Page 156 of A Vicious Love

Harrison was already there. He sat sideways in one of the chairs. Flicking his lighter open and shut.

I closed the door behind me.

“What happened?”

Harrison glanced at me. “Hello to you too.”

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

Marcel did not turn from the window. “Kingston starts at Darlington this week.”

Our little brother had always been the sore point none of us touched unless we wanted the room to become dangerous.

There were things my brothers and I could discuss without flinching. Murder. Debt. Torture. Types of different torture. Territory disputes. Damius. Our parents, on good days, if the whiskey was controlled and no one said our mother’s name too low

Kingston was different.

Harrison’s posture shifted first. The lazy angle disappeared by half an inch.

I stayed by the door. Marcel finally turned. His face was empty in the way that meant the guilt was eating at him again.

“Darlington confirmed his intake packet this morning,” he said.

Darlington Academy.

Officially Darlington Sovereign Academy for Dynasty Heirs.

No one called it that unless they were opening ceremonies.

It was where dynasty children went when childhood stopped being useful. The academy took heirs and heiresses from every major bloodline and trained them to inherit without flinching. Law, etiquette, territory management, negotiation, surveillance, bloodline history, public optics, private violence.

A finishing house for monsters.

Every dynasty heir learned the pretty side first. How to stand in a room beneath chandeliers and make a threat sound like a toast. How to negotiate land rights over dinner. How to smile beside a family they intended to bankrupt by winter. How to marry for bloodline gain and call it duty. How to speak to press. How to survive press. How to hide weakness behind manners old enough to have their own legal protection.

That was dynasty training.

Crows got that too.

The world loved pretending we were only syndicate because it made them feel cleaner to hate us. But Crow blood was dynasty blood. Older than most of the families who whispered about us over champagne. Richer. Heavier. More violent, yes, but violence did not make us less legitimate.

So Crow heirs sat through the same lessons as everyone else. We learned old treaties, table rank, sovereign law, marriage weight, inheritance optics, public grief, funeral protocol, and how to accept an insult without reacting until the room was no longer full of witnesses.

Then the academy separated us. Behind locked doors the other bloodlines pretended not to know about. Crow heirs got the second education.

The real one.

Syndicate strategy.

Combat training.

Interrogation resistance.

Debt architecture.

Route control.

Hidden markets.