Black Reign (ROYAL OAKS PREP #6)

Chapter 1

Another wedding invitation.

I turn the thick cream card between my fingers, watching firelight slide across the black foil edging.

Embossed.

Hand-lettered.

Custom stock so heavy it could probably survive a small-caliber round.

Very Haverhill.

Then I notice the tiny superscript beside the date.

I stare at it.

There is an actual endnote at the bottom of the invitation.

My mouth twitches.

Naturally.

Kane Haverhill—NBA point guard, multimillion-dollar shoe deal, professional pain in everyone's ass—put endnotes on his wedding invitation for Hannah.

His Bookworm.

His Endnote.

I lift my glass toward the card.

"Pathetic."

The fire answers with a crack.

I take a slow drink of Scotch old enough to have witnessed several European governments collapse.

Two hundred years.

Malted.

Smoky.

Nearly impossible to source.

My father owns twelve bottles.

He used to own thirteen. There are certain advantages to being a Blackwell.

The invitation rests across my knee while bitter wind lashes against the tall windows of the Newport house.

House is generous. Castle is more accurate.

My great grandfather bought the place before I was born because apparently a normal oceanfront estate wasn't sufficiently dramatic for a Blackwell.

Stone walls.

Turrets.

A private cliff.

Enough embedded security technology to make a head of state comfortable.

Tonight, the Atlantic is black beyond the glass.

Winter water.

Violent.

Cold enough that the entire building groans whenever the wind comes off it hard.

I sink deeper into the leather chair and look at the invitation again.

Another one. Leo was first.

Leo and Jade.

That wedding remains permanently categorized in my memory under events requiring medical intervention.

Not for them.

For me.

I rarely get drunk.

There are practical reasons for that.

Control matters when your family makes its fortune knowing what people do when they believe nobody is watching.

Alcohol compromises control.

Leo's wedding compromised mine spectacularly.

I remember champagne.

A bottle of something clear Tristan insisted came from a private distillery in Croatia.

At some point Drew Travers produced tequila.

I remember telling him tequila was beneath me.

Then drinking it.

The next morning, I woke in a hotel suite with one shoe, Leo's boutonniere in my pocket, and a headache violent enough that I briefly considered ordering myself a brain scan when I noticed several women in various states of dress across the bed.

I shudder.

Never again.

Drew and Isa didn't bother giving anyone the opportunity.

They eloped.

Very Drew.

Very Isa.

No cathedral.

No society pages.

No month of ridiculous planning.

They disappeared, got married, and informed everyone after the damage was done.

I wasn't particularly close to either of them back then.

Drew and I became better friends later, mostly because when my friends gravitated to California, it had a strange way of shoving people into each other's lives whether you ask for it or not.

Then came Vale and Stella Cortez.

That was less a wedding and more an international summit with flowers.

European royalty arrived on private jets.

Old Newport money flew west.

Security teams multiplied overnight.

There were titles I had to look up, which irritated me enough that I memorized every one before the ceremony.

They married in California beneath an obscene amount of imported flowers while half the guests pretended not to notice Stella wanted to kick off her shoes and escape.

She hated the spectacle.

Her father adored it. Tristan’s mom was over the moon.

Vale barely noticed any of it.

He only watched her.

That part I understood.

For all the theater surrounding them, Tristan looked at Stella like the rest of us had been removed from the room.

And now Haverhill.

I glance down at the invitation again.

Kane Haverhill has already survived Stanford, been drafted into the NBA, become one of professional basketball's newest obsessions, and somehow decided the best use of his remaining sanity is marrying the one woman capable of correcting his game in front of millions of people.

Hannah Goodwin.

The footnote who became the whole story.

There's something annoyingly poetic about that.

I take another drink.

The invitation reads:

Kane Haverhill and Hannah Goodwin request the pleasure of your company—

I look down.

Then I notice the line beneath my name.

Xavier Blackwell + Guest

That presents a problem.

For several years, people assumed I was gay.

I never corrected them.

Why would I?

People reveal considerably more once they believe they've categorized you.

Women relaxed around me.

Mothers quit throwing daughters in my direction at charity dinners.

Useful misconception.

Incorrect.

I'm attracted to women.

I'm simply selective.

Ultra-selective.

Possibly clinically selective.

That isn't entirely my fault.

Spend enough years watching human beings through surveillance feeds and romance loses some of its polish.

I've seen men leave engagement-ring appointments and drive directly to another woman's apartment.

I've watched wives kiss husbands goodbye at airports before walking into first-class lounges with someone else.

I've caught people who erase messages, duplicate accounts, falsify locations, hide purchases, create entire second lives.

Blackmail is currency in my world.

Sometimes more valuable than cash.

A photograph.

A location record.

A conversation someone assumed disappeared.

One compromised hotel camera.

One transaction routed through the wrong account.

Boardrooms run on leverage far more often than anyone admits.

I've known that since I was thirteen.

It changes the way you look at intimacy.

Trust isn't romantic to me.

Trust is a security vulnerability.

So I don't date.

Not really.

There have been women.

Naturally.

Hamptons summers.

Mykonos.

Capri.

Saint-Tropez.

A pool.

A yacht.

Two people who know exactly what the arrangement is.

No promises.

No toothbrush left behind.

No access to my devices.

No expectation that breakfast means anything more than breakfast.

Physical attraction has never been difficult.

It's what comes afterward that creates the problem.

Eventually someone has to speak.

And then I'm bored.

I take another sip of Scotch.

That sounds cruel.

It isn't meant to be.

My brain simply doesn't stop.

I've been tested enough times that the numbers stopped being interesting.

My mother once proudly announced at a dinner party that my measured IQ exceeded Einstein's estimated one.

I didn't speak to her for two weeks afterward.

Intelligence isn't particularly impressive when you're trapped inside it.

Most conversations reach their destination long before the other person finishes the sentence.

Most arguments reveal themselves three moves ahead.

Most people repeat patterns.

Once I see the pattern, I'm done.

I need something else.

Someone who can move pieces I don't anticipate.

Someone capable of verbal chess.

Mental chess.

A woman who doesn't merely keep up but occasionally makes me wonder what the hell she's going to do next.

Someone who can surprise me without irritating me.

Challenge me without performing intelligence like a party trick.

And since I'm apparently shallow enough to require physical chemistry on top of all that, the search has become statistically absurd.

A brilliant mind inside a body I can't stop wanting.

Someone who simmers beside me instead of fading once the novelty burns away.

Tall order.

I've mostly accepted she probably doesn't exist.

Mostly.

My eyes drift toward the black screen sitting on the table beside the fire.

But Vesper—maybe she’s the flaw in the theory.

We met years ago in a corner of the dark web most people would never find and fewer would survive five minutes inside.

No real names.

No faces.

No ordinary biographies.

Just handles and encrypted conversation.

Ghost and Vesper.

At first I liked her because she was irritating.

Then because she was funny.

Then because she was fast.

Not typing speed.

Mind.

I could bait her with half an argument and she'd already be three conclusions ahead.

She could turn one sentence around on me before I realized I'd handed her the weapon.

I started logging into The Veil because I knew she might be there.

Then we built NULL.

Our own private encrypted room.

Our own little digital country with a population of two.

There have been weeks when we barely speak.

Months when we talk every night.

Sometimes she disappears.

Sometimes I do.

Then one of us drops a message into the dark and the other returns as though no time has passed.

I've never called it love.

That would be ridiculous.

I've never seen her entire face.

I've never heard her voice.

I don't know where she lives.

I don't know what her go-to drink is, whether she sleeps with the windows open, or what she looks like first thing in the morning.

I don't even know if Vesper is remotely close to her real name.

But I know how she thinks—and that might be worse.

The photographs haven't helped.

They started innocent enough.

Bare feet on a balcony.

My hand wrapped around a whiskey glass.

Her hair falling over one shoulder.

My wrist beneath a white cuff.

Then she sent me her mouth.

That one remains an act of war.

Full lower lip caught beneath white teeth.

Nothing above her nose.

No identifying background.

No jewelry.

Nothing I could run.

I stared at it longer than a stable man should admit.

Then responded in kind.

No face.

Shirt lifted.

Enough abdomen to make the point.

Her reply arrived eleven seconds later.

Cheap.

I told her she started it.

She said a lip wasn't equivalent to half a six-pack.

I told her that depended entirely on the lip.

The pictures have become progressively more reckless since.

Not enough for either of us to identify the other.

Enough that anonymity is becoming increasingly absurd.

I have one picture I keep separate from the rest.

Caramel-brown hair blowing in the wind.

Her back to the camera.

Her face turned toward an unseen horizon.

Water beyond her.

No timestamp.

No metadata.

No location.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to triangulate it.