23. Twenty-Three
TWENTY-THREE
HARLOWE
At ten sharp, the evening’s official “toast” was called to order by the event MC—a senator’s grandson with the air of someone who’d never gotten his hands dirty. He tapped the mic, trembling, and scanned the room for Arrow’s permission before daring to speak.
“Friends, tonight we are witnessing history—two great houses, once at war, now joined. Please, raise your glasses to Arrow Romanov and Harlowe Virelli.”
He butchered my name.
Arrow lifted his glass precisely as the rest did, the gesture so practiced that he might have been raising a knife for the finished cut. His eyes met mine over the rim, holding, holding, then skimming over the assembly as if he could auction every soul in the room to the highest bidder.
Then I caught, out of the corner of my eye, a shadow at the balcony—someone not part of the standing ovation, not drinking, not even clapping. Just watching. Black Virelli suit, slicked-back hair, and that old familiar smile.
Frank.
My pulse didn’t skip. It detonated.
Arrow caught the shift in my focus, and when he followed my gaze, his jaw set so hard I heard a tooth creak.
“Frank’s alive?”
He nodded.
“You knew?”
Of course, he knew.
There are no secrets in the upper levels of the carnivore city, only deferred declarations of war.
“He has terrible timing.”
“What?”
“He wasn’t supposed to show for another half hour.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I bought him from your father.”
“Bought him?”
“His life. He’s working for me now.” Arrow’s eyes flickered with a hungry pride. “Consider it an engagement present.”
“Wh-why?” I couldn’t wrap my mind around what was happening.
“Frank has protected you your entire life. He was more of a father to you than Giovanni. I have full confidence he would give his life if that meant you were safe. Seemed like that’s exactly the type of man I want in my employ, protecting my wife when I’m not here.”
Wife.
That’s the first time Arrow called me “wife,” and fuck, something coiled hot between my thighs.
I tore my eyes from the balcony and looked up at Arrow, seeing him in a different light.
It was like catching your reflection in a stranger’s eyes.
An alien intimacy, a flash of possibility that knocked the air out of my lungs.
My body gravitated toward him until I was pressed against his side.
His hand, strong and warm around my waist, anchored me to the room. Arrow’s voice was soft enough that only I could hear it. “If you want to say hello, just ask.”
“Not yet.”
My eyes skittered to the balcony again—Frank’s smile was gone, replaced by a cool, blank, professional gaze I’d never seen him wear in my direction.
The senator’s grandson fumbled through the rest of the toast, now sweating through his tux, while all around us, the energy of the room changed. Eyes that had held only hunger or envy, moments ago now carried relief.
It gave me clarity—absurd but perfect in Arrow’s world.
As the speech wound down, Arrow leaned in so his stubble rasped my jaw, his lips skating a breath beneath my ear. “Go to him now, if you want.”
The words were so unexpected, I jerked, and a raw flicker of gratitude radiated out from my throat before I pressed it back down into the marrow, where no one else could see it. I slipped from his hand and climbed the spiral stairs, my heels echoing off the polished steps.
Frank stood motionless above the ballroom, hands draped over the red-velvet rail. My heels buckled on the polished floor, but I let them.
He waited, watching the party below, his shadow a solid line even in the fractured gold of the balcony. White dress shirt, tie knotted the way he’d always worn it for Sunday mass, hair sharp black, and a sprinkle of gray in his beard—the only evidence that time had touched him at all.
His eyes stayed locked on the crowd, not looking at me. I remembered him that way, always looking away for the disaster before it arrived.
He didn’t speak until my body slotted next to his, our elbows almost touching.
“I like the necklace,” he said.
“I thought you were dead, you asshole,” I said.
Frank smiled, the line of his mouth breaking sideways just enough to show one canine. “A state of mind more than a lasting condition.” Then, quieter, eyes flicking to me like the snap of a camera, he added, “I’m sorry I didn’t call, Principessa.”*
“You should be.” I punched him playfully in the shoulder, then wrapped my arms around his neck.
He let the hug hover in the air, his chin perched on the edge of my skull, before pushing me off with a gentle squeeze to the outside of my arm.
“You look good. You’re strong,” he said, voice a little tight. “I was worried you’d get dull around the edges.”
“Arrow won’t let me get dull,” I replied, picking at the bloodred A on my chain. “I have to stay sharp, or he’ll get bored.”
Frank’s eyes narrowed at the crowd below. “He’d never get bored with you, kid. Not unless he died, and he’s not the type.”
My throat closed. I wanted to ask Frank if he was happy now, if this were the retirement plan he’d always wanted. Instead, I just stood there, watching the party below, the easy waltz of enemies pretending to want each other alive.
“You were always going to end up here,” Frank said. “With him. This engagement . . . it was never a question of if. It was always when.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but he cut me off.
“Not because of the dress you’re wearing or the games you’re playing. Not because of anything you did or didn’t do. This was written before you were born, Harlowe. Your family, his family—the debt, the blood, the power. It all pointed to this moment. To him.”
“It doesn’t seem like a place to rest.”
“Rest isn’t what you want.” He turned to face me fully. “You ever going to forgive me?”
“Not tonight.”
He nodded, eyes bright. “Good.”
The silence between us was thick, saturated with all the things I wanted to say, but never would. He looked at my neck, at the chain. His gaze lingered, cataloguing the violence, the lineage, the intent.
“Are you ready for the rest?” he asked.
“I’m ready for anything.” I turned to the crowd below. “Even boredom.”
A smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. “Then you’ll be fine. Arrow’s a good man, Harlowe. He was always going to be exactly this, for better or for worse.”
“For worse is the job description.” I bit my lip, feeling the new ache where I’d opened it on Arrow’s tongue. “You and Arrow, you’re working together now?”
Frank shrugged, eyes shuttling over the crowd for any fresh threat. “I work for whoever wants you safe. Doesn’t matter the name on my checks.”
He wouldn’t say more, but it was on his face. Arrow hadn’t bought Frank’s service, he’d bought his life, and eventually, his death. Frank knew the reaper would come for him eventually, but now it could be on his terms, not my father’s.
I looked over the edge, into the clot of Manhattan’s best and worst hearts beating in unison.
The crowd rippled with a sudden change in current. Some of the city’s apex predators had a scent, a pressure wave, and you felt it before you saw them.
Arrow’s father entered without warning or announcement, dragging a cold spot of silence behind him.
Antoli Romanov—the old czar in Brioni, the smile like a slit throat in a palace. He radiated health, but not the kind measured by organs and blood. More like the way a great white shark is healthy, right up until it ruins a seal.
Frank’s palm ghosted the banister, relaxing as Antoli stalked toward the dais. Down on the floor, my father froze mid-toast, his glass hovering just long enough to register the importance of the moment.
Arrow positioned himself between Antoli and me without hesitation—a line of intent so clear it cut the ballroom like a blade.
“They’ll make a scene of it,” Frank muttered, already calculating lanes of cover, altitudes, and the possibility of a sniper in the organ loft.
“Should I go down?”
He shook his head. “Stay on the balcony. Let them all remember exactly how hard it is to reach you now. You’re worth more to Arrow than the entire room put together. Let him play the king.”
My job, for once, was to be watched.
Antoli reached the dais and stopped, feet planted, arms crossed behind his back. His gaze swept, not over the crowd, but toward me, way up in the fishbowl. He looked through the lights, the bodies, the walls, and found me like a wolf picking up the scent of a wounded animal.
Arrow met him at the base of the stairs, before anyone else could move. In the ancient mafia way, the two men didn’t touch, didn’t smile. Arrow inclined his head, not deferential but recognizing the old man’s place on the chessboard.
The entire room rotated around the axis of those two—the next city, the next life, wound tight between the old czar and his son.
Then, Antoli tilted his head, barely a fraction, acknowledging Arrow with a mathematician’s disdain. His neck shimmered with the blue veins of age, but those eyes—spectral, belong-to-no-one eyes—never left me.
He stood there while Arrow let the crowd re-align, and while Giovanni Virelli studied the tableau with the smile of a conqueror waiting to see if his city would burn or simply be rebuilt in his image. The lights prickled against Antoli’s skull. The hush was total.
My father shrank, not in height or posture, but in the simple yellow flicker of recognition that passed behind his eyes, as though he’d suddenly remembered every time he’d been outplayed at a table by this exact man.
Arrow spoke softly, two syllables, barely a ripple to the crowd.
Antoli nodded. There were rules for this, even if none of them had been written in a century.
The father would offer a blessing, the heir would accept, and the bride-to-be would be acknowledged not as family, not as a child, but as a sealed envelope—contents presumed lethal.