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“She gave me hell the whole way to the floor,” I say. “Mouth going the entire time, telling me exactly how unimpressed she was, and her body already three steps ahead of her, leaning in, picking up my rhythm before she’d agreed to any of it.”

“That’s a dance.”

“That wasn’t a dance.” The park slides by, black against black. “I had her against me with my hand spread on her stomach, and she was working herself on my thigh in front of a hundred people, still arguing, still acting like she had the upper hand. I thought about bending her over right there. Genuinely weighed it.”

“In the middle of Lux.”

“In the middle of Lux. That’s what she did to me.” I let the corner of my mouth go. “I was a gentleman enough to make it until the bathroom. And, oh my God, she was so fucking feisty. She’s seriously one of the top three fucks I’ve had, if not even the best one. Wait, scratch that. Definitely the best one.”

“Wow.”

“Wow, indeed, my friend,” I grin, then frown. “She’d buried someone today.”

“And you, naturally, made it about her getting through the night.”

“It was the right thing to do,” I assure him and sigh. “I think I’m in love.”

“You’re in love every week.”

“And what a way to live!”

Evander drives us into the underground garage a few minutes shy of two. The elevator lifts me through its own hush, the city shrinking under my shoes until it’s only a field of light. I’m working my collar loose when the doors part on my floor, and they’re there.

Four of my men in my own entryway at two in the morning. Stavros in front with his hands hanging at his sides, the first wrong thing, because Stavros thinks with his hands and they aren’t moving. The others have found places to put their eyes that aren’t me. Behind me, Evander comes off the service stair and stops in the doorway.

No one speaks. They’re waiting for me to ask, but I won’t, because the question is the last second before the answer, and I’d hold that second past the heat death of the sun if money could buy the holding.

“Speak,” I tell Stavros.

“Kyrie.” The word for sir cracks in his mouth. He clears his throat. “It’s Nikos.”

I don’t move. My legs are steady, my hands are still, nothing in me has tipped. I keep it that way on purpose. Whatever is coming, I won’t meet it swaying.

“He was on the yacht with your parents, off Cape Sounion. They went out yesterday at first light.” He stops, starts over, the sentence refusing to be smaller. “There was an attack on the water tonight. The boat burned to the line and below it.”

“Who?”

“Unknown. The coast guard came after it. There was nothing left to pull out of the water that the water hadn’t already taken. There were no survivors, Kyrie. Your mother. Your father. The crew. Nikos.”

I hear every word. They don’t mean anything yet. My son is sixteen. Four days ago he sent me a photo of the harbor at dawn, no caption, because he knew I hated silence more than the picture. I wrote back two words telling him it was too early. He sent another line, something about the old fishermen already out with their nets, asking if I didn’t want to see the city before it woke up and started pretending. I didn’t answer. I was in a meeting about money I couldn’t trace. The last thing I ever said to my son was a complaint about the hour.

“There’s more,” Stavros says, and the cold in the room finds a deeper gear. “In the wreckage. Burned into the deck plate where the steel held and the fire couldn’t reach, they found the mark.”

He doesn’t name it. He doesn’t have to. Only one mark does this to a room. The wolf-crown. The same brand left over the bodies of the heirs, over Declan’s cousin’s boy, the whole campaign painted onto my money and my network and my name, dragging me into the middle of a war I never started, so the Crown would crack along my line and call the crack mine. They’ve been killing the members of the five houses and signing my name to the bodies. Tonight they signed it to mine.

I stand very still.

I’m aware of the men watching, of Evander not drawing breath behind my shoulder, of the city laid out under the glass like an estate I hold the deed to, the lit bridges, the dark stretch of harbor beyond, the same dark water an ocean east of here that has my son in it now, all of him, the boy who floated on his back at six and the boy who reminded me weekly he’d outgrown me by an inch. I don’t reach for the glass to brace myself. I won’t lay a hand on anything in front of these men. The grief is already seated in me, cold, running all the way down, and there’s no floor under it. It keeps dropping, but I keep standing. Two true things at the same time, and I let them both stand, and I make no sound the room could carry back.

Time passes that I don’t measure. No one fills the silence. They’ve worked for me long enough to understand that the cruelest thing they could offer me right now is a word, so they offer none, and somewhere too far down to reach I’m grateful.

He kept a fallen bird’s nest in a shoebox at eight because he couldn’t put it back and couldn’t leave it. He fed half his dinners to a gull at Sounion, his grandfather swore was the same gull for ten summers. He left glasses of water on every surface in this house and never once carried one to the kitchen. I told him a hundred times. I’d hand back everything I own to find one more of them at dawn, somewhere idiotic, the stairs, the hall, anywhere, his.

I can’t bring him up out of the water. I can’t reverse the fire and set my son on dry stone with his grandfather’s terrible jokes still ringing in his ears. Death is the one system I never bought my way into, the one room that won’t go quiet when I tell it to, and it took the single thing all of this was ever built to hand down. So I take the only thing it’s left me. The men who did it. The men who paid the men. The men who knew and said nothing. And I do to them what I can’t undo for him.

To get there, I follow the money. The mark means OB6, the same patient hand that’s been inside my house for years, and money is the one thing that hand can’t move without leaving a trail. It pays its soldiers. It moves what it steals. Somewhere in all of it is a number that doesn’t sit right. Kalliopi was getting to the center of it when they put her in the ground, and they put her there because she nearly had them identified.

“Evander.”