Prince of Blood and Steel

by Nazarea Andrews

  Tears strike Emma before she can even register the magnitude of Seth's words. Her memories take her back to when her brother died, so long before the relevance of the event could ever be obvious to her or her cousins. From that catastrophe came another death, and another, until it became routine, almost expected. No wonder, she realizes, no wonder the whole outfit began to rot at some point. The dream became the monster, and the monster eventually became exactly what Gabe and those before him had tried to avoid. Emma had been sheltered from all of it, just as Seth had been in his day, and both of them had been robbed of their brothers as sacrifice to the so-called success of the family. She blurts, “I don't want you to die! I don't want anyone else to die!”

  Seth watches Emma's disillusionment wash over her in a moment of stunned helplessness. He knows such moments well, remembers the series of them that have shaped his personal armor. The tears that stream down her cheeks contain the last tiny remnants of her youth, and, again, he is sorely familiar with her current trauma.

  Then, she makes a tiny sniff that snaps him out of his paralysis, and he does what no one ever could really do for him: he scoots over in the seat and wraps an arm around her shoulders. She sniffs again, but her head comes to rest against him. He wants to tell her that it's ok, that it will be over soon and that no one will die, but beneath the comfort he has to offer he can feel a cold mass of hatred incubating. Though he has not taken the time to consider his next step, an inevitable truth has already solidified in the back of his mind. There will be at least one more death. There will be retribution, and the takeover will be hostile. And if he fails, then he will be the one to die, for death is the only force that can stop him.

  Another sniff from Emma brings Seth back around, so that he must bury the anger that tries to rise in him. He can feel her shoulders gently shaking against him, and it threatens to shake loose his grief from the hold into which he finally managed to cage it. Emma whispers, “Caleb didn't have to die,” and Seth must bite down to keep from groaning in the agony caused by her words. He squeezes her shoulders so hard he knows it must hurt, but she makes no protest.

  “Caleb was betrayed,” he answers as steadily as he can manage. Still, his voice cracks, and his head drops to rest on her silky hair. “Just as I was betrayed. We all were.” Her tears redouble, and her breath hitches as she tries her damnedest to keep herself in check. He continues, “I don't know what's going to happen, Emma. Just promise me that no matter what comes, if fates chooses me, don't follow me to the grave. You must become the hope that my father once saw in me.”

  She rips herself away to stare at him in wild disbelief. He can see the defiance in her eyes, despite the wet upon her cheeks. She makes a swipe at her tears with the back of her hand and says, “You are still that hope, Seth. Don't say shit like that. I refuse to lose you. I can't do it.”

  He sighs, and it is full of his weariness, his apprehension, and an undeniable sorrow. Again, he wants to lie just to ease her pain, but he knows he can't do it to her. Chances are, she would call him on a lie anyway, for he has no heart for deception. He touches her cheek, gently, as he says, “You're a Morgan. You can take anything this world throws at you. Don't ever forget that, and don't ever doubt it.”

  Emma makes an indignant sniff, but she settles back against him in silence. He rubs her arm in a calming motion. He glances up to find Tinney's eyes on him through the rear view mirror. He is taken off guard by the contact, surprised by the look in the old man's eyes—pride, an expression so reminiscent of Gabe that Seth cannot hold the connection.

  Would his dad be proud of him right now? Or would he see the failure that crushes the air out of Seth's lungs, the failure that he could not save his brother from bitterness? His raw emotion smothers his voice, and so he squanders silently in it, retreating to the impersonal view of the city as a series of blurs that creep by as the car presses through traffic.

  As they leave the city behind, Emma stirs, blearily asks, “Where are we going now?”

  “The Hamptons,” answers Seth, and his voice is so hollow.

  By the time the Altima arrives at its destination, the sun has begun to set. The long rays are buffered by the tinted windows, but still they seem to give Seth just a breath of warmth to prove that he is not completely numb. He watches huge, embellished wrought iron gates swing mechanically open to let them pass, and his vision crawls over the huge, ridiculously expensive house with its two stories. Manicured shrubbery and gilded statues of cherubim roll across his vision as Tinney eases the car along the driveway to the back of the house. An expanse of green lawn stretches into the back yard, and a stylish redwood deck cradles, of course, an in-ground pool.

  The property belongs to an old friend of Gabriel's that Seth didn't even know existed. The Morgans have their own, highly-coveted house in the Hamptons, but Tinney has insisted that they should drop off the grid for a little while as the dust and debris of Seth's latest move settles. By now, Mikie has most certainly put out the word among his subordinates to find his niece and nephew, for he realizes the threat of losing their heat signatures from his radar. And surely by now, he has begun to wonder where his chief of security has gone.

  Seth has mulled over Emma's words the whole trip. Caleb didn't have to die.

  It is the slow but painful truth to which Seth's digging for answers has led him, and it is the conclusion that not even he had put so succinctly into spoken word. The entirety of the rest of the drive had been in silence, so that Emma's voice haunted the foundation of Seth's internal calm. He had suffered every strained tenth of a mile so that when the car finally stops, the air feels too thin to breath and highly explosive, despite Emma sleeping slumped against him.

  Before Tinney can fully throw the transmission into park, Seth flings open his door and propels himself into the expansive air of upper crust society. The temperature has dropped so that his summer clothes are a little too thin, and chills spread across his skin. He hardly notices as he throws his attention to the clarity above him, to the stars he can never see inside the city. Cocaine traces race through his veins, and his memory is tempted by a faraway beach where he wandered, mostly naked and without a soul to care for him.

  Perversely, he longs for the isolation, for the stores of his family's ghosts are nearly too heavy for him to hold just now. Cuba seems so far away now, he can hardly believe it is a real place, that he was actually there. Is it just another myth that his previous superiors would have him believe?

  No. Cuba was real, and Caleb didn't have to die.

  He hears the car doors open then gently close. He hears Tinney pop the trunk, and he hears Emma's tentative footsteps growing closer to him. He makes his voice rough and commanding as he says, “Go inside, Emma.”

  She pauses, and he can feel her heart break just a little more. He knows she feels like she is being pushed away from him, and maybe, just for the moment, that is exactly what he's doing. So he adds, softer, “I'll be right there, Em. Just . . . please, go inside.”

  More moments pass, and he is alone. It's dark enough here that he can actually feel his solitude. His legs shake, not from the chill, but from the weight of his world, and he finds himself sitting in the grass before he realizes he is moving. The only natural path, he also finds, is that his upper half follows, and then he is lying on his back in the cold grass, staring at the stars. He can almost pretend that he is nowhere, with no cares, but then Rama's honest eyes, so full of pain, creep into his thoughts.

  The Thai mystery who was his brother's solace may prove to be a valuable ally after all; the Thai prince who almost stole Emma's heart from her own empire, just as he had with Caleb. How the momentum of Seth's game had changed so dramatically over the course of one night.

  He has no idea how long he stays there, letting all his thoughts play, like watching a movie drunk. He stops trying to guide them, stops avoiding them, and just as he had on that fantastical beach of his past, he resolves to stay there until some immeasurable force makes him mo
ve. Surely his twisted world will cease its movement if he removes himself from it.

  He knows now, though, that it will not stop, and it will definitely collapse. Finally, he hears footsteps approaching lightly. His usual defensiveness doesn't rise, and he thinks that if someone's come to put a gun to his head, he'd probably let them.

  Instead: “Seth, you're going to make yourself sick. It's getting cold.” It's Emma. Then she appears in his field of vision, and she reaches out a hand to him. “Please come inside,” she whispers.

  There, the hand to pull him out of the quicksand and make him breathe again. The hand that never came during his education. His body moves, still without his will, and he reaches to accept. Her fingers are so warm against his chilled ones, and her grip is strong when she pulls him out of the grass. He stands like an emotionless machine, and she slips an arm around his thin waist. Again, she is so warm against him, and the ice that has been forming around his heart begins to melt.

  He cannot give up now. There are people who need him. There are people he needs. She says nothing, merely holds fast to him, as if she has taken the time to understand his stress.

  Before they begin to walk, he says, “I'm not angry at you for seeing Rama. You just need to be more careful.”

  She stiffens against him. She couldn't have expected him to say such a thing, but she doesn't answer. Just urges him forward, and he holds her against him as they go.

  Chapter 34

  Mikie’s Apartment, New York City. August 7th.

  The only sound in the room for several long moments is the hiss of artificial temperature control, and the only movement is from Nicolette's eyes as they rove her side of the chess board. Despite the comfortable sixty-eight degrees, her demeanor is frigid, her poker face impenetrable. And despite the air conditioning, Michael Morgan is sweating.

  A cigar idly smokes in a crystal ashtray, where Mikie left it several minutes before. A sifter of brandy sits as equally neglected beside the ashtray. For all his experience in hard-ball situations, there is still something about this woman’s subtle ferocity that puts him sorely ill at ease.

  He has faced down rooms full of the most dangerous men in the country. He has strong-armed some of the most difficult allies the family has ever had. He has even gone nose-to-nose with the unscrupulous Remi Oliver. Yet still there is something about facing Nicolette alone while she's wearing that hard game face.

  Maybe it's her achingly devastating beauty, the way she moves like a midnight dancer, and broods like a summer thunderstorm. But more likely—he thinks to keep himself from hanging on every twitch of her gaze—yes, it's her hunger that unsettles him. Two years ago when he sent Seth away, he never could have realized that Nicolette's drive and lust for the top very nearly matched his own.

  “Knight takes bishop,” she finally says, definitively, and Mikie's remaining bishop makes a 'tink' sound when she knocks it over and off of the space she has conquered.

  Mikie lets loose his frustrated sigh.

  He should have known she would devastate him on the board, especially with his mind so frayed from fielding the heat after Seth's ballsy rebellion at yesterday's meeting. The rest of the board members are furious. Mikie's lawyers can't seem to find a loophole to counteract Seth's play. And Mikie's chief of security has apparently taken up Seth's banner, at the most inconvenient time.

  Now, the king is losing at chess. He snatches up his cigar and takes a few hearty puffs.

  “I'm having a hard time believing that all of this just flew under your radar,” he says, his words edged enough that she throws him a heated glare in return. He bites down on the grin that wants to surface at her reaction. He continues, “Has my nephew grown so stealthy that he showed no signs, gave no indication that he was about to exact a very precise move to oust me?”

  Where most opponents might react in a flare of anger, Nicolette holds his gaze as she shifts in her seat. She leans against the low, straight chair back and crosses her legs. Her eyes and lips are flatly unamused. She retrieves her Manhattan from the table beside her and takes a drink. She says, “I hardly see him. When I do, he tells me nothing. Not since he brought Emma on. And she quit telling me anything when she got caught poking around your Thai whorehouse.”

  Again, Mikie has to suppress a smile at the bitter twinge to her voice when she mentions Seth's darling cousin. Blow for blow, just like that. He drops his gaze to wander over his pieces. The game is hopeless at this point, so why not push a few more buttons. He decides to call upon a rook he has left inconspicuously hidden. In her careful preparations, she has left a rook deliciously open. Perhaps she thought he would not be so ballsy as to rush her from one end of the board to the other. Maybe it's a trap, but he wouldn't mind for the game to end anyway. As he removes her piece, he says, “It's like he knows you're a conniving bitch.”

  He catches the clench in her jaw, but she doesn't answer right away. Her queen is now in danger. She sweeps the piece over without second thought and takes the rook. She says, “You said that you and my father could keep the reins on him.” His rook makes a thunk as she lands it on the table, perhaps with a little more force than necessary. “You also said we'd be making wedding plans by now, and be Mr. and Mrs. Seth Morgan by Christmas. You promised me shares, Michael. Where's the pay-up?”

  Mikie's anger flares, just as he has watched it do in her.

  The difference between them is simple: experience. He has had years on her to practice being cold-hearted. Not even the tension along his limbs wavers. He calmly cycles through possibilities for his next move. Clever bitch, she had known she could safely take his rook without further endangering her queen. He must consider some other decision and accept that his sacrifice had been merely for effect. He stalemates one of her pawns with his instead. Yet another yank on her aggravation.

  He says, “The deal went both ways, remember. You were supposed to keep me informed about any movements within his division and the company, and about anything drastic that he planned to do. You gave me nothing, and now he's taken over the whole goddamned company with nothing I can do to stop him. The pay-up is no longer under my control. And I've been paying you to be the ‘liaison’ with your father's bank for nothing.”

  He can all but feel the hatred coursing through her veins. Maybe she's experiencing a moment of regret. If she had just stuck by her lover in the first place, she wouldn't be at risk of exposure as a traitor.

  She is the only thing left in the world, it seems, that retains Seth's naïve idealism. The only chink in his armor. He would never consider that she would scheme against him, would never believe that her love for him had been outweighed by her bitterness.

  Mikie knew it was true. He has watched her harden from the front row, until what she truly desired was power and she no longer believed in love. So interesting, to watch the devastation of the weak-hearted in the wake of Seth's absence: his own brother, the love of his life, even the poor young sap at the head of the Thai syndicate who didn't even know him.

  Nicolette leans forward, her silken hair sliding over her shoulders. There are ribbons of her anger in her eyes, but her expression and voice remain calm. She says, “I did my job. He gave me nothing, on purpose, to 'protect me' he said. By the way you describe it, and my father, he didn't even tell Emma he planned to take over Caleb's shares. More aptly, it's like he knows you are a backstabbing snake. Maybe you shouldn't have left quite so many loose ends. Surely he realized you had been up to something when there was no contingency plan for him to take over his own division when he came home.”

  “I thought I could stall his return just a little longer,” Mikie says, his anger slipping into his words.

  “What difference does it make?” she says with a shade of amusement. She slips her knight around his and waylays his queen. He has to bite back his curse.

  He barks, “Because I could have had the Cubans take care of him, and it never would have been an issue. I was so close.”

  She gasps, freezes in
her reach for the prized piece. Her eyes are genuinely wide. “You don't mean that,” she says, her voice scarcely above a whisper.

  “No, you're right,” he hurries. “It doesn't matter. Though Caleb had a streak of brilliance with his plan to integrate the whores into the syndicate, he was never a good pawn anyway.”

  He eyes the chess board, ignores her burning gaze on him. His thread of survival in the game is dire. He might as well light the funeral pyre. He takes the knight with his king. She clears her throat, re-focuses on the game, but her attention is now divided—somewhere else. Finally she says, “You've known all along that one of them would have to die.”

  Mikie sighs, says, “Don't act like you didn't realize that. Together, they would have completely unseated my regime. Caleb's loyalty would have returned to his brother, and they would have forced me into retirement, and Seth would have realized right away that it was his division that I planned to dissolve. They would have taken everything I have built.”

  “You mean they would have taken their rightful place?” she says, that deadly edge back in her words. “You mean you're too weak to manipulate them both?” She scoffs. “We see how well that fucking worked. Turns out you can't even handle one brother. Your plan failed, and you couldn't adapt in time to save your ass.”

  “Careful,” he growls, grabbing her eyes with his, letting his rage shine in the connection. “I would hate for your beloved to find out that you've been sneaking around behind his back.”

  “Like he would believe you,” she answers, ups the bet. They share a stretch of searing eye contact, before she dismisses him for the game between them. At length, a slow, devilish smile possesses her lips. She asks, “What now? What's your plan?”