Page 133 of Arrow

“I can handle her.” I bit it off with enough steel that even the driver’s eyes flickered in the rearview.

My father’s smile bisected his face, ugly and calculating.

“The problem is not whether you can handle it. It is if you will choose to.” He leaned in, breath heavy with some Scandinavian anise liqueur, deadlier than any confession in that cramped backseat. “Indulgence is a luxury. Emotion, more expensive than bullets.”

I stared at my own hands, flexing the knuckles until bone flashed white, fighting the urge to cave his face in. They were made for this world, shaped by years of fencing with death, with rivals, with my genetic sabotage, but I never wanted to become his mold.

Not literally.

Not even close.

“I’ll do what’s necessary,” I said, and meant it.

He looked unconvinced.

Antoli Romanov said nothing else, but the message crawled through the air even after the car coasted to a stop outside a limestone walk-up near the park—uptown, where old money slept with a blade under the mattress and dreamt of rivers full of bodies that looked like their own.

My father exited first, no wasted motion, leaving the door wide for me to follow. He was already a full flight up before my feet hit the curb.

The city here was muffled—insulation packed into the bones, so you felt the violence rather than heard it. The foyer was dark, baroque, smothered in the kind of dust that you can never quite scrub away. As I climbed, the familiar thump of boots on wood replaced all the noise in my head.

On three, I paused at the landing. His voice was a thin sliver behind the frosted glass.

“Not a word—only listen,” he said as I entered.

Men in black circled a broad walnut table, faces lit by the unstable orbit of a single desk lamp. They kept their hands in view, but every eye in the room was a loaded gun.

My father didn’t sit, he paced, slow and precise, as if stalking each man in turn, checking for the slightest hairline fracture in someone’s composure. When he reached the head of the table, he unbuttoned his jacket, folding it before laying it across the chair. He walked behind the man who was speaking, paused, and bent to whisper.

“Tell me, Viktor, how many of your men are left, after the inspector found your stash in Brooklyn this week?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “You think it’s better to predict the storm, or to outlive it?”

Viktor wilted in his seat. The others took note, recalibrating the axis of the evening.

“We are all aware the old alliances are dead,” a third man said, hissing through broken teeth. “New paths must be carved. The girl opens too many doors.”

The girl.

They didn’t dare say the name—Virelli was poison, Romanov was sacred, but the combination, to these men, was radioactive. The way they said it made Harlowe sound like a codeword, a hidden weapon. Not a person. Never a person.

“She’s my concern.” I injected enough threat that they glanced at my father for permission before responding. I couldn’t let him know that she was important to me. If he thought she mattered, he’d find a way to take her from me. And there was no way in hell I’d let that happen now.

He watched me, fingers steepled. “Arrow’s right. We’re here to discuss a matter separate from the engagement. There’s been movement on the west side—old Albanian, and the last Gallo nephew. They’re consolidating. You’ll handle it. Clean.”

He turned, letting the word trickle down the table.

Clean.

Every man there understood that meant bodies left in places the city would not find for days. I saw the smile tease the corners of their mouths, a necrotic satisfaction. They loved the cleanliness. It was a proof of power—a promise no one could ever deliver other than by force.

My father laid out the plan as if it were already a part of history.

His mouth moved. The room was a casket of old men and old debts. I felt the sluggish, volcanic anger in my chest.

This was it. The inheritance. Not money or penthouses, not Manhattan, not even the legend. The inheritance was violence—pure, unfiltered, sacred violence, passed from father to son, or from uncle to nephew if the son wasn’t mean enough to last.

And for a minute, not quite a full breath, I wanted to torch the room, flip the table, scatter these brittle bones, and carve new law in the sinew of my name instead of theirs.

But I didn’t.