CHAPTER FIVE; Vodka and Unspoken Truths

"I heard noises," Adrian said.

The sound of his voice cut through the red haze clouding my vision. Ceal's grip vanished from my wrist. One moment those cold fingers were pressing into my skin hard enough to bruise, and the next they were gone, his hand returning to his side with a fluidity that made the entire exchange feel like something I'd hallucinated. He stepped back, his expression settling into that ocean calmness I was already learning to hate.

My pulse hammered in my throat. The heat in my chest was still there, coiled and ready, but my father's presence had thrown a bucket of ice water over the flames. I straightened my shirt, tugged at the cuffs, ran a hand through my hair.

"Dad," I said.

The word came out flat and casual. Like I'd bumped into a college seatmate at a coffee shop rather than the man who'd sired me, ignored me for a decade, and then failed to show up at the airport for my homecoming. My hands were still trembling, but I shoved them into my pockets. Let the fabric hide what the flesh couldn't conceal.

He hadn't changed. That was the first thing that struck me, really struck me, as I let myself look at him. The circular face, the trimmed beard—whiter now, silver threading through what used to be dark. The lines around his eyes had deepened, but they were the same lines, carved by the same expressions. Or lack thereof. Adrian Frost had the kind of face that aged without transforming, like a statue weathering decades of rain and emerging with the same smirk intact.

He chuckled, soft and private, the kind of sound meant to fill silence rather than express humor.

"I already knew it was you," he said. "You cause a lot of trouble, don't you?"

The question landed like a stone dropped into still water. Was he fucking was ignoring it. The tension in the corridor, the violence that had been seconds away from erupting, the fact that his son and his—whatever Ceal was—had been on the verge of tearing each other apart. He was ignoring all of it, as if two grown men nearly coming to blows outside his study was as mundane as a spilled glass of wine.

Why was everything so strange? Why was everyone in this house acting like the world had tilted on its axis and no one had bothered to tell me?

"Actually," I said, and the word came out sharper than I intended, "there's no way I'm getting in a fight with a lowlife slave child. I was just about to teach him his place before you showed up."

I adjusted the watch on my wrist.

The silence that followed was heavier than any response could have been.

My father's gaze moved from me to Ceal, then back again. Something passed across his face a third thing that occupied the space between them. He looked at Ceal the way a man looks at a tool he's spent years sharpening. Pride, maybe. Or possession. Whatever it was, it made my stomach clench.

He didn't respond to what I'd said. Didn't reprimand me for the insult. Didn't defend Ceal. He simply let the words hang in the air until they rotted, and then he opened the door wider and stepped aside.

"Come in," he said. "You don't want to stay out there forever."

Avoidance!?. He'd sidestepped my provocation letting the bull charge past, and the absence of reaction was more infuriating than any argument could have been.

This was what my father did. This was who he was. He didn't fight battles he didn't need to win, and apparently, whatever had just happened between his son and his trophy wasn't worth the ammunition.

I stood there for a moment longer, watching him retreat into the room. His silhouette was the same as I remembered—slim, efficient, built like a blade that had been sharpened too many times and was starting to show its age. Beyond him, I caught glimpses of the study: oak paneling, the edge of a massive desk, frames on the walls that I couldn't quite make out from this angle.

Behind me, I felt Ceal's presence. He hadn't moved. He was still standing by the wall, still wearing that ocean calmness, still holding himself with the infuriating composure of someone who'd already won a fight I hadn't realized we were having.

I turned my head just enough to catch him in my peripheral vision.

"I swear you're going to regret what you just did," I said, keeping my voice low so my father wouldn't hear. The heat was building again, pressing against the inside of my ribs, and I had to force my breathing to stay even. "You're going to regret putting your hands on me."

Ceal didn't blink, he didn't even flinch. Didn't smile. Didn't do any of the things a normal person would do when threatened by someone with the power to destroy them. He just stood there, motionless, his dark eyes fixed on some point just beyond my shoulder. A humanoid servant robot, I thought, except robots didn't have that quiet pulse of authority radiating from their stillness. Robots didn't make you feel like you were the one being evaluated.

Fuck me. The thought surfaced unbidden and unwelcome. I actually think he has aura.

The realization settled in my gut like a swallow of bad whiskey. I hated it. I hated that I'd noticed. I hated that my brain had supplied the word, that some traitorous part of me had looked at the boy who should have been groveling and seen something worth respecting.

I couldn't let him see it. Couldn't let anyone see it.

So I walked into the study and shut the door behind me, hard enough that the frame rattled, and left Ceal standing alone in the corridor.

The room opened up around me like a memory. My father's study—or one of them, anyway; the man had offices scattered across the estate like a general maintaining multiple command posts—was larger than I'd expected.

But it was the photographs that caught my attention and held it.

Frames lined the walls in careful arrangements. My father at various events—handshakes with politicians, ribbon-cuttings at charitable foundations he'd funded for tax purposes, that same soft smile reproduced across a dozen different occasions. And interspersed among them, unexpectedly, were pictures of me. Me at twelve, holding a fencing trophy. Me at fifteen, standing stiffly in a boarding school uniform. Me at twenty, graduating from university, my smile looking borrowed from someone else's face.

He'd kept them. Displayed them. While I was gone, while I was being shuffled across Europe like a valuable he didn't quite know what to do with, he'd put my face on his walls.

I didn't know what to do with that information, so I filed it away and kept walking.

He was at the bar cart now, his back to me, pouring vodka into two glasses. The liquid caught the light and threw it back in amber splinters. I watched him he wiped the rim with a cloth before setting it down. Everything Adrian Frost did was precise and measured

I made my way to the couches and stood there, surveying the room slowly, letting my gaze drift across the photographs and the bookshelves and the darkening garden beyond the window. The last time I'd been in this house, I'd been seventeen and counting the hours until my flight out. Now I was back, and nothing was the way I'd left it.

"I see you're already having issues with Ceal," my father said.

He turned from the bar cart with two glasses of vodka, one extended toward me. The ice hadn't melted yet. It clinked softly against the crystal as I took the glass from his hand.

Ceal??. The name sounded different when he said it. Smoother and almost lmost affectionate, in the way a collector might speak of a prized acquisition. It was the same voice he'd used when talking about a vintage car he'd restored or a painting he'd outbid someone for at auction.

"Actually," I said, settling onto the couch across from him, "he's the one who's going to have a problem with me."

I saw it then—a flicker at the corner of his mouth. A smile, real this time, there and gone so fast I might have imagined it. When he looked at me again, his expression had reset to its default neutrality.

"Who is he, by the way?" I asked.

Not that i don't already know, I just wanted to confirm my doubt.

Adrian took a sip of his vodka, his eyes sliding toward me over the rim of the glass. The look in them was unreadable.

"You said it yourself," he said quietly. "You said it's the slave child."

He was right. Of course he was right. I'd thrown the words at Ceal not five minutes ago, spat them like an insult meant to draw blood. But hearing them repeated back to me in my father's voice, calm and matter-of-fact, they sounded different. Hollow. A label that no longer fit the thing it was attached to.

There was something about the way he spoke. Something in the cadence, in the deliberate neutrality, that told me there was more he wasn't saying. My father had always been good at that—giving answers that weren't answers, offering information that revealed nothing. He'd built an empire on what he didn't say.

I took a drink of the vodka and let the silence stretch between us.

"Something's changed," I said finally. "Since I've been gone. Something's different about this place. About him."

My father swirled the vodka in his glass, watching the ice chase itself in circles.

"Everything changes, Lucian. That's what time does." He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was softer. Almost gentle. "The question is whether you'll change with it."

The words landed somewhere deep in my chest and stayed there, heavy as a stone