Dominic tilts his head slightly, the way a man does when something confirms a suspicion he already had. He picks up his wine glass, turns the stem once between his fingers.
"I want my brother back." His voice is flat and even. "Can you give me that?"
I take a deep breath.
"No?" He sets the glass down. "Then let's talk about what you can give me."
My father's expression doesn't change. "We can make this worth your while. Enough to start over somewhere. Anywhere in the world." He names a number.
It's significant. The kind that has ended other conversations, dissolved other problems, made other men suddenly reconsider what they actually wanted out of a situation. I've watched it work before, that number, the way it lands in a room and changes the atmospheric pressure.
Dominic laughs.
It's a genuine laugh, unhurried and almost warm, like my father has said something that delights him. He leans back in his chair and looks at the ceiling for a moment before his pale eyes come back down to us.
"You think I'm here for a payday."
"Everyone has a price."
"Not me." The warmth drains out of his voice and what replaces it is something emptier and colder than silence. "Not for this."
I lean forward. "Then what do you want?"
He looks at me. He's looked at me before, at the office, in passing, with that practiced efficiency. This is different. This is the look of a man who has spent time studying you.
"I want you to suffer," he says. "The way my brother suffered."
The dining room is very quiet. Somewhere beyond the closed door, the restaurant continues its business, the low music and the murmur of other people's evenings, completely indifferent to the three of us.
"Your brother was going to rape her." The words come out of me flat and absolute. I know what I saw. I know what she looked like when I walked through that door and found Marcus with his hands on her. "He was going to kill her."
"My brother was family." It's the first crack in his composure, the first place where the polished surface splits and something raw shows through underneath. His jaw tightens. His hands press flat against the linen. The pale eyes go hot for a single moment before he controls it. "And you beat him to death."
Nobody speaks.
The candles on the table burn without flickering. A glass of wine sits untouched near my father's elbow, its surface perfectly still. Dominic looks at me across the white tablecloth and I lookback at him and we both know exactly what this meeting is and what it isn't. It was never a negotiation.
Dominic stands. He buttons his jacket with those precise movements and takes one last slow look around the room, cataloguing it, and then turns toward the door.
"I'm not going to the police." He says it without looking back at us. "That would be too easy. Too quick."
My father's voice is even. "Then what?"
Dominic pauses. His hand isn't on the door yet. He turns, and the candlelight catches the small scar above his left eyebrow, and his pale eyes move between my father and me.
"I'm going to take everything from you. Piece by piece." A pause. "Your business. Your reputation. Your family." His eyes settle on me and stay there. "And when you've watched all of it burn, when there's nothing left worth protecting, then we'll have a real conversation about what you owe me."
I'm out of my chair before I decide to move.
My hands find the front of his jacket and pull, hard. The wine glasses go over. Something shatters against the floor. I don't register any of it. All I can see is Jade. Jade, who learned to trust me when trust didn't come easily to her. Jade, who let her guard down because I promised her she was safe.
My father's hands close around my arms. His grip is harder than it should be and he pulls me back one step at a time.
"Phoenix." His voice is low and sharp at my ear. "Stop."
I stop.
Dominic hasn't moved. He's standing exactly where he was, jacket slightly displaced now, and he's looking at me with the first real expression he's worn all evening. Not anger. Not fear. Something that looks disturbingly like satisfaction, like a man who just confirmed a hypothesis.
