Bound By Blood - A Dark Romance

The Devil's House

Sienna had been inside the homes of dangerous men before.

She had sat across from a Bellini underboss in a dining room that smelled of expensive cigars and older blood. She had negotiated in a Westside warehouse while three armed men stood at the door pretending to be furniture. She had walked into rooms that most people never walked out of and she had always always walked back out again.

She told herself 14 Blackthorn Terrace would be no different.

She was wrong.

The house didn't look like what she expected. That was the first thing. She had prepared herself for something ostentatious, the kind of architecture that announced its owner's wealth and danger the way a drawn weapon announced intent. Columns. Gates with family crests. The visual language of men who needed everyone to know they had won.

Instead, the car that Damian had sent black, unmarked, driven by a man who hadn't spoken a single word for forty minutes, pulled through a set of iron gates and stopped in front of something that looked almost restrained.

Almost.

It was large. She wouldn't pretend otherwise. Four storeys of dark stone set back from a private road, flanked by trees that had been growing longer than anyone currently alive in Velmora. The windows were tall and narrow and lit from within by a warm light that had no business looking that inviting. A shallow flight of stone steps led to a door that was already open.

A man stood in the doorway.

Not Damian.

He was younger, with a shaved head and the kind of watchful stillness that told her immediately he was security. He nodded once as she got out of the car.

"Ms. Caruso. I'm Rafe." He had a low, even voice. "Mr. Voss is expecting you."

She had her bag over one shoulder, packed for six months with the grim efficiency of someone preparing for a sentence rather than a stay and she carried it herself when Rafe moved to take it. He didn't push. She appreciated that.

Inside was worse than outside.

Not worse in any way she could easily explain to someone who hadn't spent two years clawing to keep the lights on in a building that smelled of old beer and older grief. Worse because it was beautiful. Genuinely, quietly beautiful in the way that old money sometimes was not decorated to impress but furnished to last. Dark wood floors that had been walked on for decades. High ceilings with plasterwork that caught the light. Books on actual shelves, not for display but in the disordered, overlapping way of someone who actually read them.

She hated that she noticed.

Rafe led her through a hallway and into a sitting room off the main corridor. "Mr. Voss will be with you shortly. Can I get you anything?"

"No."

He left her alone.

She didn't sit. She stood in the centre of the room and turned slowly, cataloguing the exits the way Marco had taught her. Door she came in. One window, street-facing, locked. A second door on the far wall, slightly ajar. She could hear faint movement somewhere deeper in the house. Footsteps on stone. The distant sound of what might have been a phone call ending.

Then quiet.

Then him.

Damian Voss walked through the far door without knocking which was, she supposed, his prerogative in his own house and stopped when he saw her standing in the middle of the room rather than seated.

Something crossed his face. There and gone.

"Sienna."

"Mr. Voss." She kept her voice even. "We need to talk about Clause Seven."

He was dressed differently than the night at the club. Less formal, dark trousers, a shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, no jacket. It shouldn't have made him look any less dangerous. It didn't. It just made him look more human, which was somehow more unsettling.

He moved to the sideboard and poured two glasses of something amber without asking. He set one on the table nearest her and kept one for himself.

She didn't touch hers.

"Sit down," he said.

"I'll stand."

He looked at her for a moment with that same expression from the kitchen, like she was a variable he was recalculating. Then he sat down himself, unhurried, in the chair across from where she wasn't sitting.

"The residence clause," he said.

"You knew I'd object."

"I knew you'd object and come anyway." He swirled his glass once. "The fact that you're here means you've already decided the arrangement is worth it. You're here to negotiate the terms of your comfort, not the terms of the deal."

The accuracy of that landed like a stone in still water. She let it settle without reacting.

"Why do I need to live here?" she asked.

"Because the work requires proximity. The intelligence you'll be gathering moves fast, window periods of hours, sometimes less. I need you accessible."

"You have a phone. I have a phone. You're having my phone monitored, which means you'll know exactly where I am at all times regardless of whether I'm under this roof."

"True."

"So the residence clause isn't about accessibility."

He looked at her steadily. "No."

The honesty of it surprised her. She had expected deflection. Another layer of reasonable-sounding logic she would have to peel back.

"Then what is it about?" she asked.

He was quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of someone stalling but the quiet of someone choosing their words with the same care they chose everything else.

"There are people in this city who will notice our arrangement," he said. "People who will look for ways to use you against me or use me against you. If you're living separately, you're exposed. If you're here, you're under the same protection as everything else I consider mine."

The last word sat between them.

Mine.

She picked up the glass. Not because she wanted the drink but because she needed something to do with her hands while she processed the particular way he had said that word flatly, factually, with no apparent awareness of how it landed.

"I have conditions," she said.

"I expected you would."

She set the glass back down. "My room has a lock. A real one, not a courtesy lock. And I keep the key."

"Done."

"I come and go as I need to for the club. No curfew, no check-ins for personal movement."

"Within reason."

"Not within reason. As needed."

He studied her. "As needed," he repeated. "Fine."

"And Marco visits when I say so. He's not network, he's personal. He doesn't get monitored or vetted every time."

Something shifted in Damian's expression at the name. Complicated and quick. "Marco Silvestri has been in this business for forty years. Calling him personal is generous."

"He's the closest thing I have to family. That makes him personal." She held his gaze. "Those are my conditions. All three."

The room was very quiet.

Damian Voss looked at her across the low table between them at the woman who had come into his house with a bag over her shoulder and a list of demands and hadn't sat down once and for the second time since they'd met, he nodded.

"Agreed," he said.

She didn't let herself feel relieved. Relief was for after. Right now there was only the next thing, and the next thing was surviving the first night in a house that smelled like old wood and dark money and something she didn't have a name for yet.

"Rafe will show you your room," Damian said, standing.

She nodded once and turned toward the door.

"Sienna."

She stopped but didn't turn around.

"You negotiated well." His voice was even. Quiet. "Your father never could."

She didn't answer. She walked out into the hallway where Rafe was already waiting, and she didn't let herself think about what Damian Voss's version of a compliment felt like until she was behind a locked door with the key in her own hand.

Only then did she sit down on the edge of a bed that wasn't hers, in a house that wasn't hers, and let herself feel the full weight of what she had just agreed to.

Six months.

She could survive anything for six months.

She hoped