Chapter 5

House of Two Kings

Nobody moved for a long, brittle moment.

Nolan stood frozen between them, close enough to feel Lucein’s warmth against his back and close enough to see the muscle jumping in Alistair’s clenched jaw, and understood, with the sudden, sickening clarity of a man realizing he had walked directly into the center of a minefield disguised as a hallway, that he had made a catastrophic miscalculation somewhere in the last four days. He had assumed, foolishly, that managing two separate points of interest inside the same household would be a matter of careful scheduling and careful lies. He had not accounted for the fact that the two men in question were brothers who apparently already existed in a permanent, simmering rivalry that his presence had just detonated into something considerably more volatile.

“Lucein.” Alistair’s voice had dropped into a register Nolan had not yet heard from him, quiet in a way that carried more threat than shouting ever could. “You are embarrassing yourself.”

“Am I?” Lucein straightened, unhurried, stepping back from Nolan with theatrical reluctance rather than genuine retreat, his grin never once faltering. “Funny, from where I’m standing, it looks like you’re the one who got caught red handed trying to seduce our new art consultant in broad daylight, in a room with excellent acoustics, I might add. Margaret probably heard every word from the hallway.”

“This is precisely the kind of behavior I expect from you,” Alistair said, and though his voice remained level, something had tightened around his eyes, a flicker of genuine anger breaking through his careful composure for the first time since Nolan had met him. “You cannot simply claim things because you saw them first, Lucein. This is not one of your acquisitions. He is a person.”

“Oh, now you care about him being a person.” Lucein’s grin sharpened into something considerably less pleasant, and for the first time Nolan saw, beneath the charm, the flash of the man he had witnessed in the parking garage, cruelty coiled just beneath a friendly surface. “Careful, brother. Almost sounds like you’re jealous, and jealousy’s usually reserved for people who actually feel something.”

“Get out of the gallery.”

“Make me,” Lucein said again, softer this time, and something about the repetition, the deliberate provocation of it, made Nolan’s instincts scream that this was not a new argument, that these two men had been circling some version of this confrontation for years, and he had simply become the newest, most combustible variable in an equation that had always been unstable.

Nolan did the only thing his training had ever taught him to do in a room about to erupt into violence between two powerful men. He made himself smaller, softer, harmless, a role rather than a person, and stepped, deliberately, into the space between them.

“Please,” he said, letting his voice tremble with exactly the right measure of distress, “I really don’t want to be the reason you two fight. I can leave. I can find somewhere else to stay while I do the appraisal, if that would help, I just, I don’t want to cause problems in your family.”

It worked, though not in the way he expected. Both brothers turned their full attention onto him instead of each other, and for a moment the air in the gallery shifted from violence toward something else entirely, something that felt, to Nolan’s practiced eye, disturbingly like two predators recalibrating their approach to prey worth keeping rather than fighting over on principle.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Alistair said, his voice softening fractionally, though the underlying steel never fully left it. “This collection requires proper appraisal, and I have no intention of hiring someone else simply because my brother cannot behave himself for one afternoon.”

“Careful,” Lucein murmured, though his eyes, when they settled on Nolan, had lost their earlier hardness, replaced by something warmer, more curious, more dangerous in its own quiet way. “He’s not wrong, though. I don’t want you to leave either. I just want my brother to remember there’s two of us in this house, and I’m not the type to politely step aside because he saw a pretty face first.”

“I saw him first at the gala,” Alistair said. “You apparently saw him in a parking garage, threatening an employee. I fail to see how that establishes any claim on your part.”

“I didn’t threaten him.” Lucein’s grin returned, sly and unrepentant. “I let him live. Which, incidentally, I have done for exactly nobody else who’s witnessed what he witnessed that night. That has to count for something.”

The casual admission landed in the room like a dropped stone, and Nolan watched Alistair’s expression flicker, processing the implication, understanding, evidently, precisely what kind of scene Nolan had stumbled into that night in the garage, and something in his sapphire eyes went even colder, calculating in a way that made Nolan distinctly uneasy.

“You witnessed one of my brother’s punishments,” Alistair said slowly, turning the full weight of his attention back onto Nolan, “and he let you walk away.”

“I didn’t see anything,” Nolan said quickly, too quickly, and hated himself for the misstep even as the words left his mouth. “I mean, I saw. I don’t know what I saw, exactly. I was scared. I left.”

“You’re a remarkably poor liar for someone who does it so often,” Lucein observed, sounding delighted rather than suspicious, and Nolan’s blood ran cold at the observation, the second time in a week someone had noted his deception rather than believed it, though Lucein, unlike Alistair, seemed to find the discovery entertaining rather than alarming.

“I think,” Alistair said, before Nolan could construct another deflection, “that we should let Mr. Vale settle into his work rather than interrogating him about matters that are, frankly, none of his concern. Lucein, don’t you have somewhere else to be? Some empire to threaten, some rival to eliminate?”

“As it happens, I do.” Lucein’s gaze lingered on Nolan a moment longer, warm and assessing and entirely too knowing, before he stepped back toward the doorway, unhurried, utterly unbothered by his brother’s dismissal. “I’ll see you at dinner, Nolan. Both of you, I suspect, though I imagine my brother will try to arrange it so I’m not invited.” He paused at the threshold, glancing back with a grin that had turned, briefly, almost soft. “For what it’s worth, I meant what I said in that garage. I don’t forget pretty things that interest me. And you, gorgeous, interest me more than anything has in longer than I care to admit.”

He left, footsteps unhurried down the hallway, and the gallery seemed, in his absence, to exhale, tension bleeding out of the air though nowhere near completely.

“I apologize for my brother,” Alistair said, once the sound of Lucein’s footsteps had fully faded. “He treats desire the way he treats everything else. As something to be claimed rather than earned.”

“And you don’t?” The question left Nolan’s mouth before he had fully decided to ask it, some reckless, unfamiliar part of him wanting, suddenly and inconveniently, to know the actual answer.

Alistair considered the question with the same unhurried care he seemed to bring to everything, and when he answered, his voice had dropped into something quieter, more honest than Nolan had yet heard from him. “I have spent my entire life acquiring things, Nolan. Companies. Property. Influence. I am very good at it, and I have never once, in thirty one years, mistaken acquisition for anything resembling love. But I find, with you, that I do not want to simply claim you the way my brother claims things. I find that I want you to choose me, knowingly, completely, and that terrifies me considerably more than any hostile takeover I have ever executed, because it is the one outcome I cannot fully control.”

The confession hung in the gallery between them, unexpectedly raw against the backdrop of priceless paintings and filtered skylight, and Nolan felt something crack, quietly, dangerously, somewhere behind his ribs, a fissure in seventeen years of careful, practiced emotional distance.

He did not have a response prepared for honesty. He had prepared for seduction, for interrogation, for violence, for every possible permutation of danger this assignment might present. He had never once prepared for a man looking at him and simply telling the truth, offering vulnerability instead of demanding it, and the absence of any rehearsed response left him standing in silence, exposed in a way that felt considerably more dangerous than anything Lucein’s possessive warnings had threatened.

“I should start the appraisal,” Nolan said finally, because it was the only sentence he could locate that did not risk saying something he could not take back.

Alistair studied him a moment longer, something unreadable moving behind his sapphire eyes, before he nodded, stepping back to give Nolan space, though the retreat felt, somehow, like its own kind of statement, a man choosing patience over pursuit because patience, for a man like Alistair Blackwood, was simply another form of certainty.

“Of course,” Alistair said. “Margaret will show you to your workspace. I have a call with our Singapore office in twenty minutes, unfortunately, or I would stay to watch you work.” He paused at the doorway, echoing his brother’s earlier exit with an irony Nolan doubted either man would appreciate being pointed out. “Nolan. Whatever you saw in that garage. Whatever you’re not telling either of us. I want you to know that I will find out, eventually. I always do. I would simply prefer you tell me yourself, when you’re ready, rather than force me to extract it through less pleasant means.”

He left before Nolan could respond, and Nolan stood alone in the gallery for a long moment, surrounded by paintings worth more than most people’s lifetimes, and allowed himself, finally, a single unguarded breath.

Two brothers. Two claims already staked, in radically different languages, over the same undeserving liar. A threatening photograph from an untraceable number. A mission that required him to extract evidence of trafficking from men who were beginning to look at him less like a stranger and more like something they had already, in their own separate, dangerous ways, decided belonged to them.

Nolan Vale, who had spent his entire life being nobody so thoroughly that even he sometimes forgot there was supposed to be a somebody underneath, turned toward the nearest painting, an oil portrait of a woman with sad eyes he suspected had once been the twins’ mother, and began, with hands that were not quite steady, the work he had actually been sent here to do.

It was nearly midnight before he found the first hidden ledger, tucked behind a false panel in the gallery’s northern wall, and it was in the soft, flickering light of his phone’s camera, photographing pages of numbers that made no sense as legitimate art transactions, that Nolan heard the door behind him creak open, and turned to find Lucein Blackwood standing in the doorway, no longer smiling, watching him with the flat, dangerous attention of a man who had just caught something considerably mo

re interesting than a simple liar.