Page 169 of Nikolay

“Not all of us are so quick to self-knowledge.”

“No,” I said dryly. “Some of us wait until a woman is tied to a stone and then announce our feelings over a corpse.”

He reached for the folder set near the edge of my desk and opened it to the marked reports within. The transition from fraternal commentary to business was seamless. We had spent too long working side by side for it to feel abrupt.

“Amethyst,” he said, “continues to outperform projections.”

Now I did smile properly.

He leaned over the ledger, tapping the figures. “Membership numbers continue to climb, higher in the VIP areas across the board. Vampires are still our biggest demo, but witches are catching up, demons aren’t far behind, whiny bastards. Amethyst isn’t just holding its own; it’s killing it.”

Hearing this success, pride swelled within me. My vision of a balanced club with the addition of overnight rooms had materialized, no longer an experiment but a venue rivaling Obsidian itself. “You’ve sharpened what we’ve built into a blade; now we keep it honed.”

Taras met my gaze, a fierce edge to his smile. “Agreed. Complacency would be the only true threat here. But I’ve got my foot on the gas, brother. I don’t intend to slow down.”

Satisfaction settled warm in my chest. Amethyst was no longer an experiment. It was a rival.

“You've done an excellent job, my king. The west holds.”

I smiled at him, calling me by my title. “It does.”

“Amethyst holds.”

“Yes.”

“You hold.”

I turned my head enough to study his face. Few people spoke to me in such a direct way. My twin was the exception.

“I do,” I said.

He glanced up at me then, hazel eyes cool and sharp in the half-light. “Try not to announce your immunity to catastrophe again in the future.”

“I made no such announcement. I simply observed a pattern.”

“Your pattern may be about to grow ambitious.”

I finished the glass and set it on the corner of the desk. “If catastrophe wishes an audience, it may request one through proper channels.”

Taras looked at me as if deciding whether to pray for me or leave me to my own education.

In the end, he said only, “Come. If we stay any longer, you will say something else reckless, and the desert will hear you.”

I collected my jacket from the stand by the door, gave the office one final sweep of satisfaction, and followed him out while below us the club’s pulse thickened into full evening.

If fate had been listening, it chose not to answer just yet.

The side door let out into the dry, cooling breath of the desert, and for a moment the ordinary ugliness of the industrial block felt almost elegant under the Vegas evening. The warehouse exterior remained exactly what I had designed it to be—unremarkable, forgettable, armored by understatement—save for the terracotta planters along the brick path where bougainvillea spilled dark blossoms over their rims and desert sage silvered in the failing light.

The sky had gone the deep bruised violet particular to desert evenings, that strange suspended color between heat and night, while the distant Strip burned on the horizon like a smear of electric vice too far away to offend me properly. Low industrial buildings hunched on either side of the street, all corrugated metal and loading bays and neglected asphalt. Nothing about the block suggested a supernatural court operated in its midst. That, too, pleased me.

My two-man detail fell in a few paces back the instant I stepped outside. Good men. Silent. Trained well enough to protect without performing protection for my vanity. Taras came beside me, hands in his trouser pockets, his posture loose in the deceptive way competent men wore it.

We had casually been discussing the Elder Council because their behavior of late continued to force my father and me to pay more attention to them than we had patience for.

“If the elder from Monterey says ‘collective stewardship’ to justify one more petty territorial incursion,” I said, “I will make it my mission to show him the collective quality of a shallow grave.”

Taras’s gaze remained on the path ahead. “That may be interpreted as a hardline position.”