Chapter Three #2
Zephyr Kontos. Twenty-six years old. Five-foot-five and maybe a hundred and fifteen pounds soaking wet. My employee. My brand-new, probationary, talks-too-much, found-thirty-million-dollars employee.
And I was standing in a doorway like a man who had forgotten how doors worked, thinking about the specific way his throat would look when I had my hand around it.
This was a problem.
I turned and walked down the hall. My boots sounded louder than they should have. The ghost of Geno’s cologne caught me near the study—cedar and dishonesty, the stale signature of a man whose ghost was still doing more damage than he ever had alive.
I kept walking.
The kitchen was cool and quiet. Stone countertops, cabinets that went clear to the ceiling, and copper pots hanging from a rack that had been there longer than I had.
I poured coffee into a clean mug—black, no sugar, the way I’d been drinking it since I was sixteen and the docks taught me that anything sweet was a luxury I couldn’t afford.
The mug warmed my palms. I stood there and stared at the wall and let the heat seep into my hands while my brain did the thing it always did when confronted with a problem it couldn’t solve with knives or threats or cold silence.
It made a list.
One: He was my employee. Employee-boss dynamics were a liability in any business.
In this business, they were the kind of liability that got people killed or, worse, gave Alexios ammunition.
My uncle had been looking for a weakness since the day I took the seat.
The last thing I needed was for that weakness to be five-foot-five, blond, and currently eating caramels at his desk while reorganizing shell corporations I hadn’t known existed.
Two: Zephyr was unpredictable. Unpredictable meant dangerous.
Dangerous meant I couldn’t trust him, and trust was the one currency this family couldn’t afford to lose any more of.
He talked too much. He moved too fast. He’d found thirty million dollars in an afternoon and returned it like it was a library book he’d accidentally kept past the due date.
Men who moved that quickly through other people’s money were either very good or very something else, and I hadn’t decided which one he was yet.
Three: The family was fractured. Alexios wanted my seat.
Theo wanted whatever his father told him to want.
The old guard was watching, waiting, measuring.
Bringing a civilian this deep into the operation was already a risk.
Bringing a civilian I wanted to bend over my desk was the kind of risk that didn’t have a category because nobody was stupid enough to create one.
Four: Zephyr was too comfortable. Men who weren’t afraid of me were either very brave or very stupid, and brave men got brave ideas, and brave ideas got people killed. I couldn’t afford to be distracted by someone who looked at me and saw a puzzle instead of a threat.
Five: He could be working for someone else. Alexios. Theo. One of the families. The ease with which he’d navigated those shell corporations suggested either extraordinary talent or extraordinary preparation, and I wasn’t in the habit of assuming the former when the latter was still on the table.
Six: He was a man. I was a man. The Romano family already thought I was weak for being gay.
Weak meant vulnerable. Vulnerable meant target.
The conclave was months away and every eye would be on the Romano table, measuring, calculating, looking for the crack they could widen. I couldn’t give them one.
Seven: I didn’t do this. I didn’t want things.
Wanting was a luxury. Wanting was what got men like Geno killed—wanting power, wanting respect, wanting things that weren’t theirs to take.
I had built my life on the absence of want.
On necessity. On the cold, clear calculation of survival.
Wanting Zephyr Kontos was the kind of arithmetic that came out wrong no matter how many times I ran the numbers.
The list was thorough. It was logical. It covered every angle, every risk, every reason this was a catastrophe waiting to happen. It was also, I noted with the same cold clarity I applied to everything, not going to be enough.
Because the part of me that wanted him didn’t care about the list. The part of me that had stood in that doorway and catalogued the curve of his neck and the way his fingers moved over the keys and the concentration in his face when he was working through something stubborn—that part didn’t give a damn about employee dynamics or family politics or the conclave or anything else on the list.
That part was older. Wilder. The part that had been running the docks at sixteen, that had built a crew from men nobody else wanted, that had taken a seat nobody thought I deserved and held it through sheer refusal to let go.
That part looked at Zephyr and saw something it wanted to keep, and keeping meant possession, and possession in my world looked a certain way, and that way involved my hands and his skin and the specific sound he would make when I—
I put a stop to that thought and drank the coffee. It was too hot. I drank it anyway, feeling the burn all the way down, welcome in its simplicity. Pain was honest. Coffee was honest. Wanting was complicated in ways I didn’t have the vocabulary for.
The lighter flicked open in my palm. The small flame held steady, orange against the dark kitchen, casting a warm glow that didn’t belong there. I watched it for a count of three. Then I snapped it shut and set it on the counter.
Back to work. The mountain estate didn’t run itself. The ledgers didn’t balance themselves. The families were watching, and I had a list of fifty-three problems that didn’t include the problem of a man that made me think of things I shouldn’t want.
I rinsed the mug. Set it in the sink. The kitchen was quiet.
The house was quiet. Somewhere down the hall, Zephyr Kontos was muttering over spreadsheets and forgetting his tea existed, and I was standing in a kitchen staring at a wall, carrying the weight of a want I had no intention of acting on and every intention of remembering.
The list was thorough. It was logical.
It wasn’t enough.
I picked up the lighter and went back to the study. The ghost of Geno’s cologne caught me at the doorway. Cedar and dishonesty. The smell of a man who had wanted too much and gotten exactly what he deserved.
I stepped through it and closed the door behind me.