The two elderly men had not moved.
From the moment Dylan Brooks stepped into the room, they had remained seated in their heavy wooden armchairs, eyes closed, bodies still, as if suspended in some quiet, inward-facing state of meditation.
They neither acknowledged his arrival…
Nor reacted to the presence of Old Master Winslow, a man whose wealth alone could command respect in nearly any circle.
To them, it seemed, none of it mattered.
The air around them carried a faint, almost imperceptible tension—not hostility, but a kind of deliberate detachment, as though they existed just outside the boundaries of ordinary social hierarchy.
Only now did Fergus Howard, the heavyset man seated at the front, rise from his chair, his expression shifting into something more animated.
“Allow me to ma
