Revenge of the Kesses

The thread

Rhys Calder’s idea of a test was simpler and crueler than Vivienne expected.

He led her into a back room of the warehouse, no windows, concrete floor, a single steel table with an old leather folder sitting in the center of it like an exhibit. Three other pack members lined the walls, arms crossed, watching her with the particular stillness of predators who had decided, collectively and silently, to let their enforcer make the first move.

“That’s a contract,” Rhys said, nodding at the folder without touching it. “Sixty-one years old. My grandfather kept it because he wanted proof, one day, that the Marchettis lied about the territory line, proof the Kess family supposedly destroyed when they signed the treaty that ended the war. If you’re what you say you are, you shouldn’t need to open it to tell me what’s inside.”

Vivienne understood, with a small, unpleasant jolt, that this wasn’t curiosity. It was a trap with a fair door, if she failed, she’d be exposed as a liar and thrown out; if she succeeded, she would have proven to a room full of werewolves that a Kess vampire could see straight through anything they tried to hide from her, which was its own kind of danger.

She stepped forward anyway.

She didn’t touch the folder. Her father’s book had been clear about that, the debt is not in the object, it is in the promise the object represents, so instead she let her eyes go soft and unfocused, the way she’d practiced twice, badly, in the mirror at her father’s house before she’d lost her nerve and come here instead of practicing more.

The thread appeared almost instantly. Thinner than the one she’d seen in the elevator, older, frayed in places like a rope left out in weather for decades, but unmistakably real, running from the folder, out through the walls of the warehouse, across the city, toward a name she recognized even before the vision sharpened enough to read it.

“Marchetti,” she said, and heard her own voice come out strange, distant, layered with something that wasn’t quite her own tone. “The line in that contract was altered after signing. There’s a second thread underneath the first, a debt inside a debt. Someone paid to have it redrawn. Recently. Within the last five years, not sixty-one.”

The room went very still.

“That’s not possible,” said one of the men against the wall, older, silver at the temples, a face that might have belonged to Rhys in thirty years. “That contract hasn’t left this building since my father locked it in that safe.”

“I didn’t say the paper was altered,” Vivienne said, the words arriving faster than she could second-guess them, pulled out of her by the thread itself, which she was beginning to understand did not particularly care whether she was ready to say them. “I said the debt was. Someone renegotiated the terms of what’s owed without ever touching this document, a private agreement, made recently, that changes who actually holds the obligation now. Whoever holds power over the Marchetti pack’s finances today isn’t the person your grandfather thought he was fighting sixty-one years ago.”

Rhys’s jaw tightened. “Who.”

Vivienne closed her eyes, chasing the thread further than she’d ever pushed it, past caution, past the small correct voice in the back of her mind that sounded exactly like her father telling her it will not let you look away from a debt twice, and found, at the very end of it, not Damon’s name.

Ines Calloway’s.

“Your husband’s mistress,” she said slowly, opening her eyes, “isn’t just sleeping with the heir to your enemy’s fortune. She’s the one holding the paper on it.”