Page 56 of A Vicious Love

“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.”