Chapter 6
Rook
Idon’t knock.
Men like me don’t ask permission to walk into a room we already own.
The townhouse is quiet when I leave my office and cross the landing.
Old London brick means the hall carries sound differently than steel and concrete do.
Everything is closer here, warmer. The Riders use this house to disappear, not to work.
The rooms still hold the heat from the radiators, the ghost of someone’s cologne in the walls, the faint hum of pipes.
It shouldn’t feel intimate. But it does.
It feels intimate now, with Ember in a room upstairs. Waiting to see if we spare her or damn her.
Wraith is stationed at the far end of the hall, leaned against the banister in absolute, easy control. He doesn’t move when he sees me, just tilts his chin in a bare nod. Guarding the stairs, not her door. Good. He understood me.
No one in or out unless it’s me.
I stop outside the room and rest my hand on the latch. For a beat, I just listen. No crying. No pacing. No desperate rattling at the lock. She’s not panicking.
That already interests me more than it should.
I open the door.
She’s exactly where we left her—on the edge of the bed, knees drawn up loosely, chin resting where her thigh meets bone.
She’s angled so she can see both the door and the window without having to turn her head.
Cute. Tactical. Her face is soft, her body language small, but her eyes cut straight to mine the second I step inside.
Still awake, then. Still pretending not to be.
Her gaze flicks over me quickly. My black shirt, the open collar, the way I didn’t bother to put my mask back on. I let her look. I’ve kept my face from her this long. And I intend to let her see what hunts her.
She notices the details that matter. The way most people don’t.
Good girl.
I close the door behind me and turn the lock.
She doesn’t flinch at the sound. Her jaw tightens, though. I file that.
The room smells like steam and clean skin. She’s washed her face. Her hair is still a little damp around the edges, frizzy red curls catching light from the street through the curtain gap. There’s a smudge of dried blood at the corner of her mouth. She hasn’t wiped that off.
Interesting choice.
“Comfortable?” I ask.
Her lips curl. “Go choke.”
I almost smile. “My disobedience,” I murmur instead. “There you are.”
Her brow pulls in for half a second. She hates that—being claimed like that. And some deep, primal part of me wants her off balance.
I drag a chair from the corner—the dark green leather one by the books—and set it across from the bed, far enough to give her space, close enough to make it clear she doesn’t actually have any. I sit and lean back, ankle resting on my knee, hands loose. Not looming. Not threatening.
Let her think this is a conversation.
She tilts her head. “So this is the part where you try to convince me you’re the nice one?”
I huff a quiet laugh. “No. That would be Saint. He’s the one who likes to dress violence up in scripture and apology.”
“And which one are you?” she asks. She’s fast. She doesn’t hesitate. “Executioner?”
“King.”
Her mouth tightens. A beat of silence hangs between us, bright and thin like wire.
I watch the way she holds herself. She’s pretending to be curled in, vulnerable, knees hugged in like a scared girl, chin on bone.
But her weight is in the balls of her feet.
Her shoulders are forward but not hunched.
Her hands are loose, ready. She’s angled to spring left, not right.
Away from me, toward the door, not the window.
That’s wrong, my dreadful disobedience.
The window’s reinforced. The door has me. But you don’t know that yet…
Or do you?
“Why am I here?” she asks. Her voice doesn’t shake. She wants it to come out bored. It lands sharp.
“Because you broke into one of my secured properties,” I say calmly. “Because you accessed documents you should not have known existed. Because you touched product that did not belong to you. Because you made contact—uninvited—with one of my men.”
“‘Made contact,’” she repeats, disgust curling around the words. “Is that what you call finding your guy with his throat open on a warehouse floor?”
I let that sit for a moment. Her eyes watch me for reaction. She’s hunting truth the same way I am.
“I call that evidence,” I answer.
Her chin lifts, just slightly. “Evidence of what? That you kill anyone who annoys you and dump them like rubbish? You’re very scary, congratulations.”
She’s trying to sting. She’s trying to prod until I show her teeth. She thinks anger means honesty. And, I supoose it usually does.
Which is why she’s not getting any.
“Owen,” I say instead, softly.
Her eyes flash, jaw clenching like she’s biting back a retort.
There it is.
Everything inside her goes very still, all at once. The agitation, the frantic calculation, the restlessness under her skin—it all threads down tight, like a snare pulled quick around the throat of some animal. She doesn’t speak.
Not yet.
“Owen Calloway,” I continue, voice even. “Your brother.”
She snaps. Mask dropping immediately, snarling the words. “You don’t get to say his name.”
I lean back a fraction more, studying her. “You think if I don’t say it, it makes him yours alone?”
“He was mine,” she bites out. “Not yours. Not theirs. Mine.”
Something ugly and familiar twists under my ribs. Possession, yes, and grief as a blade. I’ve seen that mix a hundred times. It’s always the ones left behind who are the sharpest.
“He was also mine,” I tell her.
Her expression fractures for half a second—just half—and there it is, clean and naked… Pure hatred.
“Liar,” she whispers, eyes wide.
“He ran product for me,” I say. Calm. Factual.
“He moved weapons through customs labels that didn’t exist on paper.
He sat down with men I told him to sit down with, and he watched hands and faces and routes.
I trusted him with certain corridors because up until the very end, he was good at it.
Better than good. Clever. Charming. Useful. I don’t break what works.”
She swallows, and I watch the muscles in her throat shift. She doesn’t want to hear this, but she’s listening. I can see her doing it against her will. Filing it. She’ll decide later whether to believe me. But she’s taking it in now. After a second she glares at me.
“No,” she says. Quieter. “No, you’re lying. Owen wasn’t like that. He wasn’t—he wasn’t one of you.”
“Everyone is ‘not like that’ to someone,” I say. “Thieves are loyal brothers. Hitmen are good sons. Spies are perfect lovers. People are always softer when you’re not the one holding their leash.”
Her nostrils flare. “He didn’t work for you. He wouldn’t have.”
“He was on my payroll for eleven months,” I say. “Indirectly, and through a shell company, but yes. I have the transfers. I have recordings. I have Owen, Ember, on camera and on wire, taking cash he did not earn and swearing he would deliver more.”
Her eyes snap to mine at his name. I let it sit between us like heat.
“And what?” she spits. “You expect me to believe he deserved what you did to him? Because he took your dirty money and helped you move guns? That’s not treason.
That’s survival. That’s living in London and not wanting to fucking starve.
That’s—” Her voice cracks. She swallows it down like it burns. “That’s not a death sentence.”
Her defense of him is instant. Instinct. Angry and loyal and unedited. It hits harder than it should. For a second, something old inside me stirs.
I kill it.
The mask of indifference tightens in place, my voice colder, more distant. “No,” I say. “Running shipments isn’t what got him killed.”
Her breath stalls. Just barely. “Then what?”
Now we get to it.
“The Russians,” I say.
She blinks. Confusion runs across her face fast and honest. She wasn’t expecting that word. Good. That matters.
“You want to know why you’re here?” I ask.
“Why I didn’t put a bullet in you in that flat and leave you on your floor the way you found Darren in the warehouse?
Why you’re sitting in my sheets instead of bleeding out in the gutter?
It’s because you were trying to find something you don’t understand.
Something Owen didn’t understand when he walked himself straight into hell wearing my colors. ”
“He didn’t wear your—”
“He sold route intel,” I say, cutting clean through her protest. “He sold internal run maps, drop schedules, and safehouse locations to a Syndicate contact out of Poplar, and he did it for cash. Cold. Hard. Cash.”
She goes pale in stages. For a heartbeat, she’s just stunned. Then I see it land—the math of it, rapid-fire behind her eyes. Routes. Schedules. Safehouses. Places with people in them. “How much,” she whispers, almost choking on it, “did he give them?”
“Enough to cost me three men,” I say. “Enough to burn a corridor I’d spent a year building. Enough to make me pull everyone and reroute everything I had for six weeks while half of East London tried to eat us alive.”
Her hands are clenched, white-knuckled around her own shins. She doesn’t seem to notice. “Stop,” she says, voice shaking. “Stop talking.”
“What? Would you rather I lie to you?” I ask. “Would you rather I pat your hair and tell you a bedtime story about how your brother was a saint cut down by cruel masked monsters in the night?”
“Fuck you,” she snarls.
“Already on your mind?” I hum. “Careful, my disobedience.”
Her eyes blaze. “You don’t get to— you don’t get to talk to me like that and then pretend this is you being kind.”
“I’m not kind,” I say. “I’m honest when it matters.”
“Honest,” she repeats, low and furious, rising with every word. “Honest?! You kidnapped me. Drugged me. Dragged me God-knows-where. You have me sitting here like—like a pet—and you expect me to believe anything you say?!”
“I expect you to listen,” I say evenly, “because I am the only person in this city who will ever tell you what really happened to him.”