VOWS OF VIOLENCE

CHAPTER TWO:THE KING

She woke to the smell of bourbon and stale air.

That was the first thing the smell Cedar, something metallic and beneath it bourbon, the expensive kind that didn't burn going down but settled in your chest like a coal.

The second thing was the view.

Chicago spread out beyond floor-to-ceiling windows like a circuit board a million lights, black ribbon of the river, dark mass of the lake beyond, all of it so far below that the cars looked like slow-moving sparks.

Penthouse, High and Maybe the fortieth floor maybe higher.

The third thing was the chair.

Kiera tried to move her left wrist and felt the zip-tie bite on both wrists behind her. She ran

through the assessment without showing it on her face her ankles free, which was a mistake on their part, weight distributed evenly, back straight, able to stand if she had to head clear.

No residual drug fog whatever they'd used had been precise, which meant someone had

calibrated it for her specifically, which meant someone had done their research.

She took one more breath and got her face right.

Cold,bored and Unimpressed.

Then she looked at him.

Dante Vane sat across from her in a leather chair that probably cost more than six months of fight money while he held a glass of bourbon in one hand the crystal caught the city lights and scattered them in amber flashes and he was watching her the way a very patient man watches something he's been waiting for for a long time.

He was beautiful, and she hated him for it.

Six feet four inches of carved, controlled menace in a black suit that had clearly been built specifically for those shoulders ink-black hair worn slightly long, curling at the back of his

neck. A jaw that could have been sculpted,scar that cut through his left eyebrow and had

healed slightly crooked, the only imperfect thing on an otherwise unreasonable face.

And the eyes.

Amber and gold something alive inside them that wasn't quite warm, wasn't quite cold and

watched her like she was the most interesting thing in the room and also like he hadn't yet

decided what to do with her.

He didn't speak.

She let the silence run for ten seconds, which was professional then she let it run another ten, which was a message.

"Nice view," she said finally. Her voice came out flat and even and she was proud of it.

One corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile but an acknowledgment.

"You slept for four hours." His voice was lower than she remembered. It vibrated at a frequency that she felt in her sternum. "Dr. Vasquez says no concussion.”

"Dr. Vasquez can go to hell." She shifted her wrists, testing the ties again without making it

obvious, "So can you."

"Mm." He lifted the bourbon glass and turned it slowly in his fingers. "You broke Petrov's nose and he wanted me to tell you that he respects you for it."

"Tell Petrov I'll do it again." She looked around the room with the steady, methodical gaze of

someone cataloguing exits, not someone being impressed. Two doors, one behind her, one to her left no guards were visible inside the room, which meant they were outside both doors while the windows were the third option, but forty stories up with no equipment meant that wasn't an option at all. "Are we going to talk, or did you bring me here to sit in a pretty chair and watch you drink?”

Dante set the glass down on the table beside him with a soft click.

"Viktor Sokoloff," he said, "has put eight hundred thousand dollars on your head."

Something in Kiera's chest tightened she didn't show it.

"I know."

"His men found your building three days ago and They've been watching you." His amber eyes didn't move from her face; "I got there first."

"I noticed." She rolled her shoulders back as far as the restraints allowed. "Is that supposed to

make me grateful?"

"No." He laced his fingers together, "It's a context."

She waited. He had more she could feel it, the weight of unspoken things in the room, the

way a man like this always had more and always made you wait for it.

"Viktor doesn't want you dead," Dante said. "He wants you alive and he wants to keep you alive

for a significant amount of time." He paused. "I've seen what he does with the women he

keeps."

The temperature in the room dropped two degrees.

She'd heard the stories everyone in their world had heard them. Viktor Sokoloff was not a man

who killed his enemies quickly he was a man who made an art of it, who had a patience for

suffering that most people reserved for things they loved.

She kept her face neutral. "And you're the better option?"

"I'm a different option." He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and withdrew a folded photograph while he set it on the table between them and pushed it forward with two fingers."Recognize her?”

Kiera looked down at the photograph despite herself.

A woman at her mid-twenties with a dark hair, beautiful and laughing in a restaurant. Happy in the specific, unguarded way of someone who doesn't know yet that their happiness is borrowed.

She was dead now for about six months.

Kiera had been there.

She looked away from the photograph while her jaw was tight. She let it be tight, she owed him nothing.

"Elena Russo," she said. "Senator Russo's daughter she died on a-"

"She died on a mission you were running," Dante said quietly. "A mission that was sabotaged."

"By you;" The words came out like chips of ice. "Your men pulled the extraction vehicle and your men cut the comms,your men—"

"Yes." Simple, Undefended. "My men did all of those things."

Silence.

She hadn't expected that but she'd expected deflection, denial, some elaborate explanation

designed to make the thing that had destroyed her career, life and her sense of self sound like someone else's fault.

She hadn't expected: yes.

"Why?" she said.

He picked the photograph back up his thumb moved across Elena's laughing face in a gesture that was too small and too careful to be unconscious.

"Because Viktor's men had orders that night," he said. "Kill the bodyguard first then took the

girl." His amber eyes came back up and found hers. "I had eleven minutes to make a choice between her or you." A beat; "I chose you."

The words sat in the room between them and she didn't know what to do with them.

"She was twenty-three years old," Kiera said. Her voice was very quiet.

"Yes," He didn't look away. "I know."

"She had a whole—"

"I know." Still quiet, Still steady and The lack of defensiveness was somehow worse than argument would have been. "I know what she had and I know what I took from her." He set the photograph face-down on the table but "I also know that you would not be sitting in this chair right now if I had made a different choice, and I found out I was unable to make a different choice." He met her eyes. "That is not an excuse, It is simply what happened.”

Kiera stared at him for a long time.

She wanted to hate him but She already hated him . Six months of hate, built carefully and maintained the way you'd maintain a weapon, sharp and ready. But the hate needed somewhere to go, and right now it was finding angles he hadn't given her, and that was infuriating.

"So what is this?" she said. "You rescue me, you tell me it's your fault, and then what? We're

even?"

"No." He reached into his jacket again but this time he withdrew a manila envelope and set it on the table. "This is a proposition."

She didn't touch it. "Talk."

"Viktor knows you're alive he knows you're in Chicago and he'll do anything to find you again. My reach is significant, but it isn't infinite, and he is very motivated," He leaned forward slightly, elbows on his knees, and the shift brought him close enough that she could smell the cedar and the bourbon and something underneath both of them that she refused to identify. "I can protect you, I can clear your name with the evidence of the sabotage that destroyed your reputation can be reframe and I can also give you Viktor on a plate." He held her gaze; "What I need from you is one

year.

She stared at him.

"One year," he repeated. "As my wife."

The silence that followed was the loudest thing Kiera had ever heard.

"Your—" She stopped. "I'm sorry, I think I misheard you."

"You didn't." He sat back, perfectly calm, and picked up his bourbon again. "The details are in

the envelope publicly, you would be my wife. This gives you the protection of my name and

my organization and It also gives Viktor a reason to engage he will come after what is mine, and when he does, we will be ready."

"You want to use me as bait."

"I want to give you an opportunity to destroy the man who wants to keep you in a basement."

His voice was even, "There is a difference."

She wanted to throw something at his head. She couldn't move her hands, she settled for the look but the one she'd been told could strip paint at twenty feet.

He didn't flinch.

"And if I say no?"

He looked at her for a moment. Then he stood on a smooth, unhurried unfolding of six-foot-four that moved through the room like weather, and she hated that she tracked it, hated the way her body registered his height, his shoulders and the way his suit sat on him.

He walked to the door.

Paused with his hand on the frame.

"Viktor's men know this building," he said, without turning around. "They'll connect you to it eventually and when they do, they'll come in the same way my people did." A beat. "Except they won't use tranquilizers." He glanced back over his shoulder. "Think about it, you have until morning.”

The door closed.

The lock engaged.

Kiera sat alone with the city humming forty stories below her and two hundred dollars in a

pocket she couldn't reach and the name of a dead girl echoing in the bourbon-scented air.

He'd chosen her over Elena Russo.

She didn't know what terrified her more that he'd done it, or that part of her, a very small and very ashamed part of her, understood why.

The night stretched out ahead of her like something with teeth.

She had until morning.