and steel facade. The building rises into the night sky like a monument to everything the Syndicate has built, everything we've fought and bled and killed to protect. The windows gleam with reflected starlight, dark mirrors that reveal nothing of the power that pulses behind them.
I pull up to the entrance and put the car in park, the engine idling while I stare at the doors I've walked through a thousand times. The doorman stands at attention inside, his silhouette visible through the glass, ready to welcome me home to the empire I've spent my life building.
But home feels like the wrong word tonight. Home implies warmth, belonging, the presence of someone waiting on the other side of the door. What waits for me in my penthouse is silence and expensive furniture and the echo of my own footsteps on marble floors.
Luca doesn't move. He knows me too well for that.
"Get out," I say finally, and my voice sounds strange to my own ears. Rougher than usual. Stripped of the careful control I've spent decades perfecting.
He studies my face for a long moment, reading something in my expression that I'm not sure I want him to see. The dashboard lights cast his features in shades of blue and amber, making him look like a portrait painted in shadow and flame. Then he gathers his phone and reaches for the door handle, pausing with his fingers wrapped around the chrome.
"Have fun fucking up your peace," he says.The words carry the weight of genuine affection beneath the mockery — a blessingdisguised as a warning, the way brothers who have bled together learn to say I love you without ever speaking the words.
The car door opens with a soft click, letting in a rush of cold October air that smells like rain and exhaust and the particular metallic tang of the city. Luca steps out, his movements fluid and unhurried, and pauses to look back at me through the open door.
"She's not going to fall into your arms, brother. You’ll have to work for it." His voice is softer now, stripped of mockery. "Women like her don't break easy. That's probably why you want her so badly. Keep in mind Jonah tried and she’ll make you pay for his sins."
He closes the door before I can respond, and I watch him disappear through the glass doors of Redthorne Holdings, his silhouette swallowed by the warm light of the lobby. The doorman greets him with a nod, and then they're both gone, and I'm alone in the car with the engine humming and the wish burning against my heart.
I pull away from the curb and point the car toward Katriana’s place.
The drive gives me too much time to think.
The neighborhoods transform as I travel, the sleek glass towers giving way to brick buildings with their fire escapes clinging to facades like metal vines. The streets narrow, the streetlights grow dimmer, and the air through my vents carries different scents now. Cooking oil from late-night restaurants. Cigarette smoke drifting from open windows. The musty sweetness of old buildings holding their breath against the weight of years.
I imagine the moment she opens the door and sees me standing there.
In my mind, the fear in her eyes transforms into something softer when she realizes I've come to save her. Her shoulders drop from their defensive position near her ears, and her hands stop trembling, and she looks at me with gratitude so pure it makes my chest ache. She falls into my arms the way women do in the movies Persia watches on Saturday nights, grateful and relieved and trembling with the knowledge that someone finally came for her.
She smells like vanilla and cotton and the particular sweetness of surrender. She looks up at me with those brown eyes behind those cute glasses, and she says thank you in a voice that is sweet only for me. She lets me carry her weight for once, lets me be the strength she's been searching for, lets me prove that not all Moses men are like my worthless brother.
In my imagination, this is easy.
The fantasy warms something in my chest that has been cold for so long I'd forgotten it could feel anything else. I let myself linger in it for a few blocks, savoring the sweetness of a scenario where I'm the hero instead of just another powerful man taking what he wants.
But I've been in this business long enough to know that nothing worth having ever comes easy. Luca was not wrong.
Years of experience tells me that Katriana Bellrose, with her quiet defiance and her battered pride and her refusal to crumble even when a monster had his hands around her throat, is not the kind of woman who falls into anyone's arms without a fight.
The memory of her face surfaces unbidden. The way she stepped sideways to break my hold on her arms, her chin lifting even as her voice trembled. The steadiness in her gaze when shetold me the bruises were from an encounter, nothing more, her words saying one thing while her eyes screamed something else entirely.
