Chapter 3 Ask No Questions #2
Greyson stared at the mask stand on the far shelf, empty except for a single antique specimen—blackened iron, a relic of the first generation.
Slowly he stood. “Now, I go to my family dinner. Pretend I care about the Vow, and try not to think about what comes after.”
Callum nodded, rising as well. “And what does come after?”
Greyson hesitated. “I don’t know. But something has to change.”
Callum stepped in front of him again, this time closer. He pressed a hand to Greyson’s chest, right over his sternum. Greyson could feel his heart pounding against Callum’s palm. “Don’t let him take this from you, Grey. Not ever.”
The masks made emotion unreadable, but the heat of Callum’s hand was real.
“I won’t,” Greyson said, and meant it.
Callum pulled his hand back with a flourish. “You know the old rule, right? If you break the Vow before the ceremony, you owe me a case of Boundary whiskey.”
Greyson’s mouth quirked. “If I break the Vow, you’ll die of shock, and I’ll just be dead.”
“I’ll die happy, then.” Callum’s laugh was softer this time. “Good luck with your mother. She terrifies me more than the President.”
“Her silence terrifies everyone,” Greyson replied.
Callum raised his glass in salute, found it empty, and mimed a toast anyway. “You’re going to get through this, Grey. You always do.”
Greyson turned to go, then paused at the door. “Cal?”
“Yeah?”
“If anything happens to me, make them suffer.”
Callum’s answer was immediate. “I’ve got you, brother.”
Greyson nodded, then slipped from the room. The mask of the Executioner never left his face, but under it, for a moment, he could breathe.
He cut through the club’s main room, ignoring the hungry looks and the whispers that trailed him like the scent of blood.
Outside, the city waited, hungry for another show of power.
He straightened his jacket, checked the watch on his wrist, and walked toward the dinner that always ended in threats.
The Serel residence was a cathedral of old money and even older ambitions.
No matter how much the rest of New Found Haven modernized, the President’s quarters remained untouched by anything as fragile as progress.
Corridors of burnished black walnut led to the great dining hall, where generations of the Heart’s rule hung in oil and canvas, every ancestor rendered with the solemnity of a funeral mask.
Greyson’s shoes made no sound on the inlaid floors, an empty man among ghosts. He paused at the archway to the dining room, and took a breath, steadying himself before entering the room then taking his seat.
If the Entertainment District was all veiled violence and artifice, this room was naked power—set like a trap, designed to draw blood with nothing but a glance.
The table stretched forever, a plank of mahogany so polished it reflected the candelabra’s flames in a perfect mirror image. At its head, sat the gold-leafed throne, reserved for Maximus Serel. President and patriarch.
Four places were set. One for Greyson, one for his father, and one for Elara, the mother who’d built the city’s mask tradition into ironclad law. Outside of these walls, she was a force to be reckoned with. She was cutting and lethal. But here, in this house, she was as trapped as the rest of them.
A fourth chair—Lira’s—stood at a carefully measured distance, closer to Maximus but always out of arm’s length.
The housekeepers moved like smoke, seen only in the periphery, never acknowledged by name.
Each place setting was calibrated to perfection.
Folded napkin, obsidian edged plate, water goblet filled to the meniscus.
There was no music, only the sizzle of wax and the faint scratch of preparations flowing from the kitchens.
Elara arrived first, her mask a shimmer of white gold, delicate as frost. Her hand swept lovingly across Greyson’s shoulder as she rounded the table and sat. She met his eyes behind her mask and held his gaze.
“You look tired, my dear,” she said, voice hushed. “Rough night?”
Greyson considered lying. “You could say that.”
She reached for her water glass but didn’t drink. “You should take better care of yourself. Your Vow will be in four days. You’ll want to look your best.”
He nearly smiled at her transactional tone. “Always the diplomat.”
Elara’s eyes flicked to the entrance. “It helps. Sometimes.”
Lira slipped in next, her mask a brutal geometry of rose gold angles. She wore her hair up, every long, dark strand lacquered into place. She didn’t greet her mother, nor her brother. She simply slid into her chair, arranged her napkin, and waited.
Maximus entered last.
He wore no mask, but his face was more formidable than any metal. The lines had deepened since Greyson was a boy, the jaw a little sharper, the eyes colder. He surveyed the table, assessed the seating, and sat without ceremony.
The meal was served in three silent courses. First, a soup as black as the city at midnight. Then, a slab of meat so rare it bled onto the plate. Last, a citrus tartlet.
They ate in silence. It wasn’t an awkward silence—there was nothing tentative about it—but a deliberate suppression, the kind that dared you to fill it and risk being devoured.
Greyson was the one who broke it.
“Father,” he said, careful to keep his tone neutral, “I wanted to ask about Brooker.”
His brother’s name landed on the table like a hammer. Elara’s hand trembled, just once, before she set her spoon down. Lira’s jaw clenched, so subtly only someone who’d known her from birth would notice.
Maximus didn’t look up from his plate. “What about him?”
“Where are you in your search for the Daggermouth that killed him?” Greyson forced himself to look at his father.
For a second, Maximus’s eyes flickered—something unsettling, lethal. Then he set his fork down, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and leaned back in the chair.
“I thought I told you to drop this.”
Greyson did not drop it.
He would never drop it, not until all of the Daggermouths were wiped from New Found Haven.
He ignored his father’s statement. “I heard from a Veyra captain that—”
Maximus cut him off. “What you heard is irrelevant. He was murdered, and I will not risk more of my men to satisfy you with a name.”
Elara tried to intervene, her voice brittle. “This is not the place—”
“I did not tell you, you could speak,” Maximus snapped. He turned back to Greyson, eyes dark as pitch. “When I tell you to drop something, you drop it.”
Greyson’s fists clenched around his knife, his muscles pulling tight in an effort not to jam the utensil into his father’s jugular at the disrespect he showed his mother. At the disrespect he showed Brooker’s memory.
“He did everything you ever asked of him. He killed hundreds of people day after day in the plaza on your orders. People you hunted down over minor infractions to your law. And yet you refuse to look for the Daggermouth scum that murdered him,” Greyson spat, knowing immediately he should’ve kept his mouth shut.
Maximus smiled, lips thin as a blade. “Your brother was a greater man than you will ever be, you do not need to remind me of that. He was the son I wish had lived. To insult me, to question my loyalty to him, is treason.” Slowly, Maximus leaned forward.
“The elite are not immune from the violence of the rings. The job of Executioner will make you enemies. Brooker knew that, and still he did it without hesitation. He died for the Heart, and that is what I will honor. I will not give our enemies the upper hand by making emotional decisions.”
Lira spoke up, her words flat and dangerous. “His death wasn’t an honor.”
Maximus’s hand curled around the stem of his goblet, knuckles whitening. “Please, speak plainly, Lira.”
She met his gaze, mask to face. “His death was a sign of weakness. A sign that the Daggermouths can get to us. And your hesitation to retaliate only gives them more power.”
The silence that followed was so pure, so total, it threatened to fracture the room.
Elara recovered first, smoothing her napkin with trembling fingers, daring to speak again without permission. “We’re all tired,” she said, voice a shade above a whisper. “Let’s not fight tonight.”
The back of Maximus’s hand struck the side of her face faster than anyone could stop it, knocking her out of her chair and onto the floor with a whimper of pain.
Greyson shot from his chair with a snarl as Lira gasped beside him.
“Sit. Down,” Maximus growled, raising a single pointed finger at Greyson.
Greyson hesitated, every instinct screaming to pull his gun from its holster and put a bullet into the back of his father’s head. His fingers splayed on the tabletop, breaths rough through his mask.
The decorum of the room demanded submission, but every knot in Greyson’s body flexed against it.
He forced himself to sit, knowing that would be the only way to protect his mother from another blow. Maximus held his gaze for a long, balanced moment, then turned away.
Maximus’s voice trembled not with regret, but with rage. “This family is not a democracy. You will mourn your brother however I tell you to mourn. And you will never again question my choices.”
The words slashed through Greyson, and he felt the sudden, irrational urge to laugh. To laugh at the irony of it all, the cruelty that rotted the inside of this family while the outside looked polished and pristine.
Instead, he forced his jaw tighter, grinding the fury down to a stone he could swallow and watched as his mother straightened her mask.
She struggled to her knees, steadying herself on the arm of her chair with no help from his father.
Slowly, she slipped back into her seat and cleared her throat as she smoothed out the front of her cream blouse, now stained with drops of blood.
“Now, let’s finish this pleasant family meal, shall we?” Maximus said, the coolness of his voice more brutal than the violence of the moment before.
The scraping of silverware against china was the only sound that filled the room as each of them picked at their dessert, tasting nothing.
At last, Maximus set down his utensils and addressed the room. “The Vow is scheduled for Saturday. I expect full attendance. No exceptions.”
He rose, wiped his mouth, and left them with nothing but the echo of his footsteps. Elara’s voice caught as she rose, excusing herself to hurry after him, sparing a single look toward her children before disappearing into the corridor.
Greyson waited until they were alone, the room shrinking around them.
“You shouldn’t have said anything,” he said, but without the heat he’d intended. “He’ll make you pay for it.”
Lira’s own voice was flat. “I don’t care, Grey. Not anymore.”
“You need to care. You need to let him think he’s won. He will hurt you, Li.”
“I need,” she replied, pushing her chair back with an abrupt scrape, “to get out of this family, before it eats me alive.”
Greyson watched Lira go for only a breath before he followed her into the corridor, catching up to her near the elevator. For a moment, neither spoke as they waited for the lift to arrive.
“If he’s not going to do it, we have to,” Lira started. “We have to find the Daggermouth that killed Brooker, and kill them ourselves. He deserves that much.”
He wanted to argue, to tell her that she shouldn’t get involved, but couldn’t find the words. She put a hand on his arm, just above the elbow, squeezed once, then stepped into the elevator.