Chapter 8
1100 Words
Kael
My father had a rule..He ran a small legitimate club out of South Jersey, nothing glamorous, forty members at its peak, men who rode on weekends and worked construction and auto shops during the week. He had one rule he repeated so often it became wallpaper. ‘We don't lie to each other in this house. Outside these walls, do what you have to. In here, we tell the truth.’
He believed it, He lived it and in the end it didn't save him from anything. Aldric Voss came for his club when I was nineteen. Not with guns but with paperwork, debt instruments, leveraged properties, a network of legal pressure so carefully constructed that by the time my father understood what was happening, the walls were already closing. I watched him try to hold it together for two years. I watched him sign things he shouldn't have signed and agree to things he should have died before agreeing to, because he was trying to protect his men and his family and everything he had built with his hands.
He died at sixty-one. Heart failure, the doctors said. I knew better. Some men break from the outside. My father broke from the inside, slowly, over two years, and called it natural causes.
I built everything after that with one purpose underneath it. Not money. Not territory. Not the brotherhood, though that became real and I did not take it lightly. Underneath all of it, always, one purpose.
Aldric Voss..
I stood in Soren's doorway and looked at the back of his head and felt the particular cold that came over me when someone I trusted moved without telling me.
"You left her a note."
He turned in his chair. His face was the same as always, composed, giving nothing away. We had been working together for four years and I still found it remarkable, the way he could sit inside a decision he knew would cost him something and show absolutely nothing.
"I did," he said.
"Without telling me."
"If I had told you, you would have said no."
"That's the point, Soren."
He didn't flinch. "You're keeping her in the dark about her own father. About a man who sat across a table from you and trusted you with his life."
The word landed the way he intended it to. I didn't move.
"I kept her in the dark because she has enough to carry right now," I said. "Because her sister is in a Voss holding property and Isolde is two degrees from breaking and the last thing she needs tonight is one more thing she can't fix."
"You kept her in the dark because you don't want to have that conversation." He said it without heat, without accusation, just flat and clean the way he said everything. "Those are different reasons and you know it."
I walked into the room, not toward him, Just inside, away from the door, because standing in doorways was a dominance posture and what I felt right now was not dominance. It was something I didn't have a comfortable name for.
"You don't know what happened to Damien Vale," I said.
"Neither do you.. Not completely."
"I know I didn't order it."
"I know that too." He looked at me steadily. "That's not the only question."
The room was quiet. One of his laptops was still open, something running on the screen I didn't look at. The coffee beside it had been cold for a long time. This was how Soren lived, in the middle of information, fueled by nothing, sustained by the work itself.
I had trusted him for four years because he was the most honest person I had ever put in a room. That honesty was useful right up until it turned in my direction.
"She'll hear it one way," I said. "Her father came to me. Her father died. She'll put those two things together and she'll build a wall."
"Maybe."
"There's no maybe. You know how people work."
"I know how most people work." He paused. "I'm less certain about her."
I thought about Isolde standing in the yard watching Marcus drive away. I thought about her face when he said what he said, the way it went through her like something physical, and the way she pulled it back inside herself in the space of three seconds. Not performance. Actual control. The kind built from practice, from a life that had required it.
"She'll find out anyway," Soren said. "You're not choosing whether she knows. You're choosing how she finds out. From you, or from someone who doesn't care what it does to her."
I looked at the floor. The cold thing in my chest was moving, rearranging itself into something I liked less.
Damien Vale had sat across from me in a rented room with his evidence laid out between us and he had looked at me and said: I need to know this gets used. And I had told him it would. I had meant it.
Twenty-nine days.
I had been three days away from moving when Soren told me Damien was dead. I had sat with that for a long time in a room by myself. I had decided that Aldric found the leak through his own network and moved first. I still believed that. But belief and certainty were not the same room and I had always known it.
I left Soren without another word. Not because I was finished but because I had run out of arguments that felt clean.
The hallway was quiet. I walked to Isolde's door and I stopped.
The light was still on underneath it. She was awake. She had the note. She was on the other side of that door right now with four words and every question they unlocked and no answers yet.
I raised my hand to knock, I stood there. My knuckles were an inch from the wood and I could not make myself close that distance. Because Soren was right about one thing. I knew exactly what I wanted to say and I knew exactly how she would hear it and the gap between those two things was large enough to lose something in.
My phone rang.
I dropped my hand and pulled it from my pocket, Unknown number. I almost didn't answer.
I answered anyways..Silence for one second. Then a woman's voice, smooth and careful, the kind of voice that had learned to carry weight without showing it.
"Hello, Kael." A pause. "We need to meet. It's about the girl."
- Writer
