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Feelings.

Fuck, the word tastes like rust. The same rust I tasted standing in a kitchen years ago while one of my father’s generals said FBI and informant and rat until I put my fist through a car window and swore the name would be clean again.

Feelings cloud judgement.

Feelings get a man put in a hole while other families repeat the story of how he died and spit on what he left behind.

But I can’t deny it. I have feelings for Elias. I will not lie to myself at three in the morning. The hour I waited outside the boutique hotel with my hand on the ignition was not only strategy. The jealousy in the converted bank, when I told him he might have to offer his body, was not only strategy. The way his thighs locked around me on the Kawasaki, grinding with the engine, was not only strategy.

However none of it is more important than the business.

The Lucci paid one of my own men for my hours, my security, my routes. They wanted me dead. They still do.

Tito is the head of that family. Everything else—the snowball fight in the park, the kiss under the tree, the way he swallowed me under the dining table after he opened up about that scumbag Zane—is secondary.

I steel myself the way I have steeled myself since I was a boy standing in wreckage with blood running off my knuckles.

Business first.

Always.

I put my hand on his hip. Not a caress. Weight...

“Elias. Up.”

The boy startles. His green eyes find me in the low light. For a second something almost soft moves across his face, the look of a boy who woke in a warm bed and thought the night might still belong to him.

Then he reads my face and the softness dies.

“What time is it?”

“Late enough,” I reply. “Get dressed. Dark clothes. Nothing that asks to be remembered. We’re leaving. Business calls.”

Elias does not ask where or what for. He sits. The sheet falls. I look at his chest, the ghost of the clamps, the bruise my mouth left where his neck meets his shoulder, and I look away before my urges bubble up and become a reason to stay in this room and lose the hour.

We dress without talking. I put on black. Shirt, trousers, coat, the ring that has closed more than one conversation without a word spoken. He pulls on jeans, a tight shirt, boots that will not click on stone. A little platinum neck chain. A nice scent. A boy who could be walking home from a late kitchen shift and hoping no one looks twice, or even a young man out looking for adventure. Maybe even both.

The private elevator takes us down past the guest floor, past the training room, all the way to the basement lot.

Hardy is already there. The vintage Mercedes sits with the engine running. Chrome and black paint that still turns heads even when there is no one to turn them.

Two seats. Low. Classic.

Hardy stands by the driver’s door with the keys in a gloved hand. His face gives nothing. He has been doing this long enough that 03:00 does not require an explanation.

“Sir. Boy.”

I take the keys. “Stay on comms. If I call, you move. No delay. No questions.”

“Yes, sir.”

Elias slides into the passenger seat. I get behind the wheel. The door shuts with the heavy sound of old money and older violence. We roll up the ramp and into the city.

Three in the morning in the first real storm of winter is an honest hour. The streets are scraped and salted and still losing. Steam lifts from the grates like the city is breathing through a wound. A plough crawls somewhere to the east, blade screaming on ice.

The clubs have emptied.

The people still walking have reasons that do not include joy. A man in a doorway watches us pass and then looks at his shoes.