Chapter 4 - THE BROTHER
Damon Cross arrived at the estate at two o’clock for their standing Tuesday meeting, which covered operational updates, financial reviews, and the dozen small strategic decisions that kept the organization running.
Damon was thirty-eight, broad through the shoulders, with a face that had been broken and reset enough times that it had an interesting quality — not handsome, exactly, but compelling. The kind of face you kept looking at to figure out. He’d been with Rhett for eleven years. He was the only person Rhett would call without qualification a friend. The only person Rhett had told things to that he hadn’t told anyone else. The only person besides Marcus who would tell him when he was wrong.
He came into the study, shook the rain off his jacket, dropped into the chair across from Rhett’s desk, and said, “I heard you brought someone home.”
“Word travels.”
“Seventeen-room estate, one new occupant. Yeah. Word travels.” Damon looked at him. “She okay?”
“Three cracked ribs, soft tissue damage. She’ll be fine.”
Damon was quiet for a moment. He had a way of being quiet that contained more information than most people’s words. Rhett had learned to read it over eleven years, the same way you learn to read weather. This particular quiet had weight to it.
“She works for you,” Damon said.
“She does.”
“You don’t usually.”
“I know what I usually do,” Rhett said. The edge in his voice was slight. Just enough.
Damon heard it and redirected. “What are you doing about the guy?”
“Watching.”
Damon nodded. He knew what watching meant in this context. It meant Kane had acquired a shadow, would acquire a shadow, would find that certain things that had been open to him were now more difficult. Not violence. Pressure. The kind of pressure that didn’t leave marks but shaped behavior.
“What do you need from me?” Damon asked.
“Nothing on this. I handled it.”
Another wait in the silence. Then Damon looked down at the file on the desk between them and said, “Right. So the Brixton territory. We’ve got a problem.”
They spent the next two hours on business. It was good business — clean, focused, productive. And at some point in the middle of it, Rhett became aware that Damon’s attention was not entirely on the files. It was moving occasionally toward the ceiling, toward the floor above them, which was where the guest suite was, which was where Isa was.
He filed this away. He didn’t examine it yet.
After Damon left, Rhett sat at his desk in the gray afternoon light, thinking about the configuration of forces in his house and in his city and in his own chest, and how they were beginning to intersect in ways that were going to require very careful navigation.
He was still thinking about it when his phone rang with a number he hadn’t expected and hadn’t heard in a long time.
He looked at the number for a moment, then the name below it registered. He felt something move through him that was not anger and not fear but occupied the same space as both.
Victor Draven.
Victor Draven, who ran the largest rival organization in the Midwest. Victor Draven, who had been trying to take pieces of Rhett’s territory for three years. Victor Draven, who had never once called him directly — who communicated through intermediaries and border skirmishes and the occasional corpse left somewhere visible.
Victor Draven was calling his personal number.
Rhett sat very still for exactly three seconds. Then he answered.
“Mr. Valin,” said the voice on the other end. Smooth, carefully modulated, the voice of a man who had spent a great deal of time deciding how he sounded. “I believe you have something of mine.”
Rhett’s hand tightened very slightly on the phone. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do,” Victor Draven said. “Her name is Isla. And she’s my sister.”
The silence that followed was the loudest thing Rhett had heard in years.
He didn’t move. He sat behind his desk with the phone pressed against his ear and the name hanging in the air between them like smoke, and he breathed through it — in through the nose, out slow, the way he had trained himself to breathe when the ground shifted under him. Not because it calmed him, but because it bought him the two or three seconds he needed to decide who he was going to be in the next sixty.
“Say that again,” he said.
“Isla Draven,” Victor said. “Twenty-eight. Five-foot-five, dark hair, dark eyes. Works as a housekeeper under a name she chose herself when she decided she was too good for the family she came from.” A pause. “My sister, currently, I believe, inside your estate.”
Rhett’s thumb was pressed flat against the edge of the desk. He could feel the wood grain under it. He focused on that — the physical fact of the desk, the room, the specific weight of the phone — and kept his voice exactly where he needed it.
“You have a sister,” he said.
“I have a sister,” Victor said. “And you’re going to want to think very carefully about your next move, Mr. Valin. Because she is the one thing in this world I don’t negotiate about.”
“I don’t respond well to implications.”
“That wasn’t an implication. That was a courtesy call.”
Victor’s voice stayed smooth throughout. The kind of smooth that took work — a performance of composure rather than the genuine article. Rhett had been performing composure long enough to recognize the difference.
“Return her to me and we have no issue,” Victor said. “Keep her and we have every issue.”
“She’s not property,” Rhett said. “She can’t be returned.”
A beat.
“She is my family.”
“She’s a woman who works for me. She’s in my house because she was assaulted and needed medical attention.” He paused. “If she wants to speak to you, she’ll speak to you. That’s her choice. Not mine, not yours.”
The silence on Victor’s end lasted long enough to tell Rhett something useful: the man had expected either capitulation or aggression, and he had gotten neither, and the calibration was throwing him.
“You don’t know who she is,” Victor said finally.
“I know who she is to me,” Rhett said. “I’m going to end this call now. If you want to discuss territory or business, use the appropriate channels.” He paused. “Don’t call this number again.”
He hung up.
He set the phone on the desk in front of him and looked at it for a moment. Then he stood up slowly and walked to the window and stood there the same way he’d stood in his office the day before, watching the city.
But the city looked different now. It looked like it had rearranged itself while he wasn’t paying attention.
Victor Draven had a sister. Her name was Isla. And she was upstairs.
He didn’t go up immediately. That was a decision he made in the thirty seconds after hanging up. Not yet. Not while the information was still too new. Not while the particular combination of feelings moving through him hadn’t separated into anything he could manage individually.
He needed to know the shape of this before he walked into that room. He called Garrett.
“Victor Draven,” he said. “I need his full personal profile. Parents, siblings, domestic history. Fast.”
“How fast?”
“I’m walking upstairs in twenty minutes. Have something for me before then.”
Garrett called back in fourteen.
“Victor Draven, thirty-four,” Garrett said. “Took over the organization from his father, Marius Draven, six years ago after the old man’s stroke. One sister. Isla Marie Draven, twenty-eight. Left the family home seven years ago, no forwarding address. Victor’s had people looking for her on and off for the last five. Lost the trail in Cincinnati. Picked it up again briefly in Indianapolis. Nothing after that until—” Garrett paused. “Until now, apparently.”
“How did he find her?”
“Unknown. Could be the hospital call. Dr. Walsh’s practice has a patient registration system that could be—”
“Fix that,” Rhett said.
“Already on it.”
May you like
He hung up. Stood in the hallway at the base of the stairs. The house was quiet around him in the particular way it got in the late afternoon, when the day staff had cleared out and the evening security rotation hadn’t fully settled.
He went to the kitchen first.
