Page 4 of Merciless Vow
I snorted at that. Manners were one thing. Coming home was something that would never happen.
"He’s gone, Adolpha. They took him."
The beast in my belly stopped pacing. It went still. Lethal.
"The Blackwoods. They took Elias."
CHAPTER THREE
VIDAR
Iglanced at my watch. Swiss-made, impeccably engineered, and of no help at all when it came to punctuality. Time was the only set of numbers in this world I couldn’t make obey me.
Outside, the line for Fang Dynasty stretched half a block down the sidewalk. Men in five-thousand-dollar coats, women draped in enough diamonds to fund a small war, stood in the New York chill, waiting for the slim chance of a cancellation. You couldn't book a table for at least three months. Still, the humans hovered like moths near a flame, hoping for a taste of the fire.
I moved past them, the valet and the hostess barely catching my eye before they bowed their heads in silent recognition. As I walked through the main dining room, the air was thick with the scent of expensive charcoal and searing fat. I turned my nose up at the dishes passing by; prime cuts of meat that had been kissed by the fire just long enough to satisfy a human palate. The dinerswere moaning in pleasure, their eyes rolling back as they savored the char, oblivious to the fact that they were eating a sanitized version of the truth.
I pushed through the heavy cedar doors at the back, leaving the soft jazz and clinking crystal behind. Here, the atmosphere changed. The lighting was lower, the air cooler and heavy with the scent of iron. In the private alcoves, wolves in human skin sat stripped of their corporate masks, hunched over wooden boards piled with the finest cuts of raw, blue meat. They used forks; we were civilized beasts after all. Even with the low, guttural growls of satisfaction vibrating through the floorboards.
I felt a surge of cold pride. This was the engine of our empire. This was the truth beneath the silk.
A few she-wolves tracked my movement as I passed, their eyes glowing with interest they didn't bother to hide. I kept my gaze fixed forward. I didn't sleep with my own kind. A night spent with a she-wolf was a complication I didn’t have the bandwidth for after a day spent navigating the jagged architecture of impossible choices. For that reason, I preferred human women. The fragile, skin-and-bone distractions who didn't understand the darkness I carried.
I reached the service corridor that led to the sub-basement. Just outside the heavy, reinforced door to the Meat Locker, I caught a scent that was too young to be there.
"Aren't you supposed to be with your tutor?"
My youngest brother was hunched over, his ear pressed to the wood, peeking through the narrow gap in the doorframe. Ivar nearly jumped out of his skin, spinning around with his eyes wide. He looked like a puppy caught digging in the garden, but he quickly tried to square his shoulders like the Blackwood male he would grow to be.
"The man spent an hour fumbling through the Shell Method like it was rocket science. I had to show him how to set upthe integral myself just so we could move on to something that actually required a brain." Ivar jutted a thumb at the closed door. "I need to learn this stuff. I’m going to be part of the family business soon. I know how to throw a punch, but I don't know how to interrogate a rat."
I held back the twitch of a smile. Ivar was a brat, but he was a Blackwood brat, which meant he had the sense to despise mediocrity. The kid didn't realize that the only reason our family sat at the apex of the New York food chain was that Mei-Ling and Fenrir Blackwood hadn't raised a single idiot amongst their brood.
"You have an AP Calculus test on Tuesday. If you get a ninety-five or higher, I’ll take you with me on a logistics run next weekend." Real business. No interrogation rooms. We didn't typically get our claws dirty, but what was going on inside that back room was a special situation.
Ivar’s face fell. "A ninety-five? Come on, Vido. Negotiate. Eighty-five?"
"Ninety," I countered, my face expressionless.
Ivar stuck out his hand. "Deal."
I shook the kid's hand, knowing full well he'd likely score 100% on the test because he was a Blackwood, and we liked to show off.
"Now get out of here, Ivy," I commanded, giving his shoulder a firm squeeze that was half-affection, half-warning.
He scampered toward the back exit. I took a breath, letting the mask settle over my features. I stepped into the back room in a tailored charcoal suit that cost more than most people’s monthly rent, and I found my family already assembled as if it was Sunday dinner. Fenrir Blackwood sat at the head of the scarred oak table. My older brother Magnus stood, flanking his right side. The spot to my father's left, the place where I was supposed to stand as his second-born, was empty.
"You're late." That came from my younger brother Gunnar. It was accompanied by a wet thud as Gunnar's fist connected with the bloody pulp of what may have been a pretty face about an hour ago.
Gunnar’s fist connected with the man's face again as I shut the door behind me. The sound was wet and unpleasant. The young man's head snapped to the side, a spray of red dotting the concrete floor.
"Fucking hell, Gunnar, " I said mildly. "You’re going to lower his IQ. "
Gunnar grinned over his shoulder at me, knuckles slick with blood. "Too late for that. Kid thought he could siphon six figures through a rounding error and we wouldn’t notice. "
I adjusted my cuffs and took in the scene with professional detachment. Elias Vane—youngest son of an Irish wolf den that liked to pretend they weren’t slipping—had tried to get clever with our books. Not sloppy. Not obvious. Elegant, even. He’d used a 0.4 percent spoilage margin to build a ghost-bridge directly to his father's empty vaults. A long con routed through shell accounts and timing that suggested patience and real intelligence.
If he weren’t a Vane, I would’ve offered him a job. Instead, Gunnar was rearranging his face. My brother liked the physical side of interrogation, where I liked the more subtle, psychological side of getting information out of a person. Blood instilled fear outside of our family and made sure no one wanted to fuck with us. Brainpower is what made us rich and attracted corporate power to us.
