28. Twenty-Eight
TWENTY-EIGHT
ARROW
Ileft her to dream, to rest in the sheets I’d ruined. We all needed our hours of peace, however temporary, and I’d used up enough of hers already.
The city buzzed—cop radios and police scanners alive with talk of a Union Square shooting, social media lighting up with rumors, TikTok videos spliced from street-level footage and hacked feeds. Everyone scrambling to pin fault, to draw borders in even bloodier ink.
But the only war that mattered was the one hammering under my ribs.
Dressed in clean black, I was trimmed enough to pass for a lawyer, but brutal in the weight class required.
Holstered and loaded, I caught my reflection on the penthouse’s slick steel panel.
An American psycho with prettier hands, or maybe a grown-up altar boy who’d switched to sacramental liquor and cheap murder just to spite the God he used to serve.
The elevator hissed open. Orion waited there with his perfect posture, suit immaculate even after his role in tonight’s choreographed violence. He looked me up and down, then passed over a manila envelope.
“Atlas says it’s urgent,” he said. “You want backup?”
“I’m not becoming my father yet. But keep a car ready.”
“Always.”
We rode in silence. Fresh stitches marked his temple, but I didn’t ask where they came from. He watched me, our shared language of violence needing only the occasional noun and verb.
“She likes you,” Orion noted.
“She isn’t supposed to.”
He grinned. “Then you’re already fucked.”
At street level, the city pulsed with a different kind of fear. Not the usual flavor, but the kind only bred in times of power transitions or failed assassinations.
A cold hand fell on my shoulder the second I hit the sidewalk.
My father.
“Interesting night.”
I turned. His face in profile was sharp, every feature honed for murder. The suit he wore was dark enough to erase him into the shadows, but his hands caught the city’s blue light, pale against the darkness.
The kind of hands that ended people.
“You need something?” I asked.
Orion started to intervene, but I shook my head. “Tell Atlas I’ll be late.”
My father’s grip tightened on my shoulder, a silent command as I slid into the back seat of his armored Benz. My father joined me, leaving Orion on the sidewalk with a dismissive flick of his fingers. We sat in silence as the car idled before pulling off the curb.
“You’ve handled the Virelli situation well.” He adjusted the lapel of his suit, and that was the closest he ever came to a compliment. “But her father’s not dead, so your win is temporary.”
“I’m not interested in killing him yet.”
“Clearly.” He laced his fingers together, watching me the way a spider watches another spider decide if it will eat the web or become part of it. “She’s becoming a liability to you.”
Liabilities, in his mouth, always tasted like a threat.
“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.
Because of her.
Because of what would come for her if I lost, even once.
The time for reckoning was coming, but it wasn’t yet.
Soon.
The meeting adjourned with a flick of the hand. Another man dispatched, another city quadrant banished to the shadows. I shook hands, accepted nods, and let my father clasp my shoulder on the stoop outside, his grip a deadweight of expectation.
“Don’t disappoint me.”
I turned, shrugged him off like ash, and walked into the flexing metropolis, every step echoing with the certainty that I would never become him.
But there were many ways to inherit the throne.
Orion was waiting for me on the curb where I’d left him. He gave me a small nod, and his eyes scanned my face, as if he could read every detail of my encounter with my father.
“How bad?”
“The usual.” I rolled my shoulders, trying to shake off the weight of my father’s expectations. “He’s testing me—making sure I haven’t gone soft.”
“He wants you to get rid of her father.”
I didn’t respond. There was no point in confirming what Orion already knew. My father wasn’t subtle in his desires. Kill Giovanni Virelli, secure the territory, and secure my place alongside Atlas, who he knew held absolute dominance over the city’s underworld.
A simple equation with a bloody solution.
“You look like shit,” Orion observed, lighting a cigarette and offering me one.
I took it, letting the flame catch as I inhaled deeply. “Had a lot on my mind.”
“You mean a Virelli in your sheets?” His smirk was infuriating. “I never thought I’d see the day when Arrow Romanov got himself leashed.”
“Watch it,” I warned, but there was no real heat behind it.
Orion and Atlas were the closest things I had to brothers in this life. He’d earned the right to speak his mind, even when I didn’t want to hear it.
“Just saying what everyone’s thinking.” He shrugged. “You’re different since her.”
I exhaled smoke into the cold night air.
“Different how?”
“Like you actually give a fuck if she lives or dies.”
The truth of his observation hit harder than I wanted to admit. I did care . . . more than I should. More than was safe for either of us.
“It’s strategic,” I lied. “The Virelli alliance gives us control of the docks. Giovanni’s connection’s in city hall—territorial disputes settled without bloodshed. Everyone wins.”
“Right. And the fact that you can barely keep your hands off her has nothing to do with it.”
I let the smoke curl between us like a living thing. “You should worry less about what’s going on in my bed and more about what’s in your future if you keep talking.”
“See? That’s what I mean.” Orion grinned, completely unfazed by my threat. “The old Arrow would have already had me on the ground for that comment.”
Dropping my cigarette, I crushed it under my heel. “Maybe I’m evolving.”
“Or maybe you’re compromised.”