chapter 1
Anansi
The first thing they taught me about being a clan leader was that everyone was lying. The second thing they taught me was that the people who lied best were usually the ones smiling. I learned both lessons before my father's coffin was lowered into the ground. Rain had been falling since dawn. Not the gentle kind that made people romanticize storms. This rain came down hard enough to turn the earth beneath the old Aurelis estate into black mud. It soaked the shoulders of the men standing around me and ran down the faces of women dressed in mourning.
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. That was the Aurelis way. We did not cry in public. We did not beg. We did not show weakness to people who might one day use it against us. My father had taught me that.
He had also taught me that money was not power. Knowing where it moved was power. The Aurelis had spent centuries learning where everything moved. Banks. Governments. Companies. Wars.
People. We didn't need to own the world. We only needed to know which strings were attached to it. And now, at twenty-eight years old, those strings were mine. I stared at the coffin. My father was inside. The man who had raised me.
The man who had taught me how to read a room before anyone spoke. The man who had told me that every person had a price, except the rare few who had something more dangerous than a price. A principle. I had spent my entire life trying to understand him. Now I would spend the rest of it wondering how much he had kept from me.
A hand touched my shoulder.
"Anansi."
I didn't turn. I knew the voice. Leon. My uncle. The man who had been beside my father through almost every important moment of my childhood. The man who had practically raised me whenever my father disappeared into meetings that lasted for days. The man I trusted more than almost anyone alive.
"He's gone," Leon said quietly. I looked at him. He was dressed entirely in black, as everyone else was, but somehow he looked less like a grieving brother and more like a man attending an appointment. Leon had always been intimidating. Tall. Dark-skinned. Broad-shouldered.
His face was sharp enough to make his smile seem dangerous, and his eyes had the unsettling stillness of a predator that had already decided it didn't need to chase its prey. He looked at me for several seconds. Then he said, "You are the head of Aurelis now." There it was. No sympathy. No brotherly comfort.
Just responsibility. The title. The burden. The cage. I looked back toward the grave.
"I know."
"Do you?"
I smiled faintly.
"You're asking the wrong question."
Leon raised an eyebrow.
"What question should I ask?"
"Whether I'm ready."
"And?"
"I'm not."
He smiled.
"Good."
That surprised me.
"Why?"
"Because men who think they're ready usually get people killed."
The coffin began to descend. I watched it disappear into the earth. For the first time since receiving the news of my father's death, something inside me cracked. Not enough for anyone else to see. But enough for me to feel. I clenched my jaw. Then I heard the bells.
Three slow strikes. Every head turned. A messenger stood at the edge of the gathering. He was pale. Too pale. He approached slowly and whispered something into the ear of one of the elders. The elder's expression changed.
He looked at me. Then at Leon. Then back at me. "What's happened?" I asked. He swallowed.
"The Caelus have arrived."
My eyes narrowed. That name had been spoken in my family for as long as I could remember. Caelus. The Keepers. Scientists. Scholars. Doctors.
Guardians of knowledge older than recorded civilization. And our oldest rivals. Aurelis and Caelus had been enemies long before I was born. Long before my father was born. The feud had become so old that nobody remembered where it had truly begun. But I knew one thing. The death of my mother had something to do with it.
I had never known her. She had died giving birth to me. That was the story I had been given. No name. No photograph. No grave.
Nothing.
My father had never spoken about her. Whenever I asked, the conversation ended. Eventually, I stopped asking. Now, standing beside my father's grave, I wondered if that silence had been protecting me from something. Or protecting someone else from me. "Why are the Caelus here?" I asked.
The elder looked uncomfortable.
"They claim they have come to pay their respects."
I almost laughed.
"At my father's funeral?"
"They were invited."
"By whom?"
Silence. My eyes moved toward Leon. He was already looking at me. And for one strange second, something passed between us. Something I couldn't name. Then I heard a woman's voice.
"Perhaps they came because they are tired of burying people too."
I turned. And forgot what I was going to say. She stood beneath a black umbrella. Her dress was simple. Elegant. Nothing about her demanded attention. And yet she had mine completely.
Her hair moved slightly with the wind, dark strands brushing against her cheek. She wasn't smiling. Her eyes were calm. That was what struck me first.
Calm.
Everyone around us was watching her like she had brought a weapon to a funeral. She looked at me like I was simply another human being. Not the new Aurelis leader. Not the heir to an empire. Not the man whose family had been fighting hers for generations. Just a man. Our eyes met.
Something strange happened inside my chest. I had spent my entire life studying people. Microexpressions. Posture. Tone. Fear. Desire.
Lies. I could usually tell what someone wanted before they knew it themselves. But I couldn't read her. Not even slightly. She tilted her head.
"You're staring."
I smiled.
"You're difficult to ignore."
The corner of her mouth moved. Almost a smile. Almost.
"That's not an answer."
"It was the answer I wanted to give."
She looked at me for another moment. Then she walked past. I watched her go. And for the first time in my life, I had no idea what I wanted. I only knew that I wanted to see her again. Which was unfortunate. Because Leon had just walked up beside me.
And the first thing he said was:
"Stay away from her."
I looked at him.
"Who is she?"
His expression hardened.
"Irene Caelus."
The name settled somewhere inside me. Irene. I looked back toward the woman disappearing beneath the umbrellas. Then at Leon.
"Why?"
He didn't answer. That was when I realized something. My uncle was afraid. Not of Irene. Of what might happen if I got close enough to discover why she mattered. And suddenly, my father's funeral wasn't about the dead anymore. It was about the secrets they had taken with them.
