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My footsteps echo.

Then another set echoes beside them.

I turn.

No one.

Still, I know I am accompanied.

The tunnel bends, and memory waits for me there.

Benji.

Ten years old, thin knees, crooked grin, dirt on his cheek. My cousin crouches in the branches of an apple tree, tossing fruit down while I stand as the lookout below. We run through fields with dogs at our heels. We bloody each other’s noses and swear brotherhood over an iron chalice. We speak of kingdoms we mean to inherit.

We are boys who think loyalty is simple.

The tunnel shifts.

We are older now. Tall, broad-shouldered, expensive, and dangerous in the careless way only rich young men can be. Tailored coats. Liquor on our breath. Girls watching us from doorways. Men eager to impress us. We walk into the House of Night as though the world belongs to us.

Smoke coils through candlelight. Masks gleam from the walls. Music pounds through old wood floors. Power lives in that house like a god beneath the stairs.

We kneel.

We rise changed.

Then I see her.

Amber.

She stands at the top of a staircase in a pale dress, one hand resting on the banister, gold hair spilling over bare shoulders. I remember the exact violence of wanting her. How the room narrowed until only she remained.

I loved her immediately.

I loved her badly.

I loved her enough to mistake beauty for goodness, for loyalty, forever.

The tunnel carries me forward to the chapel. A ring. Her hand in mine. Then another room, another bed, another vow whispered skin to skin. Marriage under law. Marriage under older eyes. I gave her both versions of myself and thought it devotion.

A child cries–the sound tears through me with startling force.

Remington.

I am younger again, holding him in the crook of one arm while he howls at the indignity of being born. Red-faced. Perfect. My son.

I laugh in the memory. I had forgotten that sound from myself. Pride filled me so completely that I thought nothing dark could ever enter my house again.

Underfoot, the stone becomes steel. Scaffolding climbs into the sky. Men shout over engines and drills. Blueprints cover tables. My name is etched into glass and marble.

Maddox Hotel–my legacy. I built it floor by floor, suite by suite, monument by monument. Proof that a man could turn hunger into an empire, until Amber smiles across a breakfast table and tells me she is pregnant again.

Joy rises.

Then numbers begin to gnaw. Dates. Distances. Absences. Benji refusing to meet my eyes. Amber meeting them too steadily. The tunnel narrows until the walls scrape my shoulders.

The King falls first. Clive Kayes collapses backward with astonishment still on his face, blood pooling on the floor. Benji stands above him with a knife and shaking hands. I feel that grief again—hotter than rage, sharper than steel.