3. Joey
JOEY
The Avarice was sixty-two stories of black glass, and it swallowed the morning sun without giving any of it back.
I'd lived twenty minutes from the Strip my whole adult life and never once come to it on purpose.
Danny had orbited this world — security work, he'd said, contract stuff, Josie, boring — and after him it was a skyline I kept in my rearview on principle.
This was the first time I ever set foot in the tower.
I rode up its private elevator in my funeral dress, because it was the only thing I owned that didn't have glitter on it, with Ronan standing beside me like a load-bearing wall.
Sixty floors of my ears popping. Cameras in every corner, smoked-glass domes like drops of oil.
"Who watches those?" I asked.
"I do."
I filed that.
The war room — an actual plaque by the actual door said EXECUTIVE CONFERENCE, but nobody in it was conferring; they were arrayed — took up a corner of the sixtieth floor, all mountain light and a table long enough to seat my whole class.
Four people stood when I came in. I did what I do with a new room: I read the seating before anybody spoke.
Nobody occupied the head chair. That was the first interesting thing.
The man it clearly belonged to leaned against the window instead — bronze hair, midnight-blue suit, and a signet ring that was too big for the finger it lived on, heavy, gold gone soft at the crest with wearing, his father's, I'd learn, and he turned it a quarter-turn on his knuckle when he was thinking.
When he smiled at me a single dimple appeared, aimed like a flashlight.
"Miss Ward. Cash Vane. You have my whole family's attention, which I promise has never once been good news. "
"Cassius." The man at the table's midpoint didn't look up from squaring a folder.
Black hair, pale grey eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses, cufflinks catching the light.
Lucian, then — the letter had his signature block in it, CFO, a name like a scalpel.
Beside him a woman with red lipstick and gold at her ears watched me the way you'd watch a promising chess opening, and a small auburn-haired one with freckles and quick hands was already pouring me coffee I hadn't asked for and setting it at the chair with the best sightline to the door.
Dealer's hands. She caught me noticing and something friendly happened around her eyes.
Wren, that one said when she gave it. Gia, said the lipstick.
Ronan took the wall by the door and became furniture. Armed furniture.
"You read our letter," Lucian said.
"I read four lines of your letter."
"Then I'll be linear." He opened the folder.
"Years before he died, Augustus Vane executed a codicil to his will.
Sealed. At the reading, his sons learned only this: ten percent of the House of Vane had been left to a beneficiary whose name lived with the executor and nowhere else.
Thirty percent to each of us. Ten to a stranger.
" A pause, surgical. "The stranger was your brother. "
The coffee went very still in my hands. "Danny died six years ago."
"The codicil is seventeen years old. It contains a survivorship clause. Daniel Ward's interest passes to his sole heir." The pale eyes lifted. "You, Miss Ward, own ten percent of everything you're sitting in."
There are sentences you hear from very far away. I heard that one from the far end of a long hallway, standing perfectly still, and what came out of my mouth, from closer, was: "Why?"
Cash pushed off the window. The charm didn't drop so much as set, like concrete.
"Because of a parking garage." He slid a single page down the table — heavy paper, handwriting like barbed wire, a dead man's hand.
"The codicil came with two letters. One told the executor his business.
This one was addressed to us. We got to read it five weeks ago. You should read it now."
To my sons, who will be angry —
In 2009 two men put me on the concrete of a garage off Fremont with a pipe and a knife and a number I owed the wrong people.
A kid parked one level down heard it. Eighteen years old.
He did not know me. Everyone in this town knew me, which is why everyone in this town would have kept walking.
The kid came off that level like the cavalry, took the knife across the palm, dragged me to his truck, and ran two lights to Sunrise Hospital.
He gave the intake nurse a false name for himself because he thought his mother would worry.
I offered him money. He refused it, which was the last time anyone in Nevada refused me anything. So: ten points to Daniel Ward, who is owed. A man pays his markers. You'll mind your manners about it.
— A.V.
The room let me read it twice. Somewhere in the second reading my thumb had found the edge of the page and I was holding it the way Harper holds my hand at dismissal.
Danny had been eighteen. Two years before he enlisted. He'd come home that spring with his hand bandaged — bike chain, Josie — and eaten dinner and teased me about a spelling bee.
"He never told us," I said. "Anyone. Ever."
"Neither did our father," Cash said. "It was apparently a family talent."
"The letters." I looked up. "Ames and Cordell sent me one last week. Why now? Your father died a year ago. Danny's been gone far longer. Why did one page take this long to find my porch?"
"Sealed codicil, sealed military records, and probate that moved like probate.
" Lucian's voice stayed level, but something in it was bothering him, a note off in his own arithmetic; he adjusted one cufflink a quarter turn.
"Eleven months for the executor to find your name.
Six more weeks for one page to cross twenty minutes of desert to your porch.
Slower than it had any honest reason to be. That, too, is on my list."
Gia spoke for the first time, velvet over something harder. "Show her the rest. She should see the shape of it before the vultures do."
The folder turned toward me. A single page, columns and one circled number.
Forty million dollars.
"An offer for your ten percent," Lucian said.
"It reached the executor nine days after your name did.
The buyer is a Delaware entity called Corsair Holdings, which is a coat over a coat over a man named Enzo Castellano.
He operates the Fortuna casino, this family has spent months dismantling him, and your shares are the last piece on the board that can stop us. "
"That's a lot of money for ten percent of a casino."
Wren spoke from my elbow, dry as the desert outside. "It's a garage-sale price. Ten percent of this house is worth more than that before you count the license. He's hoping you don't know how to count."
"He's pricing the crown's veto like a nuisance," Gia said, and her consonants had knives in them. "It's almost insulting on your behalf."
"Veto." I set down the letter. "Explain that part. Slowly. Pretend I teach kindergarten."
The dimple made a brief return. Lucian ignored it.
"My father's operating agreement requires ninety-five percent approval for any major act — expansion, sale, senior debt, license transfer.
A dead man's leash on his own sons. My brothers and I hold ninety.
" He let the arithmetic sit. "Ninety is two short of ninety-five, Miss Ward.
Nothing moves in this empire unless your ten percent moves with it.
There is a vote coming — an acquisition on the north Strip, a dead property called the Calypso that we intend to raise from its grave two blocks from the Fortuna's front door.
It ends him. He knows it ends him. Which is why he needs your shares, or your signature, or?—"
He stopped. Precise men stop precisely.
"Or me gone," I finished. "Hence my brother's truck being upside down in a tow yard."
Nobody dressed it up for me. I gave them that. Cash looked at the table; Gia looked at me with something that was almost approval; Wren's hands had gone still, which I already understood meant she was doing math.
The quiet stretched, and I sat in the middle of it — a kindergarten teacher holding a dead king's IOU, in a black tower, with a number circled in front of her that could buy the whole school district — and I felt the week assemble itself at last into one clean shape: the letter, the SUV, the flatbed. Not chaos. Sequence.
They were all watching me and being careful, so careful, the way people had been careful with me since the folded flag, and I was suddenly, completely done with it.
"Okay," I said, in my calm voice, the one that means the room is about to change.
"Here's what's going to happen. I'm not signing anything.
Not his forty million, not your protection papers, not a coat check ticket — nothing — until somebody in this building explains everything to me.
All of it. Starting with the part everyone keeps stepping around like a wet floor sign.
" I looked at each of them in turn and ended where I'd known I would end, on the man against the wall, who had gone stiller than any of them.
"How did my brother actually die?"
You could hear the tower hum.
Cash turned his ring, the crest catching light as it went.
Lucian took off his glasses, which I'd later learn was as loud as he got.
Ronan looked at me from the wall the way men look at incoming weather, and Gia and Wren exchanged a glance over my head — quick, bright, deciding something between them the way the two Mias decide things, and whatever they decided, it was unanimous.
"That story isn't ours," Cash said quietly. There was no charm left anywhere in him. "It never was."
"Whose is it?"
Silence, with a wall standing in it.
"Then I'll wait," I said, and picked my coffee back up, and made the wall watch me be patient.
Lucian slid his glasses back on. "Miss Ward," he said, with what I would eventually recognize as the closest thing he had to warmth, "until that vote is cast, you are the most dangerous woman in Nevada."
Great, I thought, teacher-calm, chin level, heart going like a recess bell. Somebody should probably protect me, then.
The wall by the door moved at last.