Chapter 20 #3
Gael’s eyes remained on the branch, but his awareness sharpened, tuning back into the room.
Landen leaned forward, his elbows on the table, a sly, knowing grin spreading across his face. The candlelight caught the mischief in his eyes. “Thinking about that doe-eyed associate of yours?”
Gael’s focus snapped back into the room with the violence of a slammed door.
His head turned, his gaze landing on Landen.
Landen had seen Samuel once, weeks ago during a fleeting, five-minute visit to drop off some Club papers.
Samuel had been a blur of polite, skittish anxiety and startling, ethereal beauty.
Landen, with his predator’s eye for compelling subjects, hadn’t stopped needling him about it since.
He understood the fascination intellectually.
Samuel was beautiful, in a way that was almost painful.
Soft where they were all honed to a hard edge, gentle where their world valued sharpness, carrying a latent submissiveness of a rare, deep, and instinctual kind.
It was a jewel any of them would be drawn to examine.
But Landen’s tone did not feel like intellectual appreciation. It felt like a violation.
A jolt of pure, irrational ire, hot and sharp, shot through Gael’s veins.
“He’s not a topic for discussion.”
His voice was flat, utterly devoid of the dry humor or sharp wit that usually characterized their exchanges.
The faint clink of Adrian’s fork against his plate ceased. The air seemed to solidify.
Jaden, who had been eating, slowly lifted his head. A single eyebrow arched towards his hairline. He said nothing, but the word hung in the air between them as if he’d shouted it: Interesting.
Sebastian watched from the end of the table, his expression unreadable, his dark eyes missing nothing. Adrian’s gaze darted from Gael’s stony face to Landen’s startled one, his negotiator’s mind visibly calculating the sudden shift in power dynamics.
Something in Gael’s expression, the utter stillness, the warning glint in his eyes that promised consequences far beyond a war of words, made Landen lean back in his chair.
He raised his hands, palms out, in a gesture of surrender, though his trademark grin was now tight, not quite reaching his eyes.
“Jesus, touchy,” Landen said. “Message received. Crystal clear. He’s off-limits. Topic closed.”
The conversation lurched awkwardly back to the club board’s upcoming party, Adrian seizing on the topic with relieved vigor. But the atmosphere was permanently altered. The easy camaraderie was strained. An unspoken question now hovered over the table, thick and uncomfortable:
Who, exactly, is Samuel Ruiz?
The dinner concluded quieter than usual. The bill appeared, and the heavy velvet curtain to the private room was drawn back, releasing them into the muted bustle of the restaurant’s main hall.
They moved as a loose unit towards the exit, the weight of the unspoken pressing between them.
Outside, the night air was cool, carrying the distant scent of the river.
To their left, the main entrance of The Crimson Knot glowed with its signature, muted crimson light, a siren’s call to the night’s possibilities.
Landen, ever the one to try and paper over a crack with sheer force of jolly, clapped a hand on Gael’s shoulder. The gesture was meant as a peace offering, but it landed with the subtlety of a gavel.
“Come on,” he said, his voice deliberately bright, nodding towards the glowing entrance. “Let’s go to the Club. That little twink you liked last time is surely waiting eagerly for your return. What was his name? Leo? Cameron? Lithe thing, could tie a knot with his tongue, if I recall.”
The description was meant to entice, to pull Gael back into the familiar, to remind him of the uncomplicated transactions that were their usual currency. It suddenly felt crude. Hollow.
Gael was already shrugging into his coat, the fine wool falling into place with a whisper. He didn’t look at the crimson light. “Not tonight,” he said, his voice flat.
The looks exchanged between Jaden, Adrian, and Sebastian were more telling than any comment.
His refusal was a deviation from protocol.
In their world, the club after dinner was as much a part of the ritual as the whiskey before it.
To abstain, especially after such a charged moment, was unheard of.
Terse goodbyes were exchanged; a nod, a grunt, a murmured “Later.” Before they started toward the club. Gael turned the other way, towards the shadowed parking lot, alone.
He climbed into the car but didn’t start the engine. He sat, his hands resting on the cool steering wheel, his gaze fixed on the empty brick wall of the building opposite, seeing nothing.
The scene in the restaurant replayed behind his eyes vividly.
He dissected it, the way he would a flawed legal argument.
The stimulus: Landen’s comment. Harmless.
Typical of their years of barbed, intimate banter.
Landen, for all his wolfish charm, was a friend.
There was no real threat in his words, no actual challenge to any claim Gael had.
Samuel was a stranger. An intriguing one, but not someone Landen would usually go for.
So why the surge? Why the visceral, knee-jerk reaction that felt less like banter and more like… marking territory?
It was stupid. It was undisciplined. It was a loss of control, a reveal of a hand he hadn’t even fully acknowledged to himself, and he had laid it bare.
He shook his head, a sharp, frustrated motion.
It was a fluke. An anomaly. A moment of fatigue.
Satisfied with the diagnosis, he turned the key. The engine purred to life, a smooth, powerful sound that severed the silence. He pushed the thoughts away. He locked them in a mental drawer and resolved not to open it again.
He pulled out of the parking lot, the city lights streaking past the windows. But as he drove into the night, the echo of his own thoughts trailed him, a stubborn, whispering ghost in the quiet cabin. A problem not solved, merely deferred, its shadow stretching long behind him on the empty road.