Chapter 41 Lance #2
At first, what she said doesn’t register, the words echo like they’re muddled and underwater.
But then the pieces slot together, and recognition crashes over me. “Brutus Myrddin is your fucking brother?”
She smiles.
“Brutus Troy is my brother. Myrddin is a ridiculous alter ego he insisted on using because he thought it made him sound like a wizard.” She pinches the bridge of her nose. “He’s always had a flair for the dramatic. Reminds me a lot of Alex in that way.”
The room is spinning. Or maybe that’s just me.
“I let him have it.” She shrugs. “Small joys, really, in the grand scheme of things.”
The world tilts on its axis.
All this time. All these years.
Brutus, the Lye, Freddy, everything that happened to my family, everything that happened to Genevieve—it all traces back to her.
“So what, you want revenge?” Genevieve cuts in again.
“I’m tired of your voice.” Cassandra waves a hand and before I can blink the men with her have Genevieve and her father in their arms, guns to their heads.
My entire world narrows, panic clawing at my lungs, my chest, my heart.
“Revenge is for people who’ve already lost. But I haven’t lost anything,” she says. “I’ve been building. Positioning.”
“For my entire life?” I ask.
“Remember what I told you about chess, Lance. The queen doesn’t announce herself. She moves quietly, positions her pieces, and by the time anyone realizes what’s happening…checkmate.”
“I’m not one of your pieces.”
“Oh, child,” she says. “You’ve been one of my pieces since you were born.”
“So all this has been you…” I swallow back the nausea. “And I fucked it up, didn’t I? When I killed Freddy.”
Cassandra’s expression flickers for the first time.
“Frederick was supposed to handle the Rosebrook operation with more care than he did. His death was a consequence of his own incompetence, and the mess he created was unfortunate.”
I shake my head, pressing my palms to my eyes. “Wait. What?”
“Here’s what I’m offering you, Lance. Come with me. Choose to be my weapon.”
“You’re joking.”
“I never joke about business. You and I both know empires aren’t built on nobility. They’re built on leverage and power. On people willing to do what needs to be done.”
“And you think that’s me.”
“I know that’s you,” she corrects. “I made you, remember? You were always mine, Lance. From the moment I took you to your first Jeet Kune Do class. The moment you sat down in my room and asked how to play chess. I knew you’d be the one.
Not Paxton, he’s too rigid, and not Alex, he’s too soft.
Not even Tyler, though he tries so hard to belong.
But you… You’re the spare. The one nobody was watching.
The one I could shape. Come work with me directly.
No more middlemen, no more cages, no more rigged fights for petty criminals with gambling addictions.
I need someone I trust, someone I trained, someone who understands how the game is played at the highest level. ”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“I’m offering you a seat at the table instead of a chain beneath it.”
“And Genevieve? Her father?”
Cassandra’s gaze slides to Genevieve, who’s glaring at her with a stiff upper lip and fear shining in her eyes.
“They go free,” Cassandra says. “Leo’s cooperation with the FBI becomes irrelevant if the evidence never materializes. The footage stays where it is. The case dies. And your chef gets to go back to whatever life she’s built and forget any of this ever happened.”
“I won’t forget,” Genevieve says.
“Then you’ll learn to live with it. People do.”
I look at Genevieve. She’s staring at me, and shaking her head back and forth like she knows.
She can see it forming on my face before I’ve even decided, because she reads me the way I read rooms, and right now, every exit is closed and there are four guns in this brownstone and the only person with any leverage is standing in front of me offering a deal.
“Don’t,” Genevieve says. “Don’t you dare.”
“Half-Pint.”
“I said don’t.” Her voice cracks, and she takes a step forward, but Cassandra tsks, and one of the men shifts to block her path.
“If I go with you,” I say to Cassandra, “they walk. Tonight. No one follows them. No one contacts them. Leo’s FBI deal goes quiet and nobody touches his daughter again.”
“You have my word.”
“Your word doesn’t mean shit.”
“My word is the only currency that’s kept my family’s operation running ever since my parents passed years ago. I don’t break deals, Lance. You know that. If I did, no one would work with me.”
She’s right. And I hate that she’s right, because it means the logic holds, and the logic holding is the only thing that lets me do what I’m about to do.
“Lance,” Genevieve says. “Look at me.”
I do. Green eyes bright with tears she’s refusing to let fall, her jaw set, her fists clenched. She’s shaking.
The queen is the most powerful piece on the board.
She is. She always has been. But the queen can’t strike if the knight doesn’t hold the line.
“It’s going to be okay,” I tell her, and it’s the biggest lie I’ve ever spoken.
“You can’t do this.” Her eyes spill over, tears tracking down her cheeks. “We have a plan. She’s fucked if we follow through, you can’t just—”
“Genevieve.”
“No.”
“Please.”
The word breaks something between us. I’ve never said “please” to her. Not once. Not when I asked her to stay. Not when I asked her to trust me. I just did those things, and she followed, and we figured it out together.
But I’m not asking her to follow me this time. I’m asking her to let me go.
“You promised,” she whispers. “Not just tonight. You said that. You said this isn’t just tonight.”
My chest cracks down the center.
“We’re eternal, Half-Pint. Seven seconds for your seven minutes, remember?”
One of the men pulls Genevieve back, and she fights him, her arm straining against his grip, and the sound she makes is something between a scream and a sob that I’ll hear every night for the rest of my life, however long that turns out to be.
I step toward Cassandra.
“When do we leave?”
“Now.”
I nod. I don’t look back at Genevieve, because if I do, I won’t be able to walk through that door.
I’ll do something stupid and brave, and they’ll shoot Leo in his own kitchen and Genevieve will watch her father die over coq au vin, and I won’t let that happen.
I won’t let this be the thing that kills them.
The knight sacrifices himself. That’s what the knight does. It’s what I’ve always done, and maybe Cassandra was right about one thing: She did build me for this.
She just didn’t expect me to use it against her.
Because as I walk through Leo DeGrance’s front door and into the cold Boston night with four armed men at my back and the sound of Genevieve screaming my name echoing off the brownstone walls, I’m thinking about chess.
The knight doesn’t move in a straight line. He moves in ways no one expects. And while Cassandra thinks she’s won the board, she’s forgotten the most important thing she ever taught me.
The queen strikes last.
And she isn’t my queen.