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I study him a long moment. He stood behind me once and meant every bit of it. I gave him chance after chance to turn back from this road, and each time he chose the folder, the detective, the door leading out.

“I don’t silence men for disagreeing with me,” I say. “You may hate the way I run this family until your very last breath. What you may never do is hand it to our enemies.”

My father and I agreed on almost nothing. We agreed on the family. A man can grumble under my roof as much as he likes. He simply cannot open the door and let the wolves inside.

I draw my gun, and at last the fear breaks across his face. He forces it back down with the final scrap of his pride.

“You will rot in hell for this,” he says.

I press the cold barrel to his forehead. “That very well may be true.”

I pull the trigger before he can find another word. It is quick and clean. He earned that much from me, the old bastard.

Outside, the morning light feels obscene after the blood in that room. “Clean it,” I tell Yuri, and he moves at once.

His phone rings before I reach the car. He listens, then holds it out toward me. “They found her.”

Everything slides back beneath my hand where it belongs. Nobody walks out of this city without my say. Delaney only thinks she wrote the ending this morning. A wrong digit dropped her into my path, and I intend to be the one who decides the hour she leaves it, if she ever does at all.

Sablo House is dim and half-asleep in the daylight, and I’m crossing the floor with the bar manager trailing me like a servant when a soft body slams backward into mine.

My arm goes around her waist on instinct, my hand spanning the full soft curve of it, and I tighten my grip before she can drop. My other hand finds the wrist still fisted in her collar and twists until something in it gives, and the man behind her reels away with a thin cry. Minutes ago, she watched me cross the floor, flushed pink to her ears. Now she is white-faced and trembling, her clothes wrenched crooked, the neck of her shirt dragged half off one shoulder.

The honest reason I keep this place is a dull one. A lounge like Sablo sets its own prices, invents its own costs, and answers to no fixed market anywhere. It is a laundry paradise, a clean and sensible holding on paper. That the girl who fucked me and ran pours drinks in one of my own rooms was, I told myself, a convenience and nothing more.

My thumb brushes her wrist, and the joint is swollen under it. She flinches away from the touch. Whatever cheap satisfaction I braced for from catching her curdles into something I have no name for, a low, ugly, protective heat that is not triumph in the slightest.

I turn to the sweating little man cradling a wrist bent the wrong way, the one who put his hands on her. His mouth is already open to curse, and it shuts the instant he sees my face. Smart of him. His broken wrist is the least of what I will do if he says one more word.

He goes gray. “Sir, I didn’t know you were still on the floor.”

“I might ask what you were just doing,” I say.

“She refused a direct order. I was only escorting her out to let her cool down.”

I glance at Delaney, stunned and silent at my side, and the heat in me climbs higher. “You call dragging a struggling woman across a room letting her cool down.”

“I followed company policy. This is called management.”

“He was staring down her shirt and grabbing at her collar like a pervert,” a young woman with sharp eyes cuts in. “That is not management. That is a creep with wandering hands, and he did it loud enough for the whole row of us to hear.”

The man rounds on her. “You keep your mouth shut.”

“I will not,” she says. “You dump the impossible jobs on Delaney because you know she cannot afford to walk away. You go deaf whenever Dana talks and deaf again when it suits you. Every one of us has watched it happen.”

Around the room, heads drop and eyes slide sideways. Nobody argues her down. That guilty silence is its own confession.

“Perhaps my handling was somewhat inappropriate, sir,” he allows at last. “But this is an internal company matter. It is above your understanding, sir.”

“An internal matter,” I repeat.

He mistakes my patience for weakness and draws himself up. “How we handle our own staff is the company’s decision to make. You are a valued guest, of course. But this remains ours to settle.”

The bar director comes hurrying up, wringing his soft hands. “Sir, please, what is happening over here?”

I don’t look at him. “Tell them who owns this place.”

He swallows hard. “This is Mr. Volkov. He has owned Sablo House from the very beginning. He owns all of us.”