Page 114 of Maksym

“No argument.”

“No.”

“That tells me something.”

“What does it tell you?”

“That your family is more complicated than the seating chart implies.”

Despite the report waiting ahead, despite the scent of Lucian’s name already forming somewhere in my bones before it had been spoken aloud, I almost smiled.

“My dear,” I said, “you have no idea.”

Her answering look was tired, alert, and lit from beneath by something that had not existed before the stage.

“Then I suppose I’m about to learn.”

Bohdan opened the office door and held it for her.

“Unfortunately,” he said, with flawless courtesy, “yes.”

Bohdan’s office had none of the sensual theater he sold so expertly downstairs. It was not sterile, but it was honest in the way a blade was honest: made for work, kept clean, and never mistaken for decoration.

Dark wood dominated the room, but not extravagantly. His desk was broad, its surface nearly clear except for a closed leather folio, a slim keyboard, and a glass of blood wine he had abandoned long enough that the temperature had shifted. Two leather chairs sat angled toward a central monitor mounted within a wall of screens. The screens showed Obsidian in fragments: the main floor from above, the VIP stairwell, the private corridor outside feeding rooms, the basement casino with its green-black tables and dealers who never blinked at the wrong time.

Grace looked at the monitors first.

Good.

She noticed exits, angles, surveillance, the difference between indulgence and control. Obsidian displayed pleasure below and discipline behind its walls. Bohdan understood that better than most. He sold decadence the way a jeweler sold gems: polished, lit, and secured by systems no admirer was meant to see.

The door closed behind us.

The lock engaged with a soft click, followed by the subtler answering pulse of a privacy ward sliding into place. It did not feel like Amelia’s hand, exactly, but her work lived in the seams. Sharp, clever, slightly impatient. A ward that seemed to mutter at anyone foolish enough to test it.

Bohdan crossed to his desk.

“Shad contacted me,” he said.

The hallway tension vanished from my body as if a switch had been cut. What replaced it was colder and older.

“When?”

“While you were upstairs with Grace. I waited until you were off the public level.”

I looked at him.

Bohdan did not apologize. He did not need to. Pulling me from the VIP level while Grace was processing the demonstration in front of half the club would have been clumsy. Bohdan was many things. Clumsy had never been one of them.

“Bring him up,” I said.

He was already moving.

The central monitor woke up. Black glass became a secure connection screen, then resolved into Shad Devers seated in his office at Amethyst. The camera angled slightly upward, catching the dark sweep of the room behind him: violet-gray walls, a carved cabinet, one corner of the security map lit in soft blue. He wore a dress shirt open at the throat, sleeves rolled neatly to the forearms, understated and expensive in a way that suggested taste rather than vanity.

Shad himself filled the screen with calm authority.

Black, broad-shouldered, bald, gray-eyed, his light scruff catching enough office light to sharpen the line of his jaw. Some men tried to appear unbothered and achieved only arrogance. Shad possessed the rarer gift of making composure look useful. He had run Amethyst’s floor through witch feuds, demon debt disputes, intoxicated aristocrats, territorial vampires, and one extremely unfortunate incident involving a cursed roulette chip and a siren with poor impulse control.