15. Chapter 15 #2
Grace glanced at me. “That is definitely part of what I meant.”
Bohdan’s smile deepened, but his eyes remained on mine. “Someone must maintain standards in this family.”
“I maintain standards.”
“You maintain armies, accounts, treaties, vengeance schedules, and the dietary preferences of people you pretend not to worry about.” He turned back to Grace. “Standards are different.”
Grace made a small sound. Dangerous. Almost laughter.
I looked at Bohdan with the warning only brothers recognized.
He ignored it with the pleasure of a man who had been ignoring me for centuries.
Then the humor left his face by degrees.
“I need both of you in my office,” he said.
Grace’s posture shifted. Business had entered. She recognized it at once.
“Now?” I asked.
Bohdan looked at me.
It was not a challenge. Not exactly. Bohdan challenged with a smile, a glass of wine, and seventeen facts assembled in an order designed to make resistance embarrassing. This look was cleaner.
“Yes.”
The single word told me enough. I nodded.
Grace noticed that I did not argue. Her eyes moved from Bohdan to me, then away, absorbing what my compliance said about his standing.
Bohdan was not the warrior among us. He was not the mediator, not the shadow hand, not the western king.
He was the son who knew what passed through Obsidian before most people knew they had revealed anything at all.
When Bohdan said now, he had a reason.
“Come,” he said, turning.
We followed.
Bohdan moved before us with his usual unhurried precision.
I watched my brother’s shoulders. He was annoyed.
More than annoyed. Bohdan did not like being surprised inside his own domain, and I had arrived with a newly turned mate, a blood slave conspiracy attached to Lucian Devereux, Council implications, and insufficient briefing.
He would forgive the lack of ceremony. Eventually.
He would not forgive being unprepared.
Grace glanced up at me as we walked.
“What?” I asked quietly.
“You listened to him.”
“Yes.”
“No argument.”
“No.”
“That tells me something.”
“What does it tell you?”
“That your family is more complicated than the seating chart implies.”
Despite the report waiting ahead, despite the scent of Lucian’s name already forming somewhere in my bones before it had been spoken aloud, I almost smiled.
“My dear,” I said, “you have no idea.”
Her answering look was tired, alert, and lit from beneath by something that had not existed before the stage.
“Then I suppose I’m about to learn.”
Bohdan opened the office door and held it for her.
“Unfortunately,” he said, with flawless courtesy, “yes.”
Bohdan’s office had none of the sensual theater he sold so expertly downstairs. It was not sterile, but it was honest in the way a blade was honest: made for work, kept clean, and never mistaken for decoration.
Dark wood dominated the room, but not extravagantly.
His desk was broad, its surface nearly clear except for a closed leather folio, a slim keyboard, and a glass of blood wine he had abandoned long enough that the temperature had shifted.
Two leather chairs sat angled toward a central monitor mounted within a wall of screens.
The screens showed Obsidian in fragments: the main floor from above, the VIP stairwell, the private corridor outside feeding rooms, the basement casino with its green-black tables and dealers who never blinked at the wrong time.
Grace looked at the monitors first.
Good.
She noticed exits, angles, surveillance, the difference between indulgence and control.
Obsidian displayed pleasure below and discipline behind its walls.
Bohdan understood that better than most. He sold decadence the way a jeweler sold gems: polished, lit, and secured by systems no admirer was meant to see.
The door closed behind us.
The lock engaged with a soft click, followed by the subtler answering pulse of a privacy ward sliding into place. It did not feel like Amelia’s hand, exactly, but her work lived in the seams. Sharp, clever, slightly impatient. A ward that seemed to mutter at anyone foolish enough to test it.
Bohdan crossed to his desk.
“Shad contacted me,” he said.
The hallway tension vanished from my body as if a switch had been cut. What replaced it was colder and older.
“When?”
“While you were upstairs with Grace. I waited until you were off the public level.”
I looked at him.
Bohdan did not apologize. He did not need to. Pulling me from the VIP level while Grace was processing the demonstration in front of half the club would have been clumsy. Bohdan was many things. Clumsy had never been one of them.
“Bring him up,” I said.
He was already moving.
The central monitor woke up. Black glass became a secure connection screen, then resolved into Shad Devers seated in his office at Amethyst. The camera angled slightly upward, catching the dark sweep of the room behind him: violet-gray walls, a carved cabinet, one corner of the security map lit in soft blue.
He wore a dress shirt open at the throat, sleeves rolled neatly to the forearms, understated and expensive in a way that suggested taste rather than vanity.
Shad himself filled the screen with calm authority.
Black, broad-shouldered, bald, gray-eyed, his light scruff catching enough office light to sharpen the line of his jaw.
Some men tried to appear unbothered and achieved only arrogance.
Shad possessed the rarer gift of making composure look useful.
He had run Amethyst’s floor through witch feuds, demon debt disputes, intoxicated aristocrats, territorial vampires, and one extremely unfortunate incident involving a cursed roulette chip and a siren with poor impulse control.
He looked, as usual, almost impossible to rattle.
Grace pulled in a short breath. It was small. She likely did not know she had done it. I noticed anyway.
She would not be the first woman—or man—to react to Shad’s face as if competence had developed cheekbones. I did not comment. Grace had earned the right to breathe near handsome men without a king making an idiot of himself.
Shad’s eyes moved to me first.
“Your Grace.”
“Shad.”
Then his gaze shifted, briefly and carefully, to Grace. I moved half a step, so the camera caught us both.
“This is Gracelyn Marlow,” I said. “Grace, Shadrick Devers. Operations manager of Amethyst and one of the few men I trust without qualification.”
Shad gave a slight nod. Not overdone. Not courtly enough to burden her.
“My lady.”
Grace inclined her head. “Mr. Devers.”
“Shad is fine.”
Her mouth moved faintly. “Grace, then.”
“Done.”
I looked at him. “I’m sorry in-person introductions were not possible before we left Vegas. Time was not generous.”
“No apology necessary,” Shad said.
That was Shad’s way of accepting it without making me explain myself twice.
“Report,” I said.
Shad’s gaze returned fully to mine.
“Lucian’s men entered Amethyst again earlier this evening.”
Grace went still beside me.
Not visibly, perhaps, to anyone with dull senses. To me, she changed entirely. Her pulse struck harder. Her shoulders did not rise, but tension moved beneath the fabric of her dress like wire being drawn through cloth.
“How many?” I asked.
“Three confirmed. Possibly a fourth outside camera range before entry, but the witch team is still cleaning the footage. Two vampires, one human. The human carried himself like compelled personnel, but I am not calling that conclusive yet.”
“Names?”
“Working on them. One vampire used a false identification under a minor house out of Phoenix. Sloppy enough that I assume we were meant to find it.”
I absorbed that.
Lucian was arrogant, not stupid. The distinction mattered. Stupid men made noise because they did not understand silence. Arrogant men made noise where they wanted attention and moved quietly everywhere else.
“What did they do?” Bohdan asked.
Shad did not glance at him with surprise. He had expected Bohdan to be in the room, or he had adjusted to the fact instantly.
“Watched. Drank. Spoke to two donors, neither alone. Asked questions framed as compliments. How long has Amethyst been open? Whether royal presence was common on-site. Whether the Western Court conducted business in the public rooms or only through petition entrance. Nothing overt.”
“Too careful,” Bohdan said.
“Yes.”
Grace’s eyes moved between Shad’s face on the screen and my profile. I did not turn toward her. If I did, I might soften in a moment that required sharp edges.
Shad continued. “Before midnight, Lucian entered.”
The room’s temperature did not change.
It only seemed to.
My shadows stirred at the corners of Bohdan’s office. Not dramatically. Not enough for a human eye to notice, perhaps. But Bohdan’s gaze flicked once to the baseboards, and the screens dimmed by a fraction as the dark recognized my temper and leaned toward it.
I drew it back.
Grace’s breath had stopped. I waited until she took another one.
“Alone?” I asked.
“Two guards. Both vampires. He presented himself as a Council elder visiting a royal establishment while traveling through the territory.”
“How gracious of him,” Bohdan said.
Shad’s mouth did not move. “He was very proud of the fiction.”
Grace’s jaw tightened.
“What shape did the visit take?” I asked.
“Fact-finding. Controlled. Observational. He wanted to see whether your absence was visible in staff behavior. Whether security had changed. Whether Taras was present. Whether I appeared to be managing or merely covering.”
“And?”
“I appeared to be managing.”
Bohdan gave a quiet breath through his nose. Almost amusement.
Lucian could enter Amethyst with all the Elder Council arrogance in his blood and still find himself looking at Shad Devers, who had once made an enraged bear shifter apologize to a cocktail server in front of an entire lounge without raising his voice.
Lucian would have seen no weakness there.
That did not mean he had seen nothing useful.
“Human scouts have been running daylight surveillance on the building,” Shad added.