Chapter 4

The Man Who Keeps Secrets

Lysander Hale answered on the second ring, which for Lysander, who usually let calls ring out purely to make people wait, counted as an act of genuine concern.

“Tell me you did not just send me a screenshot of a threatening text message at two in the morning without any context,” he said, before Nolan had spoken a single word, “because I was in the middle of something genuinely impressive involving a Cayman Islands shell company, and you know how rarely I get to feel impressive.”

“Someone photographed me on Alistair Blackwood’s terrace,” Nolan said, keeping his voice low even though the safehouse was, as far as he had confirmed twice, entirely secure. “And texted it to a number that shouldn’t have had any connection to me at all.”

There was a pause on the line, the particular quality of silence that meant Lysander had gone very still and very serious, a rare state for a man who treated most catastrophes as opportunities for commentary. “Read me the message again.”

“I see you. That’s it. No signature.”

“That’s not Cassius’s style,” Lysander said slowly. “Cassius doesn’t do cryptic. Cassius does explicit threats delivered with the emotional warmth of a filing cabinet. This feels like someone else entirely.” A pause, the sound of keys clicking rapidly. “Give me the number. I’ll trace it, though I’ll bet you every dollar in my extremely well hidden offshore accounts that it comes back untraceable. Whoever sent that either has serious resources or serious paranoia, and in my experience those two things travel together.”

Nolan read off the number, listened to Lysander’s typing continue for several minutes, punctuated by the occasional muttered curse that suggested the trace was going about as well as expected.

“Dead end,” Lysander confirmed eventually. “Routed through four proxies and a burner registered to a fake identity that doesn’t even exist as a real fake identity, if that makes sense. Somebody built that number specifically to send you one message and then evaporate. That’s not casual. That’s a warning shot from someone who wants you to know you’re being watched without wanting you to know who’s watching.”

“Dorian Kingsley,” Nolan said, the name surfacing from the depths of Cassius’s briefing before he had consciously decided to say it aloud. “He funds half the charity events the Blackwoods attend. If there’s a network operating under their radar, he’s the most likely candidate to have eyes inside their events.”

“Could be him. Could be a jealous ex boyfriend of one of the twins. Could be literally anyone with a telephoto lens and a grudge.” Lysander’s tone shifted, softening in the way it only did when he set aside the hacker and let the friend through. “Nolan. Can I ask you something, and can you actually answer it honestly instead of giving me the version of the truth you give Cassius?”

Nolan closed his eyes, leaning his head back against the safehouse wall. “You can ask.”

“When that photo was taken. Were you performing, or were you actually enjoying it?”

The question landed somewhere Nolan had been carefully avoiding looking for the last several hours, and he took a moment before answering, long enough that the silence itself was probably answer enough for someone as perceptive as Lysander. “I don’t know,” Nolan admitted finally, and the admission cost him more than he expected it to. “I’ve never not known before. Every performance, I know exactly where the line is. Tonight I forgot there was supposed to be a line at all.”

“That’s the part that worries me,” Lysander said quietly. “Not that two terrifying billionaire twins are apparently obsessed with you after one encounter each, though frankly that’s also concerning on its own merits. It’s that you don’t know where your own line is anymore. Spies don’t fall in love, Nolan. Spies survive. That’s the whole job description. The moment you start blurring the difference, you stop being an asset and you start being a liability, to yourself most of all.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Because Cassius is going to use this. You understand that, right? He’s not going to see two men falling for you and think, how touching, how human. He’s going to see two vulnerabilities he can exploit, and he’s going to hand you a folder tomorrow telling you exactly how to exploit them, and some part of you, the part he built, is going to do it without hesitating, because that part of you doesn’t know how to do anything else.”

Nolan thought of the folder already sitting on the table beside him, the alias documents, the fabricated employment history, the new name he had not yet fully memorized. “He already has.”

Lysander exhaled, a long, tired sound that carried seventeen years of watching his best friend get systematically hollowed out and rebuilt into something more useful and less whole. “Just be careful. Please. Not careful like Cassius means it, careful like actually protect yourself, not the mission, you. There’s a difference, even if nobody ever taught you what it looks like.”

They talked for another twenty minutes, mostly logistics, the new alias Nolan would be assuming, the cover story about a late mother’s art collection needing appraisal, the security protocols Lysander would monitor remotely from wherever he was currently hiding his very illegal server farm. By the time Nolan hung up, the sky outside the safehouse window had begun to pale toward dawn, and he still had not slept.

He did not sleep that night at all. Instead he sat with the folder open on the table, studying the new identity Cassius had built for him with characteristic thoroughness. Nolan Vale. Not entirely fictional, Cassius had explained during their meeting, a partial truth wrapped around a deeper lie, because partial truths were always more durable than complete fabrications. A genuine background in art history, obtained through a genuine, if brief, education Cassius had arranged years ago specifically to build this alias into something that could survive real scrutiny. A cover story about a mother’s death that was, disturbingly, closer to Nolan’s actual, buried history than any alias he had worn before, and he wondered, not for the first time, exactly how much of what Cassius fed him as fiction had originally been fact.

He arrived at the Blackwood estate three days later, driven through iron gates that opened without visible signal, up a long drive lined with trees old enough to have watched the city grow up around them. The house itself was less a house than a declaration, stone and glass rising three stories above manicured grounds, and Nolan felt, for the first time in longer than he cared to admit, a flicker of something that was not quite fear and not quite excitement but sat uncomfortably close to both.

He was greeted at the door by a member of the household staff, an older woman with sharp eyes and a gentler mouth, who introduced herself as Margaret and informed him, with the air of someone accustomed to managing chaos, that Mr. Blackwood, meaning Alistair, was expecting him in the east gallery, while Mr. Blackwood, meaning Lucein, had left explicit instructions to be informed the moment Nolan arrived, regardless of what he was doing or who he was doing it with.

“They don’t usually agree on much,” Margaret confided, leading him down a hallway lined with paintings Nolan recognized, with genuine professional interest, as worth considerably more than most countries’ annual budgets. “It’s rather remarkable, honestly, that they both wanted the same consultant hired. Mr. Blackwood, Alistair I mean, interviewed six other candidates before you and dismissed all of them within the first five minutes. And Mr. Lucein Blackwood doesn’t usually involve himself in staffing decisions at all. He said, and I’m quoting directly because I found it memorable, that he’d fire anyone who hired someone else.”

Nolan kept his expression politely neutral, filing the information away with the same careful precision he applied to everything, though something cold and sharp moved through him at the confirmation that both brothers had specifically, deliberately arranged for him to be here. This was not simply an opportunity Cassius had engineered. This was two men, independently, recognizing something in him that made them unwilling to let a stranger walk away.

The east gallery, when they reached it, was a long room lined floor to ceiling with paintings, natural light pouring through skylights positioned with an architect’s precision, and standing at the far end, examining a canvas with the same unhurried, total attention he had turned on Nolan four nights earlier, was Alistair Blackwood.

“Mr. Vale,” Alistair said, without turning around, as though he had heard Nolan’s footsteps and identified them before Margaret had finished announcing his arrival. “You’re punctual. I appreciate punctuality. It suggests respect for other people’s time, which is rarer than it should be.”

“I try to make a good first impression,” Nolan said, letting Nolan Vale’s voice settle into something warmer and more open than Etienne Marchetti had ever been, a different alias requiring a different performance, though the unsettling truth, one he did not examine too closely, was that this version felt less like a performance and more like permission to be something closer to himself. “Though I understand this isn’t technically our first impression.”

Alistair turned then, and something in his expression, cold and controlled as it remained, carried an unmistakable edge of satisfaction, the look of a man confirming a calculation had gone exactly as planned. “No. It isn’t. I confess I made certain, after our conversation at the gala, that whoever my brother and I hired for this position would be you specifically. I hope that doesn’t disturb you.”

“Should it?”

“I don’t know.” Alistair crossed the gallery toward him, slow, deliberate steps that ate the distance without appearing to hurry at all. “You are the first thing in a very long time that I have wanted without first calculating whether wanting it was strategically sound. I find I don’t entirely know what to do with that feeling. I am considering, however, simply not fighting it, which is, for me, a significant departure from how I usually operate.”

Nolan’s pulse climbed, and he hated, absolutely hated, that it kept doing that around this man, that seventeen years of training could not fully suppress a reaction this basic, this human. “That sounds dangerous.”

“Everything worth having is.” Alistair stopped close enough that Nolan had to tilt his head slightly to hold his gaze, close enough that the cedar and cold winter scent from the terrace surrounded him again, familiar now in a way that frightened him more than the memory alone had. “I intend to have you, Nolan Vale. Slowly, if that is what you require. But completely, in the end. I want you to understand that now, before we go any further, so that nothing that happens between us happens under false pretenses.”

The irony of that statement, given exactly how many false pretenses already surrounded this entire encounter, nearly startled a laugh out of Nolan, dark and bitter and entirely inappropriate to voice aloud. Instead he held Alistair’s gaze and said nothing, because silence, in this moment, felt safer than any lie he could construct, and it was in that charged, wordless space that a new voice, bright and lazy and unmistakably delighted, cut through the gallery from the doorway behind them.

“Well,” Lucein Blackwood said, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed and a grin spreading slow and dangerous across his face, “isn’t this interesting. My brother’s already trying to claim you, pretty thing, and you haven’t even unpacked your bags yet.”

Alistair did not turn immediately, though something rigid entered his posture, a stillness that felt less like composure now and more like restraint. “Lucein. This is a business meeting.”

“Sure it is.” Lucein pushed off the doorframe and sauntered into the gallery with the easy, prowling confidence of a man who had never once in his life worried about being unwelcome anywhere. “Funny thing about business meetings, though. They usually don’t involve you standing close enough to kiss someone.” His emerald eyes found Nolan’s, and something in them sharpened, possessive and amused in equal measure. “Hello again, Etienne. Or should I call you Nolan now? I heard you changed your name. Very mysterious. I like it.”

Nolan’s stomach dropped through the floor.

Lucein knew. Lucein had recognized him, had connected two different aliases across two different encounters, and was standing in this gallery now with a grin that suggested he found the discovery delightful rather than alarming, which was, somehow, infinitely more terrifying than if he had reacted with suspicion.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Nolan said, and even to his own ears the denial sounded thin, unconvincing, the first genuinely bad lie he had told in seventeen years of professional deception.

“No, I don’t imagine you do.” Lucein’s grin widened, and he closed the distance between them with unhurried, deliberate steps, ignoring the way Alistair’s entire body had gone taut with something dangerously close to a warning. “But that’s alright. I like a good mystery almost as much as I like a good liar, and you, gorgeous, appear to be both.”

He reached out, tucked a strand of dark hair behind Nolan’s other ear, mirroring, with what felt like deliberate, mocking precision, the exact gesture his brother had made on the terrace four nights earlier, and leaned in close enough that his breath ghosted warm against Nolan’s cheek.

“Welcome to the family, Nolan Vale,” Lucein murmured. “Try not to get too comfortable. I don’t share, and neither does my brother, and something tells me the two of you are about to find that out the hard way.”

Behind him, Alistair’s voice cut through the gallery, low and cold enough to frost the air itself. “Get away from him, Lucein.”

And Lucein, still smiling, still close enough that Nolan could feel the warmth of him, turned his head just enough to meet his brother’s gaze over Nolan’s shoulder, and said, with the light, terrible cheer of a man declaring war, “Make me.”