Vows of Ashes

ELIAS

The wrench slipped and I nearly lost two fingers to the engine block. I caught it, barely, and the same motion that saved my hand threw me backward off the gunwale, straight into a man who'd been standing behind me the whole time. Close enough to touch. I hadn't heard him come aboard. Nobody comes aboard my boat without me hearing it.

"Careful," he said, catching my shoulder. His grip was gentler than his voice. "Wouldn't want Ironmouth's most famous name to drown on my boat. People might ask questions."

My stomach dropped before my brain caught up to why. I knew that voice before I turned around, everyone on the docks had been saying his name for three days like a warning. The Cassano heir's back. He's asking about you. Watch yourself. I'd heard it from Bricci, from Rosalind, from men I'd never spoken to in my life, all of them suddenly interested in whether I knew to be afraid.

I turned, and there he was.

I remembered him at nineteen years old, at a funeral, standing straighter than a boy that age should have to stand while half the city watched to see if he'd cry. He hadn't. Not once. He'd grown into someone taller, broader, a man who filled a room by existing in it. Dark eyes. A thin scar through one eyebrow. An expression that told me nothing except that he'd been watching me work for longer than I'd realized, and hadn't minded waiting.

"You're not supposed to be here." My voice came out steadier than I felt. Small mercy. "This is a private slip."

"I own the slip." He said it flatly, no heat in it, which was worse than shouting. "I own the boathouse behind you. The water under this boat. And as of forty minutes ago, I own the contract on your father's old debt. Which means, Elias Marchetti, I own a fair amount of your immediate future."

The engine sputtered and died right then, like it had been listening too and wanted no part of this. In the quiet that followed, all I could hear was water against the hull and my own pulse, too loud.

"I don't know anything about a debt."

"No. I don't imagine you do." He stepped closer, not crowding, but close enough that I had to tip my head back to hold his eyes, close enough to watch the muscle working in his jaw. "Your father's kept that quiet a long time. Nineteen years of quiet."

"Then take it up with him."

"I intend to. Through you." Something dark moved behind his eyes and vanished before I could name it. "You're going to help me fix that. One way or another."

"And if I say no?"

"Then I find out the hard way whether Salvatore Marchetti was really working alone the night he killed my brother." He held my gaze a beat longer than he needed to. "You don't want to be standing this close to me when I go looking, Elias."

He turned and walked off the boat. No goodbye, no wait for a response, the walk of a man who'd never once had to consider that someone might tell him no.

I stood there with my hands shaking, the dead engine cooling under my palm, and understood that whatever this was, threat, warning, opening move, it had already started. I had no idea yet how far down it went.

I didn't sleep. I lay in the dark going over the hard way like a word I couldn't spit out, and by morning I'd half convinced myself it was nothing but a rich man throwing weight around because grief needed somewhere to land and my family was the easiest target left in the city.

I believed that right up until I opened my father's front door and found the house destroyed.

Not robbed, searched. Every drawer in his study pulled and dumped, the old sea chest that held what little was left of my mother's things flipped on its side and emptied across the floor, like whoever did this knew exactly what they were looking for and didn't find it.

And in the center of the wreckage, my father, on his knees, not moving.

"Papa." I was across the room before I finished saying it, hands on his shoulders, turning him, checking for blood, for a wound, for anything that would explain this. His eyes came up slow, and when they found mine, something cracked open in them I'd never seen before. Not the drowned, dull grief he wore every day of my life. Fear. Real fear.

"They asked me where it is." His voice was a rasp. "I told them I don't have it anymore." His hand closed around my wrist, hard enough to bruise. "You have to leave. Tonight. Take nothing. Tell no one. Just go."

"Who did this? Papa, who was here."

"It was never supposed to touch you." His voice broke entirely, nineteen years of silence splitting open at the worst possible second. "That was the one thing I bought. The only thing. And now they're back, and that means."

He stopped. His eyes went wide and fixed on something behind me, and his whole body locked rigid.

I turned. The front door stood open. Framed in it, unhurried, unbothered by the wreckage around him: Kai Cassano.

"Well," he said, looking between us. Something moved behind his cold eyes, surprise, maybe, or the start of something worse. "This is interesting. I sent no one here."

My blood went to ice. "Then who."

"Excellent question." He stepped over the ruined sea chest like it was furniture. "I think you and I are about to find out the answer together. Whether either of us wants to or not."

Behind him, from the wrecked study, something skittered off a shelf and hit the floor, too deliberate to be settling wood, too sharp to be wind.

We weren't alone in the house.

My father's grip on my wrist went white knuckled. Kai's hand was already inside his jacket. And somewhere past the ruined study, past the open back door swinging soft on its hinge, I heard the unmistakable, unhurried tread of someone who wasn't in any rush to leave.