15. Chapter 15 #3
Bohdan’s expression cooled.
Grace turned toward the screen. “How long?”
The question left her before she seemed to decide whether she had the right to ask it.
Shad answered as if she did. “At least two days confirmed. Possibly longer. We caught the pattern because one of the witches reviewed reflection anomalies in the outer wards. Humans loitering in places humans do not loiter. Delivery trucks parked too long. Ride-share drivers accepting fares that never appeared. A woman across the street pretending to take calls while photographing the front glamour with a dead phone.”
Grace’s face changed.
There she was. The prosecutor beneath the new vampire. Pattern catching on pattern. Fear forced to sit beside analysis.
“Compelled?” she asked.
“Unknown,” Shad replied. “Likely mixed. Some may be paid. Some may be compelled. Some may have no idea what they saw.”
“The glamour would keep them from identifying the building correctly,” Bohdan said.
Grace glanced at him. “But they could still record approaches, vehicles, faces entering places they can’t later describe.”
“Yes,” I said.
Her mouth compressed.
Shad continued. “The witch security teams are determining what, if anything, was captured. Devices recovered so far have corrupted images, as expected, but the concern is not photographs alone. Timelines. Patterns. Staff schedules. Supply access. Daylight movement.”
“Who recovered devices?” I asked.
“Witch teams and human-facing security. Quietly. No exposure.”
“Good.”
The word contained none of what I felt.
Lucian had sent eyes to my club in daylight. Human eyes. Disposable eyes. He had come himself at night to test the boundaries of my absence. If he wanted to know whether Grace had fled to me, he had gone looking for the crack in the wall.
He would find stone.
“What did he ask you directly?”
Shad’s posture did not change.
“He requested an audience with the king.”
“Your response?”
“I informed him His Majesty was out of the city for a few weeks.”
Bohdan’s brows lifted slightly.
“A few weeks,” he repeated.
Shad’s expression remained grave. “Specific enough to irritate. Vague enough to be useless.”
My brother looked pleased despite himself.
“Lucian pressed,” Shad sounded irritated. “He asked whether your absence was related to court business, family business, western territorial concerns, or an unscheduled visit to Philadelphia.”
Grace’s fingers curled at her sides.
Lucian knew enough to name the direction of travel. Or he guessed because our family’s gravity always pointed back to my father. Either way, he had placed Philadelphia into the room.
“And you said?” I asked.
Shad’s gray eyes met mine through the screen.
“I informed him that the travel itinerary of the sovereign was of no concern of lessers.”
For one beat, silence held.
Then Grace muttered under her breath and with feeling, “I bet Lucian was thrilled with the dismissal.”
Bohdan looked at her.
Shad’s mouth almost moved.
I did not smile, though something savage in me appreciated her tone more than diplomacy permitted.
“He was controlled,” Shad said. “Which is to say, yes.”
Grace’s gaze remained fixed on the screen, but her face had gone pale beneath the returned warmth in her skin.
Not bloodless. She was no longer that. But the name Lucian had reached into the room and placed old trauma at her back.
I could feel it. Not the details. Not her memories.
Only the bond’s low warning, the echo of terror disciplined into stillness.
I would end him. Not quickly. Not unless Grace asked it.
“Any sign he knows Grace is alive?” I asked.
Grace’s head turned toward me. I used the word deliberately. Alive. Not with me. Not turned. Not transformed. Alive.
Shad understood. “No confirmation. His questions suggest suspicion, not certainty. But I would not assume ignorance. We knew that after prolonged feeding from her, there was the possibility of him being able to have an awareness of her.”
Grace’s breath faltered.
I looked at Shad. “Remy took care of shielding her.”
“Yes,” Shad concurred. “Between your blood in her body and Remy’s protection, he only knows what he’s lost. How to find her is another story.”
What he lost. My vision sharpened.
A lesser man might have objected to the phrasing.
I understood it for what it was: operational language, not moral concession.
Lucian had lost access to a victim. A source.
A humiliation he enjoyed preserving. A woman he had never owned and would still describe as property because evil was often lazy in its vocabulary.
Grace’s voice came quietly. “He’ll come.”
The room turned toward her.
She was not looking at any of us. Her eyes had fixed somewhere just past the monitor, not unfocused, but inwardly aligned with a conclusion.
“If he thinks I ran to you, and now you’re gone from Vegas, and your staff won’t give him answers, he’ll come,” she said. “Maybe not personally at first. But he’ll come after the thing he thinks embarrassed him.”
“Yes,” I said. “Likely.”
She nodded once. No comfort accepted. No comfort requested.
I looked back at Shad. “Continue surveillance. Every camera angle. Every ward echo. Every staff report, no matter how small.”
“Understood.”
“No confrontation with Lucian’s people unless they violate club rules or threaten staff. If they do, remove them cleanly and hold them.”
Shad’s eyes sharpened. “Alive?”
“For now.”
Bohdan’s gaze flicked to me.
Grace did not.
She kept looking at the monitor as if she might crawl through it and cross-examine the entire city of Las Vegas by force.
“Update me the minute anything changes,” I said. “If Lucian returns, I am notified before he finishes crossing the threshold.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
Shad inclined his head. “My lady. Bohdan.”
The screen went dark.
The office seemed smaller without his image and larger with what he had left behind.
For several seconds, no one spoke.
Bohdan pushed away from the desk.
“Father and Devon have already left the club,” he said. “They are en route to the estate.”
I nodded.
“Nikolay and Maddie will follow shortly.”
“Good.”
His eyes shifted briefly toward Grace. “Lucia and Ryder have just arrived.”
Grace went still.
Not from recognition of the names alone.
I had briefed her. She knew Lucia was my sister, my father’s daughter.
She knew Ryder was her mate, the hybrid wolf-vampire doctor.
But knowledge at a table in Vegas was different from bodies waiting in the same house.
Names had been manageable when they were future problems. Now they had arrived.
My family gathered like weather.
Father. Devon. Nikolay. Maddie. Lucia. Ryder. Bohdan soon behind us. Taras somewhere in the building, already aware of half this before anyone told him and irritated by the other half on principle.
Grace’s pulse rose. She kept her chin up. The courage of that small motion did something violent to me.
Bohdan saw it too. His face softened by the narrowest degree.
“Lucia is unlikely to overwhelm you intentionally,” he said.
“Ryder may ask if you have eaten, slept, fed, healed properly, or considered sitting down before you fall down. He is a physician. They become tedious when attached to principles.”
Grace blinked.
Then, unexpectedly, she said, “I used to work with federal agents. I know tedious men with principles.”
“Then you are prepared.”
“Doubtful.”
“Preparation is often exaggerated.”
I looked at Bohdan. “You are not helping.”
“I rarely claim to.”
I stepped toward the door. “We leave now.”
Bohdan nodded. “I will be behind you on the way home. I need ten minutes with floor management and Amelia.”
“Take five.”
His brows lifted. “How generous.”
“You asked for ten because you wanted seven.”
“I asked for ten because Father married a fallen angel and now all of you have become emotionally perceptive at inconvenient times.”
I saw a slight smirk on Grace’s face and a small nod of her head as I opened the office door.
The privacy ward released us with a faint static brush over my skin. She moved beside me without prompting.
Her hands hung loose at her sides.
I shortened my stride to match hers.
She noticed.
“I can keep up,” she said.
“I know.”
“Then why are you walking slower?”
“Because I wish to.”
“That’s a bullshit answer.”
“It is the only one I am giving.”
She glanced up at me. Her eyes were bright and too intelligent for the comfort I wanted to offer.
“You Kozlov men are exhausting,” she said.
“Yes.”
“That was one syllable again.”
I held the door open for her, and we headed into the night air; she took my hand.