The ride to my father’s estate is fast and reckless, the kind that only happens in the dead hours of the night. The roads are empty, the city asleep, and Jaxon and I take advantage of both. We don’t bother with speed limits. We never do.
Rules are for people without protection.
The police wouldn’t touch us anyway. Not once they realise who we are. My father made sure of that long ago.
The estate rises out of the dark like a mausoleum, vast, isolated, unforgiving. We cut the engines and step inside, the air immediately colder, heavier. The house is mostly dark, stripped of warmth, looking even lonelier at night.
We don’t ask where he is.
We already know.
We head straight for his office and walk in without knocking.
My father stands behind his desk, shoulders rigid, fury radiating off him in waves. The room looks like a storm passed through it, papersscattered, ashtray overflowing, half-empty bottles littering the surface where order usually reigns. He’s been pacing. Spiralling.
Good.
He looks up, eyes blazing. “Where the fuck were you tonight?” The words spit out like poison.
Jaxon answers first, unfazed. “Buried deep in pussy at home,” he says with a lazy smirk. “Did you want pictures?”
My father doesn’t rise to it. He never does.
His attention shifts to me, cold, calculating, furious. The kind of look that dissects instead of explodes.
“At home,” I say evenly. “All night. Until this asshole decided to crash my evening.” I gesture vaguely toward the chaos around us. “Care to explain what this is about?”
His chest rises and falls too quickly. He’s breathing hard. Close to panic.
The sight of it is deeply satisfying.
For a moment, no one speaks. The silence stretches, thick and volatile, the kind that precedes something breaking. My father’s gaze sharpens, searching for weakness, for cracks he can exploit.
He won’t find them tonight.
Not here.
Not with what I now have to lose.
And as he stands there in the wreckage of his own control, I realise something with quiet certainty:
Whatever is in that file has already done its job.
It’s shaken him.
And for the first time in a very long time, my father isn’t the most dangerous man in the room.
He finally speaks.
“Someone broke into my safety box tonight,” he says, voice low and measured as he pours himself another drink. Ice clinks against glass. He lights a cigarette with shaking fingers, inhales too deeply. “They took documents that were never meant to leave that vault.”
Jaxon arches a brow. “And you thought that was us?”
I don’t say anything. I just watch my father unravel in real time, the cracks spider-webbing through the mask he wears so carefully.
He doesn’t answer Jaxon.
His gaze locks onto mine instead.
