LOVE AND DEATH

CAEL

“No, no—please don’t kill me.”

The words came out wet, gargling through blood that had pooled where his front teeth used to be.

I watched, while my face stayed still.

Not because I was trying to be cold, but because nothing stirred anymore when a man begged for his life im this basement. The first year, maybe. The second year, I’d flinch. By the fifth, I’d learned that flinching was a tell, and tells got people killed in Adrian’s world. By now, my heart rate didn’t even change.

He was a frail man, the one in the chair. Some accountant who’d skimmed from the wrong offshore account. His tie had been ripped off and stuffed into his own mouth earlier in the evening, then discarded when Adrian decided he wanted to hear him confess. His shirtfront was more red than white now. His fingers—those were the worst part, and I’d looked at them only once before my stomach had given a warning lurch. I didn’t look again.

Adrian stood beside me, breathing through his nose slowly. Annoyance was always more dangerous with him.

“You stole from the Frost family,” Adrian said, and his voice was almost conversational. He might have been discussing a shipment delay or a stock option that underperformed. “You thought I wouldn’t notice because the numbers were small. But that’s the thing about small numbers, Gerald—they add up. And they make me wonder what other small deceptions you’ve been feeding me.”

Gerald tried to shake his head. The motion made something in his neck crack audibly, and he screamed through his ruined mouth, a sound that came out more like steam escaping a pipe.

Adrian had already turned away. He walked to the steel table along the wall where the tools were laid out in neat rows—the pliers, the car battery with its alligator clips. Beside the tools, the pistol waited. Matte black.

He picked it up and weighed, a soft grin on his lips.

“Go beg your father in hell,” he said, pulling the trigger in one go.

The shot was louder than it should have been. The body jolted once, the twice before it collapsed with ease.

Blood misted the air. I felt it land on my cheek, and a larger drop hit the collar of my shirt. I hissed in disgust, because urbhad ruiend my neatly fresh-pressed this morning, white Oxford cotton that I’d chosen specifically for the meeting with the Belgian buyers at noon. Adrian insisted his people look immaculate, and I was his people. Had been for fifteen years.

“Shit,” I muttered.

Behind me, on a stainless steel cart that the cleanup crew kept stocked, a stack of hand towels. I grabbed two and handed one to Adrian before pressing the other to my face. The blood came away in a watery smear. On my collar, though, it had already begun to set. The fabric was probably ruined.

Adrian wiped his hands roughly, each finger separately, then the webbing between them. His jaw was tight, lips moving silently—that habit of his, talking to himself when something hadn’t gone perfectly. I’d learned to read the rhythm of it over the years. Tonight it was curses, mostly, and something about the Belgians, and something about Gerald’s boss who should have vetted his people better.

I didn’t offer comfort. I never did.

Adrian Frost. My foster father, or so his lawyers had framed the papers. What I knew was this: fifteen years ago, on a cold night, he and five men had kicked down the door of a house in a quiet suburb and shot my father twice in the chest. My mother had screamed. She’d run toward the back door. One of the men caught her by the hair, and she was apprehended too.

I was seven years old, crouched behind the sofa, and I’d watched all of it through the gap between the armrest and the wall.

They took me because Adrian decided I was more valuable alive.

I was a trophy to him. The son of the man who’d betrayed him, growing up under his roof, eating his food, calling him sir. He told me once, when I was twelve and still prone to nightmares, that I should be grateful. That he’d given me a second life.

Every time he said that, the scene replayed in my head. The muzzle flash in the dark. The way my father’s body had crumpled. Like a machine switched off.

I never forgot. I never let myself forget.

“Ceal?”

Adrian’s voice cut through the memory. He’d dropped the blood-soaked towel on the floor and was facing me now, his dark eyes scanning my expression the way they scanned everything. Searching for cracks.

“Sir,” I replied. My voice was steady. It had taken years to train it that way. Years of pushing everything down into a locked box inside my chest, of practicing the neutral tone in front of a mirror until it became second nature.

The lines on his forehead had deepened over the past decade. They were permanent now, carved by late nights and hard decisions. But what always caught my attention—what I couldn’t stop looking at tonight—was his mouth. The thin upper lip, the fuller lower one. The way it shaped his words.

Because Lucian has the same mouth.

His son.

The heir. The one I’d been waiting for.

“Tell the boys to wrap up the body and send it to his boss,” Adrian said, nudging his chin toward the chair where Gerald’s corpse had stopped dripping. “Gift-wrapped. I want the message unambiguous.”

I glanced at the body without answering immediately. The truth was, I’d seen more dead men than I could count. Some worse than this—much worse.

Some burned. Dismembered. Left in barrels of industrial solvent until the cleanup crew had to wear respirators. This one, Gerald, was almost clean by comparison. Two hours of work and then the bullet. Almost merciful.

I didn’t feel a thing anymore.

“It’ll be done within the hour,” I said.

Adrian nodded and turned toward the basement door. He’d always been built like a blade, narrow, efficient, with no excess. It was part of what made him dangerous. Men who looked like him didn’t register as threats until it was too late.

He stopped with one hand on the doorframe.

“And, Ceal—”

The pause stretched long enough that the fluorescent light buzzed once.

“Lucian is coming home tonight. Finally. I want you to meet him first, before the others. You’ll be his point of contact while he learns the business.”

His point of contact?

“Of course, sir.”

Adrian held my gaze for three seconds longer than necessary. Something flickered behind his eyes—curiosity, maybe, or the faintest edge of suspicion. Then it was gone, and he walked up the stairs without looking back, leaving me alone with the body and the blood and the ringing in my ears.

The door clicked shut.

For a full minute I didn’t move. I stood there in the silence and let the locked box inside my chest crack open, just a fraction, just enough to let the feeling in.

Lucian Frost.

Ten years since I’d last seen him. Ten years since his father had sent him to Europe—boarding schools, then universities, then apprenticeships with the overseas operations—to keep him insulated from the bloodier aspects of the family business. The plan had always been to bring him back when he was ready. When the empire needed its prince.

And now he was coming home.

My hands, I noticed, were trembling. Not with fear, but with anticipation. With something I hadn’t felt in so long that it took me a moment to recognize it.

Excitement.

I had waited fifteen years for revenge, and I’d learned early that killing Adrian outright wouldn’t be enough.

A bullet was too quick, and too kind. What I wanted was something slower. Something that would make him feel the same hollowed-out loss that had defined my entire existence since that cold night.

His son, his legacy. His Lucian.

I would take the thing Adrian loved most and destroy it from the inside out.

The cleanup crew would arrive in twenty minutes. I had time. I walked to the steel table and picked up the pistol Adrian had used and wiped it down with a clean corner of the towel. Not because it was my job, but because I wanted to touch it. I wanted to remember what it felt like to hold the instrument of someone’s ending.

Lucian would be arrogant. Ten years in European luxury, insulated from consequence, groomed to inherit an empire he didn’t build—he’d walk through that door expecting deference. He’d look at me and see the same thing his father saw. A dutiful servant. A trophy.

He wouldn’t see the boy behind the sofa.

He wouldn’t see the locked box.

He wouldn’t see what I’d become while he was away, learning to smile at his father’s enemies while memorizing their weaknesses.

I set the pistol down and smoothed my ruined shirt, the bloodstain now dried to a brownish crust. I’d have to change before Lucian arrived. Appearances mattered, and tonight I needed to look like the Ceal Adrian had trained me to be.

Everyone would be watching Lucian Frost.

No one would be watching me.

And that was exactly how I wanted it.

I pulled out my phone and texted the cleanup crew: Basement needs attention. Standard disposal. Boss wants delivery to the client.

Then I walked toward the stairs, stepping carefully around the blood pooling on the concrete, and began the climb back up into the light.

Tonight, the real work began.