The men shrank away from Shadera as she passed by and slipped into a narrow alley. She reached up, pulling down a rusted fire escape ladder, and watched as it descended in front of her. She hoisted herself onto the wobbling metal, climbed to the top of the abandoned warehouse, and pulled the ladder up behind her, locking it into place.

  Shadera paused to scan the horizon and sucked in a deep breath.

  The skyline was jagged, teeth of concrete and glass rising above the smoke. In the distance, the twin towers of the Heart glowed bright and white, a fixed star above a dead planet. She ground her teeth together as she stared at them.

  She remembered the night they came for her parents. Remembered the live stream, the screaming, the way her mother’s body hit the platform and didn’t get back up. She remembered what it felt like to pick up the knife afterward. How easy it was to carve out the soft parts of a man’s throat if you kept your hand steady.

  They’d called her a monster for what she did to that first Veyra. She didn’t care. Monsters were the only ones that survived this fucking city.

  She turned away from the skyline, letting the memories burn in the back of her mind. The utility door on the roof of the warehouse sat underneath a battered metal sign she’d drilled into the concrete.

  Kael Recycling—she let her eyes glide over it. It was the only physical evidence left in New Found Haven that her parents ever existed.

  To the Heart, she no longer existed. To the Heart, she had died the night of the raid.

  Shadera keyed the code into the lock, listening to the whirl of the mechanisms behind the door before it popped open. The stink of oil and hot metal was a comfort here, a private ache that belonged only to her.

  She stepped through the door, closing it at her back and waited until she heard the click of the last lock before moving away from it. Her lair was larger than it looked from the outside—a forgotten warehouse, once belonging to a logistics firm, now honeycombed with her own custom upgrades. Mismatched lamps shed pools of yellow light on the concrete, illuminating the walls covered in Heart blueprints, topographical overlays, and mug shots. The centerpiece of it all was the sprawl of the Heart itself, mapped in lines of red and black tape, every guard rotation, every checkpoint, every secret maintenance crawl noted with obsession.

  Dotted through the charts were faces—masked and maskless, pulled from black market feeds or captured by her own hand. The Serel family’s masks dominated the wall: the President, his wife, daughter, and two sons. Every face of that family was punctured by a knife, a dart, a sharpened bit of rebar, and in the eldest son’s case, a thick red X.

  Brooker Serel had been murdered. No one in the outer rings knew how or why, but one day he was on-screen completing live executions, the next his funeral was being broadcast. It didn’t take long for Greyson to step up and take his brother’s place as the Heart’s Executioner, which didn’t surprise Shadera. She knew how deeply the Serel family enjoyed the shedding of innocent blood.

  Her lips curled into a cruel smile as she stared at the wall and chucked another dagger toward Greyson’s masked photo. Soon, both sons of Maximus Serel would be dead, and he would have no male heir to run his poisoned little kingdom, when Shadera killed him next.

  She crossed to the wall, traced the path from the Cardinal’s service tunnels up to the base of the Heart, and marked a fresh access point she’d scouted months ago on the map. If the patrol schedules held, the tunnels would be dead from midnight to three a.m. More than enough time for her to get in unnoticed. Once she made it into the Heart, she’d climb the elevator shaft out of the maintenance tunnels, then split for the Serel residence tower. It was a suicide run for anyone else. For her, it was the only kind of job she accepted.

  A heavy sigh passed over Shadera’s lips as her tattooed arms slipped from her jacket, the black metallic ink shimmering against her brown skin. She shrugged out of the leather and draped it over the metal chair that sat in front of the desk pushed against the wall.

  Her eyes dropped to her skin as her fingers slid across the ridges of a newly healed scar on her forearm. She had a lot of new scars, but this one she earned lifting a package scanner from a Veyra officer. The job had been easy enough, she just hadn’t expected him to be so quick with a blade. In the end she got what she needed, and his body was slowly decomposing underneath chemical waste in the Cardinal.

  Next, she moved to the set of six lockers in the corner of the large space as she unsnapped the holster wrapped around her waist and thighs. She never left home without both her favorite guns strapped to her body. A CZ 75 and a Sig P320. Both had been used to try and kill her, and both Shadera had used to kill their previous owners. There was a beautiful kind of poetry to that, she thought.

  Her fingers wrapped around the lip of the first locker and pulled it open, setting both guns on the first shelf, and hanging the holster on a hook. She reached into the locker and snapped out the backing to reveal a hidden compartment, and a grin spread onto her lips. Her fist clamped around the handle of a slim black case. She pulled it out, walked to the desk, and set it on the surface before unlatching it.

  Inside, nestled in black foam, was the newest member of her arsenal. A Veyra-issued nine-mil, with the Heart’s insignia etched along the barrel. Shadera had been waiting for the moment she could use this gun. Waiting for a contract she could make look like an inside job. The beauty of Greyson being the one that would receive its bullet, when he’d put the very same bullets into hundreds of those from the Boundary, was a special kind of karma.

  She would make him kneel, she thought to herself, as she began to strip and clean it. She would say the same ritual words to him that he’d said hundreds of times before murdering innocent men and women.

  Greyson’s father had used the very same make of gun when he put the bullet in the back of her parents’ heads, when she was only ten years old. And in the twenty years since that day, she’d been waiting for her moment to take something from him.

  CHAPTER THREE ASK NO QUESTIONS

  THE HEART’S ENTERTAINMENT DISTRICT ran on blood and artifice. Every club and theater was a living organ in the city’s anatomy, pumping the elite through arteries of polished obsidian and gold-veined marble. On nights like this, the whole district shimmered with the pretense of pleasure—one-way glass and pheromone fog masking the rot beneath.

  Greyson moved with the indifference of a man born into luxury, onyx mask fixed so tight it seemed part of his skull. The stares that clung to him in the club lined corridor were all protocol and predator. Dancers in their crystalline bodysuits hoping he’d open his wallet, masked patrons high on Boundary spice, too out of their minds to recognize him. He ignored them, or pretended to. Every gesture was observed, cataloged, and noted for use in future blackmail if needed.

  Tonight, Greyson’s steps took him to the far end of the entertainment sector, an establishment dressed in platinum trim, playing shifting holograms of dancers whose bodies stretched and bled into one another with every pulse of the music. Above the entrance, sat a simple sign.

  Thane.

  Even in the Heart, only fools used family names for clubs—unless you were too powerful to care, or too dangerous to be touched.

  Callum Thane was both.

  The inside was a velvet womb, with shadows clinging to every corner. Low light accentuated the dancers on their platforms, and the masks staring up at them. Even for this early hour, the club was packed. There was always an uptick of business in Callum’s clubs the days after an execution, as if the elite needed to remind themselves that they were still alive.

  Greyson pushed through the crowd, making his way to the back where stairs leading to Callum’s office sat. He didn’t need a meeting, didn’t need an appointment to see himself up. The two guards standing at the base of the spiral stairs didn’t bother scanning his biometrics as he approached, only stepped aside so he could pass.

  He took the steps two at a time, hands pushed casually into the pockets of his black business casual attire, and watched as the large glass door slid open at his arrival.

  Callum waited for him, perched in a leather desk chair, mask shimmering with gold and copper filigree. The rest of him was covered in a dark suit, the top buttons of his crisp shirt open to accentuate the deep brown of his tattooed flesh where necklaces hung against his bare chest. His ringed fingers tapped a restless code against the desk. He was always in motion, even seated. Excessive energy coiled under the practiced languor of a Heart-bred host. The air in the room tasted of smoke, expensive gin, and bleach.

  “Grey,” Callum greeted as Greyson stepped inside the spacious office. He didn’t rise, just flicked two fingers in a lazy salute. “If you’re here to shut down my club, you’ll have to stand in line. Three Veyra have already come this week. But you can skip to the front.”

  Greyson eased the door closed behind him, the lock whispering shut. He crossed to the drinks cart—neatly curated with an array of options—and poured two fingers of gin into a tumbler.

  “Only three? I would’ve expected the entire militia with those private anti-scan rooms you just opened.”

  “You know how it goes. Law makers never live within the law. Of course, they left satisfied, and I gained three more secrets to keep them off my back.” Callum winked at Greyson as he lifted his own glass to the slit in his mask.

  Greyson huffed, it was as close to a laugh as he could muster. He set the glass down on the desk’s edge, and leaned over it, head lowered. For a moment, neither spoke.

  Callum’s mask caught the light, fracturing it into patterns that crawled across Greyson’s hands.

  “You’re not here for pleasure or shit talk,” he said. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Everything’s always wrong.” Greyson straightened, folding his arms. “Today it’s only more so.”

  Callum waited, letting the silence thicken. He always did this, forced Greyson to fill the void, to name the thing that clawed at him.

  Greyson looked away, eyes settling on the dance floor below through the one-way glass walls. “I hesitated, Cal. At the execution yesterday.”

  Callum stilled for only a breath, then lifted his glass to the slit in his mask again, taking another swig as the rings on his right hand clinked against the crystal. “I saw.”

  Greyson felt the anger again, rising hot beneath the cold. “She begged. Begged. It wasn’t dignified. But it was—” He couldn’t finish it, so he let the silence say the rest.

  Callum stood, smoothing his jacket with both hands. He closed the gap between them in four strides and rested a hand on Greyson’s shoulder. The gesture would’ve been dangerous outside the walls of this club where Veyra eyes could construe it as weakness. Here, it was necessary. Their masks hid nothing from each other, not really.

  “You do the best you can,” Callum said. “You always do.”

  Greyson looked at him. “That’s not true.”

  “You’re not your father, Grey. No matter how many times he tries to carve himself into you.” Callum squeezed, gentle but immovable. “You’re better than him. You still have a heart.”

  The words should’ve comforted, but instead they scraped him raw. “If I’m so much better, why did I put a bullet in that man’s head? Why have I put a bullet in hundreds of rebels’ heads?”

  Callum shrugged. “Because you’re not a fucking idiot. You still have survival instincts. If you didn’t, you’d both be dead. Maybe that’s not enough. But it’s something.”

  Greyson exhaled a slow, shaky breath. “He’s arranging a Vow. Moraine Daunt.”

  Callum whistled, low and sympathetic. “That’s quite the match. They’re not even pretending, are they?”

  Greyson shook his head. “He wants to make an example. Show the city I’m loyal. If I’m married off to that family, there’s no room for rumor.”

  Callum took his hand from Greyson’s shoulder and tapped his ring against the desk’s surface once. “They’re fucking right about that. Are you gonna do it?”

  “I don’t have a choice.” Greyson didn’t say the next part. That he was both afraid that he would, and that he wouldn’t.

  Callum eyed him, searching. “Why did you really hesitate, Grey?”

  Greyson didn’t answer at first. The memory of the woman’s scream hung in his mind, a ghost that refused to be exorcised.

  “Because,” he started, “her only crime was falling in love with a man from the Boundary.” He surprised himself with his honesty. “And though I cannot fathom being willing to die for such a feeble emotion, I thought maybe, if I let her go, it would… balance something. That it would start to heal the hurt my family has caused.”

  Callum shook his head. “Balance does not exist in New Found Haven. And it doesn’t matter whether it was by your hand, or the Veyra, she was never making it off that platform alive.”

  Greyson nodded. “I know.”

  “Besides,” Callum started again, his voice lighter now. “Love has brought down empires, and your father knows it.”

  Greyson snorted. “What do you know about love?”

  “Nothing.” Callum chuckled. “I only know of lust, and I would do unspeakable things in the name of lust. So, I can only imagine that if I found love, I’d also be willing to die for it.”

  Greyson smiled then, shaking his head but saying nothing.

  “Do you not love me, brother? Would you not die for me like I would die for you?” Callum added, with mock offense.

  Greyson downed the remainder of his drink. “I’d kill for you without question, but dying for you… that’s debatable.”

  A full-bodied laugh flowed from under Callum’s mask as he sat back down at his desk and propped his polished boots onto the surface. “You may still have a heart, but you lack emotion.”

  Greyson refilled his glass before falling into the chair across from him.

  “You have enough emotion for the both of us.” Greyson teased as he swirled the liquid in his tumbler.

  Callum’s smile reflected in his eyes. “That’s what got me kicked out of the Veyra training program. Too sentimental, and not enough of whatever the fuck they wanted me to be.”

  Greyson remembered the first time he and Callum met. Late-night tactical drills, both of them exhausted, masks fogged with sweat, neither willing to let the other win. Callum would sneak rations to the janitorial staff, would hack Heart surveillance just to prove that he could. That kindness, mixed with his brilliant mind, and firm hand, was what made Callum dangerous.

  “You ever regret not finishing?” Greyson asked.

  Callum shook his head. “I get to run my own show. Only now, I serve the liquor instead of the lies. Pleasure instead of death… for the most part.”

  Greyson flinched at the word. His only job was to serve death on that platform.

  Greyson studied him. “You do more good in this club than all the Veyra combined.”

  “Tell that to my father,” Callum said, voice brittle. “Last time I saw him, he told me I was a parasite. Feeding off the city’s vices.” He laughed, a hollow sound. “I told him it runs in the family.”

  Greyson’s lips curled. “I’m sure that went over well.”

  Callum shrugged. “He didn’t disown me. Guess he’s still hoping I’ll make a scandal big enough to get myself shot by you on live stream. Until then, he gets free drinks and plausible deniability.”

  Greyson swallowed back bile at the thought, the idea that his best friend could do something to land himself on that platform, and he would be the one ordered to take his life. Greyson would never do it. He would, in fact, die to protect Callum if it came down to it.

  For a time, neither spoke. The music from the club below swelled, muffled by the double glass, but still present, like the ache in his chest.

  Callum broke the silence. “So, what now?”

  Greyson stared at the mask stand on the far shelf, empty except for a single antique specimen—blackened iron, a relic of the first generation.

  Slowly he stood. “Now, I go to my family dinner. Pretend I care about the Vow, and try not to think about what comes after.”

  Callum nodded, rising as well. “And what does come after?”

  Greyson hesitated. “I don’t know. But something has to change.”

  Callum stepped in front of him again, this time closer. He pressed a hand to Greyson’s chest, right over his sternum. Greyson could feel his heart pounding against Callum’s palm. “Don’t let him take this from you, Grey. Not ever.”

  The masks made emotion unreadable, but the heat of Callum’s hand was real.

  “I won’t,” Greyson said, and meant it.

  Callum pulled his hand back with a flourish. “You know the old rule, right? If you break the Vow before the ceremony, you owe me a case of Boundary whiskey.”

  Greyson’s mouth quirked. “If I break the Vow, you’ll die of shock, and I’ll just be dead.”

  “I’ll die happy, then.” Callum’s laugh was softer this time. “Good luck with your mother. She terrifies me more than the President.”

  “Her silence terrifies everyone,” Greyson replied.

  Callum raised his glass in salute, found it empty, and mimed a toast anyway. “You’re going to get through this, Grey. You always do.”

  Greyson turned to go, then paused at the door. “Cal?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If anything happens to me, make them suffer.”

  Callum’s answer was immediate. “I’ve got you, brother.”

  Greyson nodded, then slipped from the room. The mask of the Executioner never left his face, but under it, for a moment, he could breathe.

  He cut through the club’s main room, ignoring the hungry looks and the whispers that trailed him like the scent of blood. Outside, the city waited, hungry for another show of power. He straightened his jacket, checked the watch on his wrist, and walked toward the dinner that always ended in threats.

  * * *

  THE SEREL RESIDENCE WAS a cathedral of old money and even older ambitions. No matter how much the rest of New Found Haven modernized, the President’s quarters remained untouched by anything as fragile as progress. Corridors of burnished black walnut led to the great dining hall, where generations of the Heart’s rule hung in oil and canvas, every ancestor rendered with the solemnity of a funeral mask.