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I fold my napkin, set it beside my plate, and push back from the table. My movements are professional and clean. The exit of a woman who’s entirely in control of the situation.

He looks up from his plate. “You want dessert? I’ll put you on this table and eat your pussy until you stop being so fucking polite about everything.”

“It’s eight fifteen in the morning.”

“I don’t have a schedule for this.”

“Evidently.” I walk out.

“Change your mind,” he calls after me, “you know where I am.”

I keep walking, up the stairs, back to the room, and to the desk by the window. I open my laptop, pull out the drive, put my earbuds in, and sit with the monotone man, listening to his encryption tutorial.

I make myself focus, but it doesn’t work. The tutorial is talking, and I’m not hearing it because I’m thinking about what he said at the table, the specifics of it, the complete absence of shame in the delivery. I’m trying to decide if he’s actually like that or if the whole performance is designed to get under my skin. The problem is that I can’t tell. And the bigger problem is that either answer is doing exactly what he wants.

He’s nothing like what I expected. I built a picture from research, reputation, and second-hand accounts, but none of it prepared me for the man I met. I expected brutality without intelligence. Power without curiosity. A man who’d look through me and lose interest.

But he doesn’t.

He looks at me like I’m the most interesting problem he’s had in years. And I find him interesting in return, which is the part I need to be careful about. He killed my father. I’m here to take him apart from the inside. Whatever is happening to my body when he’s in the room is a complication I didn’t prepare for and one I cannot afford to let show.

I turn up the volume on the tutorial and force myself to get back to work.

6

Volkov

The summons comes while I’m still at the breakfast table.

Marka walks in and drops his phone in front of me without a word.

The message is from Lorenzo’s office. Short, polished, the kind of thing that sounds like an invitation but isn’t.

Emergency gathering. DeLuca estate. 2pm today. Your attendance is requested and expected. The matter of recent Crown instability requires collective address.

I put the phone down. It basically says to get there and explain Berezin, or they’ll explain it themselves. Same message, better suit.

I push back from the table and go upstairs. My fiancée is back in the room, already at her laptop. I open the door without knocking. She closes it. Fast, clean, has it shut before I’m two steps in. I’d be impressed if it wasn’t so fucking obvious. I’d be impressed if I hadn’t been expecting it. She’s been at that laptop every spare minute since she got here. Whatever she found in that apartment, she’s working it. Good. I want to know what it is and I’m not going to find out by asking.

“I have a meeting,” I say. “You stay here.”

She turns in the chair. “What kind of meeting?”

“The kind that’s none of your business yet.”

She holds my gaze for a second. “Will it affect the wedding tomorrow?”

“No,” I say. “It’s because of the wedding tomorrow.” I pull the door shut before she can ask anything else.

She’s Berezin’s daughter. I keep having to remind myself of that. She sits in my room, and I forget, for a few seconds at a time, what her father’s name connects to. Then it comes back. Berezin sourced the venue. Lavro bled out on that floor while I held pressure on a wound that wasn’t closing. I put a bullet in Berezin for that. And now I’m marrying his daughter because she might be the thread that leads me somewhere he couldn’t.

Downstairs, Marka has the car ready and a folder of everything we have on where each king currently stands. I read it in the car on the way to Manhattan. Santiago pushing at Declan’s western territory again, hot-headed as always, the kind of man who takes border disputes personally. Adrianos working something in his financial network he hasn’t shared with anyone, smooth about it, charming his way around questions when they come up. Declan has three pints in by noon most days lately, which either means nothing or means he’s dealing with something he’d rather not be sober for. Normal Crown bullshit. Everybody holding cards, nobody playing them.

“She’ll go through the east wing while you’re gone,” Marka says from the front seat.

“Let her.”

He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t have to.