Chapter 10: The Morning After the Honeymoon
Four days bled into each other like candlewax, each one indistinguishable from the last. The bedroom curtains stayed drawn against the afternoon sun and the gray dawns alike, and the world beyond the estate gates ceased to exist. There was only the heat of Tomas's mouth, the scrape of his stubble against her thighs, the way his hands mapped the curve of her spine as if memorizing terrain he intended to conquer again and again. Bianca lost count of the hours. Lost track of whether it was Tuesday or Saturday. Lost her own name somewhere in the tangle of sheets and sweat and the low, possessive growl Tomas made when she raked her nails down his back.
By the morning of the fifth day, something had shifted. Bianca woke with her cheek pressed to Tomas's chest, the steady thrum of his heartbeat under her ear, and for the first time since the wedding, the bond did not roar. It hummed. A quiet, settled thing, like water finding its level. She could still feel him, the weight of his presence at the edge of her awareness, but the desperate, clawing hunger had banked into something warm and steady.
She lifted her head. Tomas was already awake, dark eyes studying her with that unreadable intensity he wore like armor.
"You're thinking," she said.
"So are you."
"One of us has to."
His mouth twitched, almost a smile. He traced the line of her jaw with one finger, featherlight, and she felt the ghost of his touch echo through the bond. "We should get up."
"We should."
Neither of them moved for a long moment. Then Tomas swung his legs off the bed and reached for his trousers, and Bianca allowed herself one breath of something dangerously close to contentment before she rose to dress as well.
She chose charcoal and black, her armor for the day ahead. The structured wool coat settled over her shoulders like a second skin, and she pulled her dreads back into a tight, severe knot at the nape of her neck. The locket rested cool against her throat. In the mirror, she looked like herself again. Cold. Composed. Untouchable.
Tomas had dressed in his usual stark palette, black shirt, black jacket, his silver cufflinks glinting at his wrists. He looked like the don she had married. Not the man who had spent four days learning the exact pressure point behind her ear that made her arch off the mattress.
They descended the stairs together, the silence between them comfortable rather than charged. The scent of coffee drifted up from the kitchen, rich and bitter, and Bianca smelled something else beneath it. Warm pastry. Cinnamon.
Meera sat at the marble island, a mug cradled between her palms and a paper plate of muffins arranged before her like she owned the place. She looked up as they entered, her expression carefully neutral, but her dark eyes flicked between Bianca and Tomas with an assessing sharpness that Bianca knew all too well.
"Good morning," Meera said, her voice too pleasant. "I took the liberty of raiding your kitchen. You were, ah. Occupied."
Tomas crossed to the island and picked up a muffin, examining it with a faintly amused expression. "You let yourself in?"
"Your security is excellent. They flagged me as family." Meera's smile was angelic. "Congratulations on the honeymoon."
Bianca felt heat creep up the back of her neck and ruthlessly suppressed it. "It wasn't a honeymoon. It was a residual effect of the blood bond. Now that it's settled, we can resume normal operations."
"Residual effect." Meera nodded slowly, as if tasting the phrase. "Four days of residual effect. Must have been very potent magic."
"Meera."
"I'm just saying, the bond seems to have done wonders for your complexion. You look rested." Her gaze slid to Tomas, who was chewing his muffin with indecent calm. "Both of you do."
Tomas dusted crumbs from his fingers and crossed to where Bianca stood. Before she could brace herself, he bent and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. The gesture was so casual, so unstudied, that it took her a full second to process it. Through the bond, she felt something warm and proprietary flicker through him.
"I'll check in tonight," he said, his voice low enough that Meera wouldn't hear. Then he was gone, the front door clicking shut behind him, leaving the scent of his cologne hanging in the air.
Bianca stood frozen for a beat. Then she turned to face Meera's knowing smirk.
"The blood bond," Meera repeated, drawing the words out like she was savoring them. "Sure. Absolutely. The bond is why he kissed your head like a man who just remembered he actually likes his wife."
"His wife," Bianca said flatly, "is a strategic asset. The bond creates affection. It's chemical. Magical. Whatever. It doesn't mean anything."
"If you say so." Meera pushed a mug of coffee across the island toward her. "The port authority finally responded to the merger proposal. They want a meeting. Neutral ground, two days from now."
Bianca wrapped her fingers around the warm ceramic, grateful for the shift in topic. The bond hummed softly in her chest, a distant echo of Tomas's presence as he moved through the city. She could feel his satisfaction, his anticipation of the day's work. It was disconcerting, how easy it had become to sense him.
"What about Aldous?" she asked, lifting the mug to her lips.
Meera's expression flickered. That was the thing about Meera. She could lie to anyone except Bianca. They had known each other too long, bled together in the same trenches, and Meera's face went carefully, deliberately blank in a way that made Bianca's tail lash behind her.
"He's gone quiet."
Bianca set the mug down. "Quiet how?"
"Quiet as in no one's seen him since Orla died. His residence is empty. His usual haunts are cold. His underbosses claim they don't know where he is, but they're lying. I can smell it on them."
The bond hummed again, but this time it was different. A warning note, thin and sharp as a drawn blade. Bianca felt Tomas's attention shift somewhere across the city, felt his awareness sharpen in response to her spike of unease.
"When did you notice?"
"Three days ago. I didn't want to interrupt your, ah, strategic negotiations."
Bianca's tail lashed hard enough to crack against the leg of the stool. "You should have told me sooner."
"And what would you have done? Left a trail of breadcrumbs through the bedroom to go hunting? You were useless to me, and you're still useless to me if you're distracted. Now you're not." Meera's voice was brisk, pragmatic. "Aldous isn't dead. I've checked every morgue, every neutral healer, every bolt-hole his kind favors. He's alive, and he's hiding, and the only reason a man like Aldous Vane hides is because he's planning something he doesn't want seen."
Bianca stared at the coffee in her hands, watching the dark surface ripple. Through the bond, she felt Tomas's answering stillness. He had heard. He was listening.
The truce had given them four days of peace. Four days of Tomas's hands, Tomas's mouth, the unexpected tenderness buried beneath the violence. Four days when Bianca had allowed herself to forget that she ruled an empire built on blood and fear, and that empires built on blood and fear were always, always under siege.
Aldous Vane had gone quiet.
And Bianca knew, with the bone-deep certainty of a woman who had survived the slums by trusting her instincts, that quiet was only the calm before the storm broke.
Tomas crossed the marble foyer of his estate, the familiar chill of the place settling over him like a shroud. Four days in Bianca's house had softened him. The warmth of her, the way she fit against him in sleep, the unexpected domesticity of shared coffee and sharper banter. This place felt like a mausoleum by comparison, all cold stone and vaulted shadows.
He pulled out his phone as he climbed the sweeping staircase, thumb finding Aldous's contact with practiced ease. The line rang once. Twice. Then a click, sterile and hollow, as the call routed to voicemail.
"Vane. It's Rojas. Call me back."
He ended the call and stood at the window of his study, watching the gray light bleed across the city. Aldous had never ignored his calls. Even when the man was nursing his grudge, even when he was scheming in the dark, he always answered. That was the nature of a lieutenant. He answered when his don called.
The silence from Aldous's end was a statement in itself.
Tomas's jaw tightened. He pressed another number, and a gruff voice answered on the second ring.
"Rojas."
"I need Vane found. He's gone silent, and I don't like it. I want him standing in front of me, alive, within the hour."
A pause, heavy with unspoken questions. "And if he resists?"
"Then I have no interest in how damaged he arrives. Only that he arrives, and that he can speak."
"Understood."
The line went dead. Tomas set the phone down on the mahogany desk and moved to the sideboard, where a crystal decanter of blood wine caught the dim light. He poured a glass, the liquid dark as old rubies, and swirled it slowly.
Aldous had proposed killing Bianca the day before the wedding. Tomas had listened, made vague sounds of agreement, and let the man walk away thinking he had an ally in the shadows. At the time, it had been a play. A way to gauge Aldous's reach, to see how far a disgruntled lieutenant would go. He had intended to deal with it on his own terms, after the marriage was consummated and the alliance firmly cemented.
But Orla had moved first. Poison in Bianca's wine. And Bianca, with that terrible, beautiful curse of hers, had drunk it willingly and watched the poison kill her would-be assassin instead. Four days ago, Tomas would have called that a convenient outcome. Vane was exposed, Orla was dead, and Tomas could maneuver against his disloyal lieutenant in his own time.
Now, standing in his cold study with the bond humming a faint echo of Bianca's presence across the city, Tomas saw the shape of his own trap with sickening clarity.
Aldous had leverage.
The man had been there when Tomas gave those vague, noncommittal responses to the plan to murder his bride. He had heard Tomas not disagree. He had walked away with Tomas's implicit blessing, real or imagined, and if Aldous was desperate enough, he would use it.
All he had to do was reach Bianca.
She would not need proof. She would feel the truth ripple through the bond, taste it in the air like a wound. He had spent four days learning the map of her distrust, the carefully fortified walls she had built brick by brick in the slums of New York. The blood bond had cracked those walls, but it had not demolished them. And if she learned he had sat in a brothel club, listening to another man plot her death without a single word of defiance...
The glass in his hand creaked. He loosened his grip, forcing his fingers to relax.
He had to find Aldous first. He had to shut that mouth permanently, or at least long enough to figure out how the hell he was going to tell Bianca the truth himself. Because if he did not tell her, and she found out another way, the trust they had begun to build would shatter beyond repair.
The bond hummed again, and Tomas felt a flicker of something from her side. Curiosity, perhaps, or an echo of his own tension. He could not hide from her. Not fully. The bond was too deep now, too entwined with the memory of her thighs around his hips and her voice in his ear growling commands that he obeyed without shame.
He drank the blood wine, letting the copper-rich heat settle in his stomach.
Below the window, the estate gates opened and a black sedan rolled through, heading toward the city. His security chief, moving with the unhurried precision of a predator who had a scent.
Tomas set the empty glass down.
Aldous Vane had been his second for nearly forty years. The man knew Tomas's routines, his haunts, his patterns of thought. He would go to ground somewhere familiar, somewhere he felt protected by old loyalties or old debts. But Tomas knew his kingdom better than any man in it. And there was nowhere in this city, nowhere in this territory, that his reach did not extend.
The hour would tell. And when Aldous stood before him, Tomas would decide whether the man lived or died based on one question: had Aldous already reached out to Bianca, or was this still a mess Tomas could clean up himself?
His phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number, encrypted by a cipher he recognized as one of Aldous's older codes.
Tomas read it, and a cold smile touched his lips.
I know what you didn't say that night. Do we negotiate?
Tomas typed a single word in reply.
Come.