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“That’s why I have to go.”

She didn’t look convinced. “I just don’t want them putting too much on you.”

Her sincerity was useful, but it was also pleasant in its own way. Samantha wanted to matter. She wanted to be needed. She wanted to believe I had already let her past the walls most people never touched. That hunger made her attentive. It made her careful. It made her dangerously willing to forgive the colder distances she had not yet begun to understand.

I caught her chin gently, tilting her face up to mine. “You being here helps more than you know.”

Her eyes searched mine, and for a moment the entire room, the whispers, the calculations, all of it fell away from her. There was only me.

“I’m glad,” she whispered.

I kissed her forehead, letting the gesture linger. She leaned into it. I had Samantha exactly where I needed her to be.

Some bonds were forged in fire.

Others in quiet manipulation.

Both had their uses.

Chapter 9

Richard

The next evening, I returned to the country club alone.

The private room was not the one used for family dinners or board celebrations. It was beneath the main level, past the restaurant, beyond a service corridor. A locked door opened into a room with dark wood walls, a long table, several chairs, and a black cloth hung behind the head of the room.

The symbol had been stitched into the cloth.

A faceless man with a ring of horns around his head. The design was simple. No eyes. No mouth. No features. The absence did what a face could not. It gave nothing away.

Several men were already inside.

Some wore animal masks. The masks were not costumes. They were formal objects, cleaned, polished, and crafted with respect for tradition. A stag stood near the sideboard. A wolf sat near the wall with his hands folded. A boar remained by the door. Their mouths were smooth. Their eye holes were empty.

John wore the goat mask.

The mask suited him. The horns curved back from the black face, and the carved mouth held a calm that did not belong to anything living. He stood beneath the symbol as if the room had been arranged around him.

Colin stood beside me near the back without a mask. He held a glass of whiskey and watched John with open irritation. Colin had never learned to hide resentment as well as he thought he had.

“John loves this shit,” Colin said under his breath.

“John enjoys being important.”

“He enjoys giving orders.” Colin looked at me. “Doesn’t it get on your nerves?”

“As long as it doesn’t interfere with me, I don’t give a fuck.”

Edward Allen waited until John turned away, then left his place near the table and crossed the room toward me. He was one of the older members of the Collective and had belonged to it longer than John, Colin, or I had. He carried that history with an irritating sense of authority. A glass rested in one hand as he moved between the masked men without taking his eyes off me. When he reached my side, he stopped close enough to keep our conversation private.

“Sorry about your parents.”

I looked at him. “Thank you.”

“Carbon monoxide, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”