Chapter 11
LEIF WOKE before the skyline bothered to glow.
Darkness pressed close to the glass, the city a low hum beneath the penthouse, but his body was already keyed up, nerves tight like wire.
Sleep had been nothing but shallow dips and sudden jolts.
His mother’s voice still lived in his head.
So did the shape of the lion burned into his palm.
Dante. The word sat like an iron weight in his chest, too heavy to carry and too true to deny.
A soft exhale brushed his shoulder. Mariah lay half on him, half against the pillows of her bed, his shirt riding high on her thighs, one bare leg tangled over his.
Her palm rested on his sternum. His heart beat hard against it, a steady drum that gave away more than he’d ever say aloud.
He looked at her mouth and wanted it. He looked at her throat and wanted that too.
He looked at the pale glow pulsing in her palm and wanted everything the Brand promised and everything it threatened to take.
Her lashes lifted. Sleep clung to her eyes, turning the hazel dark. “You’re watching me.”
“I was thinking.” His voice came out low with the night. “And failing.”
“About the ledger.”
“Yeah.” He stilled. “How did you know about that?”
“You mumbled it,” she said, a ghost of a smile at the corner of her mouth. “Ledger. Mother. Dante. Proof.”
He caught her hand and pressed it harder to his chest like he needed the touch. “My mother told me there’s a book hidden behind the altar at the Dante chapel. A ledger that records every bloodline and vow. I need to see it. Hold it. Read it.”
“Then we go,” she said simply. “Together.”
He started to say it wasn’t safe. He started to tell her to stay. Both words died because neither was true. “With me,” he said instead. “Every second.”
“Agreed,” she whispered.
Her gaze flicked to his mouth. His to hers.
The distance between them vanished. He kissed her once, a brush that should have been nothing.
It wasn’t. Heat shot through him, a clean, brutal line.
He deepened it without meaning to, angling her chin, opening her to him.
She made a sound in her throat, soft and unguarded, and his control slipped for a beat before he slammed it back into place.
“Later,” he said against her lips.
“You keep promising me later.”
“I keep meaning it.” He stood, pulled her up, and didn’t let go of her hand.
She blinked at him, still flushed from the kiss, and smoothed her palms down his chest as if steadying herself. He covered one with his own, holding her there. For a moment they just breathed together, the air between them humming with everything he kept promising for later.
Then he tugged her close to his side. “Come on. A quick shower and then we’ve got ground to cover before the city wakes. I’ll show you the chapel, and the ledger that proves everything my mother said.”
Her fingers tightened around his. “Then let’s go,” she whispered.
He caught the edge of a smile and tugged her toward the bathroom for their shower. His guards had already retrieved a selection of her clothes from the apartment below his, hanging them neatly so she wouldn’t have to keep wearing borrowed shirts.
After they’d dried off, she slipped into a fresh blouse and skirt while he buttoned his dark shirt, and they dressed quickly, stealing touches as they moved—his palm sliding over her hip as she smoothed the fabric at her waist, her fingers brushing his collar into place.
Every graze of skin promised what he kept pushing to later.
When they were ready, he laced his fingers with hers again and led her out into the waiting dawn.
THE CHAPEL kept its own kind of quiet. Not holy so much as watchful, air heavy with old incense and older secrets.
Leif pushed the door shut, the click soft, final.
He set his palm to the small of Mariah’s back and absorbed the fine tremor in her spine.
She wasn’t afraid of places. She was afraid of people.
He knew the difference. He also knew she wasn’t leaving his touch until he said so.
“Where?” she asked, voice muted so the place wouldn’t echo with it.
He walked her to the altar. Carved wood, smooth where hands had worn it down, a nick where a candle had bled wax and someone had scraped it clean years ago. He found the seam by touch, based on his mother’s description. Pressure. Shift. The panel sighed. A compartment slid open.
The ledger looked like a thing made to outlast men. Thick leather. Hand-sewn spine. Pages with deckled edges and the faint scent of dust that had been part of church air for generations. He lifted it free. Mariah came closer until her shoulder pressed his arm. He didn’t move her away.
He opened to the beginning because he needed the rhythm of it. Names, dates, witness marks, the careful precision of a family that wrote itself into permanence. He turned page after page until the world narrowed to ink and breath. Then he found her.
Leticia Dante. The script tilted, elegant and steady. A note in the margin in a different hand: severed on marriage, 19—. His jaw worked. He read it twice anyway. Beneath, one more line, tighter letters as if the writer had been fighting their own hand.
Leif. Born of Leticia. Recorded by right of blood.
The breath he took hurt, like a door opening inside his ribs. Like something he’d been braced against his whole life had stopped pushing quite so hard.
“It’s true,” he said. It wasn’t relief. It wasn’t victory. It was something older than either.
Mariah’s fingers slid over his, warm skin on colder skin. “You already knew,” she said softly.
“Yes.” He swallowed and set his palm flat to the page like a man swearing a vow. “But I needed it confirmed.”
The lion in his skin warmed, answering a mark that wasn’t ink at all. He closed the book before he could sit here and bleed into memory. He returned it to its hollow and pressed the panel shut.
He turned to Mariah, caged her face in his hands, and kissed her like this place could hold another secret.
She rose onto her toes, hands fisting in his shirt.
He tasted the last of sleep on her tongue and something lit under his skin and climbed.
He pulled her closer until her chest flattened to his and her breath stuttered into his mouth.
His thumb stroked along her cheek. Her body answered. So did his.
“Leif,” she breathed when he broke away.
“If I don’t stop now, I won’t stop at all,” he murmured, resting his forehead to hers and breathing her in. He stepped back because if he didn’t, the ledger wouldn’t be the only thing they’d lay across the altar and that would just be wrong in every possible sense.
They left the chapel the way they’d come: his hand on her back, hers curled in his. Outside, morning had found the edges of the city. The river ran a dark line in the distance, slate and quiet under the levees.
Leif paused on the steps, drawing her close so the chill couldn’t touch her.
The quiet after what they’d seen and confirmed pressed in heavy, but her fingers flexed against his like she was reminding him she was real, present, and his to protect.
He dropped a kiss to her hair, a fleeting promise, then straightened, already shifting back into the Boss the city needed to see.
By the time they slid into the car, the burden of what he’d learned had hardened into resolve. The ledger had given him proof. Now it was time to put that proof to work.
And that meant facing his brothers.
The elevator doors opened to a different kind of chapel.
Steel and glass. Money and power. Magnus was already there, hands on hips, shoulders tight, the look in his pale green eyes equal parts challenge and dare.
Alaric sat in Leif’s chair like it was a chaise at some old villa, one ankle propped on a knee.
He was smiling a little. Alaric smiled when knives came out.
“You pulled us at six,” Magnus said without preamble. “Someone better be dead or crowned.”
Leif didn’t stop moving. “Both.” He let Mariah go only long enough to take the head of the table and then tugged her into the chair at his right. He kept a hand on her knee under the table. “We’re Dantes.”
Silence hit like a bell. Alaric’s brows lifted a fraction. Magnus went very still.
“Say it again,” Magnus said quietly.
Leif met his gaze. “Mother was Leticia Dante. There’s a Dante ledger that confirms it.
It also references my birth. She was cut when she married our father.
But they didn’t take into consideration that blood doesn’t cut.
” He turned his palm up briefly. The lion had quieted to a dark brand again. “Now you know why this appeared.”
Magnus swore, a low, careful word that sounded like he didn’t want to give it too much air. “So we’re half of something we were raised to hate.”
“By our father,” Leif thought to mention.
“We’re what we are,” Alaric said mildly, eyes sharp anyway. “Information is leverage. This is a lot of it.” He tipped his head at Mariah without looking away from Leif. “And you brought a witness.”
His words were edged with challenge. It wasn’t idle commentary. It was his way of testing his brother, of pressing to see whether Mariah was truly trusted, whether Leif would defend her place at the table or treat her as disposable currency.
Leif’s thumb pressed into the inside of Mariah’s knee. “I brought someone whose presence under my roof is not up for a vote.”
Magnus’s gaze flicked to the faint golden pulse in Mariah’s palm where the Brand lived. He grunted. “Some things vote themselves.”