Page 129 of Arrow

“Arrow Romanov,” she said, voice flat.“Is it true what they say, or do you hire publicists with a death wish?”

I held my smile long enough to communicate. “I see you, and I see what you’re doing to me, and I’m fucking into it.”

“You’ll have to be more specific. I’ve heard a lot.”

Frank tensed, chin ticking sideways, as if ready to body-check me through the floor if I so much as breathed the wrong way.

I respected it.

He was a dinosaur, but also the last honest man in the city, if you defined honest as “loyal to your own extinction.”

Harlowe finished her drink, and I wanted to strip her down to her layers and see how far the refusal went.

“Our fathers may have organized this bullshit reconciliation because they have no spines, but I will never forget what you did to my brother,” she said, her mouth half-curled in a smile that made a god out of contempt.

Palming the delicate stemware, she rolled it between her fingers, then snapped the glass in two.

The crowd around us shuddered—not at the violence, but at the economy of it—and Frank produced a napkin before the first drop of blood had a chance to hit the polished floor.

She flicked a bead of blood from her thumb onto the napkin, held my gaze, then set the ruined glass on a server’s tray.

“So, Romanov, why don’t you explain why we’re supposed to stand here and play nice instead of finishing this the old-fashioned way?”

I liked her. I liked her too much, and every neuron left in my skull knew it.

“You know as well as I do, Harlowe,” I said, “that your father overplayed his hand. He lost the luxury of body counts.”

She rolled her eyes, smearing the blood absently on her pale wrist.

“Don’t talk about my father’s hands, or I’ll break yours in front of God and every coked-up debutante in this room. You want a reconciliation or a war? You have to fucking pick, Romanov.”

Frank watched us with the dead-calm he’d perfected over three decades of blood work. I waited for the threat, for the Virelli signature move—blood, then retreat. But Harlowe only stared back. Unflinching. Unblinking.

The party hummed around us, oblivious to the little earthquake happening on the carpet. All I could hear was the sound of her breathing and the sound of my own pulse trying to break through my ribs.

She was going to ruin me. I knew it, Frank knew it, and I didn’t give a fuck.

“You’re bleeding,” I said.

The blood on her wrist gleamed as she tilted it toward me. “Not as much as your fucking degenerate family made my brother bleed. You remember, I’m sure?”

God, this girl had teeth.

I wanted to fuck her right here, against the pillar, in view of every goddamn camera in Manhattan. Instead, I reached for her bleeding wrist, pinching the thin bones of it, and pressed my thumb to the open cut.

The pressure made her eyes flare, not with pain, but with a craving so dry and violent I could have wrung it out and set it on fire.

She leaned in until her ear was a breath from my mouth and whispered, “Know this, Romanov. The day will come when I will kill you.”

The words stayed in the air between us. She was close enough that the brush of her hair left a static charge around my jaw.

Goddamn, she had a way of making death sound like an invitation home.

“Careful, Virelli,” I said, so close our cheeks almost touched. “You come for me, you better bring two coffins.”

Her laugh—fuck, that sound—shuddered the space between us. She didn’t step back. Neither did I. We hung in the angry hush of an inch between us.

Frank was watching with a resigned holiness, as if he’d seen a thousand young lovers trade threats at a thousand wakes and weddings, yet somehow he knew that neither of us would be able to keep from touching the trigger first.