8. Jamison
CHAPTER EIGHT
JAMISON
Iwoke up hungry, and hungover. Blood was dried across my knuckles. A smear on my forearm where my sleeve had ridden up sometime between two in the morning and whatever fucking hour it was now. I stared at it and tried to remember if it was mine.
Probably not.
My bedroom was floor-to-ceiling glass, Harlan spread out.
Rain dragged thin lines down the windows. The city looked expensive and full of people I wanted very badly not to speak to.
I reached for the cigarette on the marble tray beside the bed.
I swallowed two painkillers with leftover whiskey and lit the cigarette before my stomach could object. The first drag burned down my throat.
My phone started vibrating.
I ignored it.
It stopped.
Started again.
I took another drag and watched rain slide down the glass. The phone kept going. I grabbed it so hard the screen nearly cracked.
“What?”
“Sir,” Reeves said, voice already tight. “We have a convoy approaching the west gate.”
I exhaled smoke. “Then shoot someone.”
“It’s Crow, sir.”
My headache sharpened.
“Which Crow?”
Another pause. The kind that meant the answer was about to ruin my morning.
“Damius Crow.”
The cigarette burned between my fingers.
“Say that again,”
“Damius Crow’s convoy is approaching your residence.”
Of fucking course my grandfather had crawled out of Villain like an old god with a grudge and decided my house needed haunting before noon.
I looked down at my bloody hand. “Tell security to stand down.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And tell anyone who asks that I’m unavailable.”
“For how long?”
I took another drag. “Until somebody dies or he leaves. Whichever comes first.”
I ended the call.
For a few seconds, I sat there listening to the quiet penthouse around me. Then the front doors opened. My house had looked at Damius Crow and decided locks were decorative.
I laughed once under my breath.
Fucking great.
I stood, dragged on black trousers, didn’t bother with a shirt, then remembered Damius enjoyed making people feel undressed in ways that had nothing to do with clothes. I pulled on a black shirt, left it open at the throat, and didn’t bother with the blood.
Let him see it.
By the time I walked out of my bedroom, he was already in my living room.
Damius Crow he near the glass wall, hands clasped behind his back, looking out at Harlan… bored. As if the whole city had failed to impress him. He turned his head when I entered.
His gaze moved over my face, my bare throat, the cigarette in my hand, the dried blood on my knuckles.
Damius didn’t give a reaction.
I could bleed out on his shoes. And Damius would look at all of it as if assessing furniture placement.
“Jamison.”
“Grandfather.”
His mouth did not move. “You look poorly.”
“I woke up to find out you were in my city. That tends to ruin a man’s complexion.”
“This is not your city.”
I took a drag of the cigarette. “It was before breakfast.”
His eyes returned to the windows. “Harlan is soft.”
“Harlan makes money.”
He looked around my living room then. The black marble floors, bar, the wall of whiskey. Then to the private lift. Armed men stationed discreetly beyond the hall. Everything I had built.
“You’ve made yourself comfortable.” His gaze settled on me again.
“I’ve made myself rich.”
“A common mistake.”
Five minutes in, already stripping. Damius didn’t need to raise his voice, to make his disappointment loud.
I crossed to the bar and poured whiskey over ice because I couldn’t deal with him sober and the painkillers had not yet decided if they were going to help or punish me.
“It’s early,” he said.
“It was early when you opened my fucking doors.”
“You were awake.”
“Not by choice.”
He watched me drink. “I watched your hotel burned.”
“Part of it.”
“Your casino accounts are being challenged.”
“By dead men who haven’t realized it yet.”
“Your licensing routes are compromised.”
“Temporarily.”
“Your western investors are nervous.”
“They should be.”
“Your name in Harlan society has become unstable.”
I laughed under my breath. “My name in Harlan society has always been unstable. That’s why they move when I walk in.”
His gaze sharpened. “Fear is not stability.”
“No,” I said. “But it clears rooms faster.”
Damius turned fully then, and the living room seemed to shrink around him.
I hated that.
That even at twenty-eight, with blood on my hands, some old, trained part of me still recognized him as the thing every Crow learned to survive.
“The Bellemere merger is precious,” he said.
I took a drink because if I didn’t, I might show him which nerve he’d found.
“Precious,” I repeated. “That’s sentimental for you.”
“It is strategic.”
“Everything is strategic to you.”
“Only because sentiment has never won a dynasty.”
“Neither has marrying off girls to pay dead people’s debts.”
Damius’s eyes cooled. I had stepped too close to something.
Good.
I hoped it hit.
“I gave you an eighteen-year-old fiancée,” he moved from the window toward the bar.
My fingers tightened around the glass.
“She was eighteen,” he continued, “and you were twenty-five when the merger became official.”
“I can count.”
“Can you? Because according to my sources, you have not married her.”
“No.”
“Or fucked her.”
The glass cracked in my hand. A thin line running through crystal beneath my palm. Damius looked at it, then back to me. I set it down very carefully.
“She was eighteen,” I said.
“I recall her age.”
“No, you didn’t.” My voice went low. “You heard numbers. I saw a girl.”
“A girl with valuable blood.”
“A girl,” I snapped. “Standing next to Harlan’s monster because you needed press photographs.”
Damius stared at me.
I leaned forward, palms on the bar. “And I made sure the world knew I wasn’t fucking an eighteen-year-old because I’m a bastard, not a cliché in one of Harlan’s dirty little family rooms.”
“For the bloodline,” he corrected.
“She was barely out of school.”
“She was old enough under law.”
“Law is what weak men hide behind when they know morality won’t survive daylight.”
“Careful, Jamison.”
I smiled without warmth. “I haven’t been careful in years.”
“No,” he said. “That is increasingly apparent.”
I lifted the cracked glass and finished the whiskey anyway. Damius watched that too. He watched everything. The old bastard would know exactly what each of his grand sons were doing in this moment.
“Your restraint would be admirable,” he said, “if it were not attached to negligence.”
I slammed the glass down.
It broke this time. One clean fracture, then another. Whiskey spread over the bar. I didn’t give a fuck. I was not in the mood for this conversation. Though. When it came to her. I was never in the right mood.
“Don’t dress this up as concern for Sienna.”
“Sienna,” he said.
The sound of her name in his mouth made my hand curl. I hated that something possessive moved in me despite the fact I had spent years trying to keep that exact instinct starved.
“Interesting,” His eyes flicked to my hand.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Whatever fucking experiment is running behind your eyes.”
“You made that girl stand next to Harlan’s monster for press. Your words. Not mine.”
“Because that’s what you wanted.”
“I wanted a marriage.”
“I wanted time.”
“For what?”
For her to get older. And for Sienna to stop smiling at me like I could be turned into something less awful if she just said my name softly enough.
Maybe in time, I could stop thinking about how small her hand felt in mine. And how much I wanted to keep her to keep my hand each time she took it.
I reached for another glass.
“You have had years.”
I poured whiskey. “I’ve been busy.”
“Yes. You have built clubs. Hotels. Casinos. You have destabilized old Harlan families, purchased judges, and made yourself the most feared man in the city.”
“Your praise is overwhelming.”
“And yet you have failed to replace a handler’s ring.”
When the engagement had been announced, a Crow handler had delivered it. A diamond set in antique gold, expensive enough for photographs, impersonal enough to mean nothing. It was meant to be replaced within a month of the public announcement.
It had been three years.
Sienna still wore the token, for a man who did not come.
Damius watched my silence. “She has no engagement ring from you.”
“She has a ring.”
“She has evidence of administrative compliance.”
I drank.
The whiskey did nothing.
Damius moved closer to the bar. “Do you know what is attached to Sienna Bellemere’s name?”
I laughed, harsh. “Fucking nothing.”
His gaze sharpened.
I kept going because the hangover, and the morning had stripped my patience down to bone.
“The Bellemeres made sure of that. They attached no property. No voting corridor. No controlling trust. No meaningful shares. No operational holdings. Nothing. I get nothing from Sienna but a girl who smiles too fucking much and doesn’t know how to shut up.”
The words left my mouth easily. Too easily. Like I had practiced them because I had.
In my head.
At bars.
In cars.
Beside her.
Every time she asked about my day. She told me about ballet. Reached for my hand and made something under my ribs go still in a way I did not like.
A girl who smiles too much, and doesn’t know how to shut up.
Except she had stopped.
The thought came before I could block it.
She hadn’t spoken the last two events.
She had nodded. Answered in tiny, polished pieces. Stood beside me like a beautiful ghost in silk.
No Jamjam.
No hand, please.
The little stories about rehearsal, had all stopped.
It had annoyed me.
No.
That was a lie.
It had gotten under my skin. Her silence had crawled into the room beside me and stayed there. I told myself I liked it. Finally, she had learned. Finally, no chirping. No tugging at me in public.
But every time she stood there quietly, something in me went looking for the noise.
Damius’s eyes had not left my face.
“You are thinking of something,” he said.
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“You miss her voice.”
I looked up slowly.
“Say that again.”
“You heard me.”