The Oath of Five Sins

Chapter 4: The Charmer’s Razor

Marcus POV

I build beautiful things that hide ugly purposes.

That is not a confession. It’s just an accurate description of my profession. The fashion houses I own look exactly like fashion houses should look, clean showrooms, elegant staff, fabrics that cost more than most people’s monthly salary. Everything is organized, documented, completely above suspicion on paper.

What moves through them is nobody’s business but mine.

I am thirty-one years old and I have spent my entire adult life understanding one simple truth, the best hiding place is always in plain sight. Make something beautiful enough and people stop looking at what is underneath it. They admire the surface and never think to ask what the surface is covering.

I am very good at facades, at architecture, at the precise construction of appearances that serve a purpose. I can look at almost anything, a building, a business, a person and immediately understand the gap between what it shows and what it is.

This is why Sofia is such a problem for me.

She has no gap.

Most people have a performance layer. Something they put on before they face the world like a version of themselves that is managed and edited and presented with intention. I do not judge this. I do it too myself. Everyone does it. It is just a question of how thick the layer is and how well it is constructed.

Sofia performance layer is approximately tissue-paper thin.

She thinks she is being subtle. She thinks the silk robe and the way she positions herself in doorways is a strategy. She thinks she is in control.

She is not.

I can see exactly what she wants. I have been able to see it for months, which is both fascinating and deeply inconvenient, because what she wants is something I have sworn not to give her. And I am a man who prides himself on giving people exactly what they have paid for, and this particular want is one I have no intention of fulfilling.

I keep telling myself that.

Lorenzo was different from the rest of us.

The five of us all came from money, from power, from the particular world that Milan builds around its wealthy families. But Lorenzo had something the rest of us didn’t, a genuine warmth. He was the person in the room who actually wanted to know how you were doing, and you could feel the difference between that and the polite version.

I loved him for it, because warmth is the one thing I have never been able to convincingly afford.

When he died I didn’t give myself too much chance to dwell on grief. I gave myself forty-eight hours to feel it properly and then I put it in its correct place and moved forward.

The oath was the first thing I moved forward with.

I understood it immediately when Kai laid out the terms. Sofia was the center of everything Lorenzo had built over years. She needed to be protected and kept safe and whole and untouched by the specific kind of men we were.

The logic was clean. I completely agree with it.

Six months later the logic is still clean but the execution is becoming complicated.

She has been testing Kai all week.

I have been watching and observing because that’s what I do best, and the pattern of Sofia testing Kai’s control this week has been genuinely impressive. The mornings with silk robe, evening she sat next to him on the sofa with her legs close to his and asked him to help her with something on her laptop, leaning into his space, completely casual and deliberate.

She knows exactly what she is doing.

That is what I find most interesting. She is not stumbling into this. She is not a naive girl accidentally crossing lines she doesn’t know exist. She is twenty-two and sharp, she understands exactly what the oath costs all of us, and she is testing it however she can.

I find this fascinating, but I also find it inconvenient because it is working, Kai is holding. But barely.

Ronan broke a glass in the kitchen last Tuesday for no reason. No one explained, which means she is getting to him without even trying specifically with him. Jax has seemed a bit distracted, which means she might be getting to them without even trying specifically.

This evening we are all in the living room.

This sometimes happens, the five of us in the same space at the same time without a specific tactical reason, just proximity.

And Sofia is on the center sofa with her legs folded beneath her and her hair loose around her shoulders and a book open in her lap that she has not turned a page of in forty minutes.

I know she has not turned a page because I have been watching her.

I am sitting across the room in the chair by the east window with a glass of red wine and a business proposal I should be reading.

I watch her shift position. I watch her reach up and pull her hair to one side. I watch her run her finger along the edge of the page she is pretending to read. I watched her glance at Kai at the window and then look away and then look back.

I understand the precise body language of someone who is trying to appear relaxed while their entire attention is focused on something they want.

She is not reading that book.

She is thinking about him.

And then, as if she has felt the direction of my analysis from across the room, she looks up at me.

I didn’t look away, and she held my gaze for a full five seconds.

And then, very slowly, she runs her tongue across her bottom lip deliberately with those dark eyes locked on mine the entire time.

I had to set my wine glass down on the side table carefully.

The proposal in my other hand makes a sound as my grip tightens on it slightly. She drops her eyes back to her book as though nothing happened.

And I think that this twenty-two-year-old girl with her tissue-paper facade and her dark eyes and her deliberate tongue, is about to dismantle something I have spent six months holding carefully in place.

And the most inconvenient part of all of it is this is that I’m looking forward to watching her try.