Page 8 of Dirty Game (Broken Blood #1)

CHAPTER FOUR

Varrick

She sits at my father’s desk, which has become my desk, which is now hers, at least for the hour.

Rosalynn, in a pale blue blouse with a stain at the cuff.

Ink, not blood, though with her it could go either way.

She’s buried beneath ledgers that predate both of us, books so dense with rot I can smell the mildew from across the room.

Her posture: hunched, deliberate, spine like a hunting cat.

Her hair falls over her face in a perfect sheet, hiding the calculations happening behind it.

She holds a pen—mine, sterling with a needlepoint tip—in a loose grip, and she’s hitting it between her fingers.

Her red pen cuts through the pages, notating corrections in the margins, slicing through decades of bad math.

The numbers flow beneath her, and I can see, in the way her lips move as she reads, that she is savoring each equation she sets right.

I’ve never watched anyone do numbers like this.

There’s a sickness to it, an obsessive purity.

I wonder if she even knows I’m here.

I make a noise, clearing my throat, the sort of thing you do to remind someone of your presence without breaking their focus.

Her hand twitches, the pen halting above a column of sixes, but she doesn’t look up.

She waits patiently for my interruption to prove itself worthy.

I step forward, suddenly unsure what I should say, just feeling the need to say something .

I count three full ledgers open and another five stacked at her elbow.

All of them annotated with her handwriting. The red is unmistakable, acid-bright.

There are coffee rings on the oldest book, a testament to how many hours she’s put in today alone.

“Rosalynn,” I say, and her name comes out raspy and gritty.

Her eyelids flick up, just for a second. No fear. Only readiness.

She finishes the sum she’s working on, then sets the pen down, parallel to the desk’s edge.

Her movements are so precise it’s almost a challenge.

Her voice, when it comes, is almost a whisper. “You’re off by nine million, give or take.”

“Is that all?” I lean against the back of a wingchair, arms folded. She smells like detergent and old paper. “My last accountant rounded up.”

Her mouth doesn’t smile, but her eyes crease with the ghost of something that almost could have been amusement. “You don’t pay me enough to be this honest.”

“I don’t pay you at all,” I remind her. “You’re here on a family plan.”

That gets a reaction.

Her chin dips, just a fraction, as if she’s weighing the words before she spends them. “Then I hope my father’s debt was worth it.”

I watch her for a full breath, letting the silence load the room with meaning.

I want to see if she’ll fill it.

I’m sort of disappointed when she doesn’t. She is better at silence than I am.

“You’re saving me more than your father ever stole,” I say. “I suppose that’s worth something.”

She blinks once. Twice. “If you say so.”

I want to ask her if she’s always been like this.

If the quiet is something she learned, or if it’s the only weapon she has left after a lifetime of being cornered by men who never learned when to stop.

Instead, I reach for the top ledger, tug it from under her elbow, and flip through her notations.

Every correction is precise. Every dollar accounted for, each lie traced back to its original sin.

There’s a ledger in my own head, and I feel the balance tipping in her favor.

Will’s voice echoes, always there when I’m about to do something irreversible: “She’s not Sienna.” Like his ghost thinks I could ever forget the difference.

Sienna was fire and lies—she’d take a number and burn it, just to watch the smoke.

Rosalynn is ice and truth. She’d rather lose a finger than round up a penny.

I hear the click of her pen as she picks it back up. The sound drags me back to the room.

“You missed a spot,” she says. Not in a taunting way—just an observation.

I look. She’s circled a line I hadn’t noticed. Embezzled, and re-embezzled, a Matryoshka doll of theft.

The paper smells of mold and corruption. I want to incinerate the entire office.

My phone buzzes. I let it, watching her watch me out of the corner of her eye. After the third vibration, I answer.

“King,” I say. Never my first name. Something I adopted after Sienna.

On the other end, Mikhail’s voice. “We have movement. Russians, north side. Two cars, four men, none local. They’re asking for you.”

I shut my eyes for a beat. “How close?”

“Half a mile. They’re not armed for subtlety.”

Of course not. They never are.

“Tell security to double the guards at ground level. Then send three to my office. Not two. Three.”

Rosalynn’s hand stops moving, pen held in mid-air. She listens, pretending not to.

I make a note of her pulse point, just visible at the line of her throat.

I end the call and turn back to her. “Visitors coming.”

She nods once. “Should I leave?”

“No. You’re safer here.”

That earns me another look. This one lingers, as if she’s checking my math. “I’ll finish this column,” she says, and resumes the calculations as if her life depends on it.

Maybe it does.

I move to the office door, pausing as my hand hits the polished brass.

I look back, and her hair has fallen into her eyes again.

She tucks it behind her ear, and I see the faintest bruise on her jaw.

Marco’s legacy, not mine, but he still owns the debt.

She glances up, just for a moment, and gives me a nod—so small most would miss it.

A message. She’ll be here when I get back.

The look sits heavy between us as I close the door and ready myself for war.

Disposing of the fucks who dare threaten my empire was easy.

What I didn’t count on was the odd feeling that settled over me on the way back to the elevator.

And the one when I wished this fucking thing would go faster.

I make it to the office floor in thirty-two seconds flat.

The elevator tells me as much, because I count each tick of the passing floors… a habit drilled in by years of treating every second as a countdown.

The moment the doors open, I know something’s off.

The air tastes metallic, edged with the copper tang of fresh blood.

There’s a new sound, too—a muffled, arrhythmic thumping, like a heart trying to remember how to beat.

My office door stands ajar.

I should see three men posted outside, but instead, there’s only one, and he’s not standing.

He’s on the floor, spine contorted in a way I know means he isn't conscious.

His face is slack, mouth open, blood threading from his nose onto the expensive carpet.

Inside, two more bodies. Both mine. Both down.

Both breathing, but barely.

The nearest has a laceration across his temple and a broken forearm, the bone sticking out at an angle that’s almost obscene.

The other has his own gun pressed so hard to his cheek that the muzzle imprint is already deepening to purple.

Neither is a threat now.

The room is chaos.

Chairs are overturned, the glass coffee table is split in two, my father’s antique globe cracked along the Equator.

And against the back wall, just in front of the safe room door, is Rosalynn.

She’s changed since I left.

Not her clothes—they’re the same—but the way she stands, pressed flat to the steel of the safe room, arms locked in front of her, both hands clamped white-knuckled around the handle of a kitchen knife.

The blade is painted in red, and so is her sleeve.

Blood spatters dot the pale blue of her blouse, and a single line of crimson traces from her elbow to her wrist, where it collects and drips in regular intervals onto the carpet.

She’s panting, breath coming sharp and shallow, and her eyes are fixed on the two men advancing on her.

They’re not local.

I can tell by the build, one short and bullet-shaped, the other thin, almost athletic.

Both are in street clothes, but there’s a heaviness to their walk, a familiarity.

The short one is closer. He’s got a hand on his side where she must have stabbed him.

The taller man hangs back, eyes flicking between her and the safe room door, calculating the odds.

They haven’t seen me yet.

The three seconds it takes me to analyze the field is all I need.

“Rosalynn,” I say. Calm. Steady. She doesn’t look up, but the shorter man does, and that’s when I move.

I cover the distance in three strides.

The short one turns, fumbling for a gun in his waistband, but I’m already on him.

I hit him in the throat with the edge of my hand—a move I learned from a man who died two hours after teaching it to me.

The cartilage crushes, and he drops the gun to claw at his own neck.

I catch the weapon as it falls, flip it in my palm, and put a bullet into his thigh.

He drops to his knees, and I let him stay there.

The thin man tries to run for the window.

I’m faster.

I grab him by the collar, wrench him back, and slam his face into the corner of my desk.

The first hit splits his eyebrow.

The second takes out two teeth.

On the third, I hear the crack that means he’s no longer in this fight.

I let him slide to the floor, leaving a smear of blood and hair on the wood.

Thirty seconds.

Two men neutralized, one still gasping for air, the other leaking brain matter onto the carpet.

I look at Rosalynn, who is still frozen, the knife shaking in her grip.

Her pupils are huge, swallowing the blue of her eyes.

She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t drop the knife. She doesn’t move at all.

The short one is still breathing, a wet, rattling sound.

I walk over, nudge his head with my shoe.

“You have a message for me?” I ask, lifting my foot to press on the wound in his leg.

He tries to spit at me, but he’s too busy choking on his own spit.

I lean in close. “You failed,” I say. “I guess I have to tell your boss what happens to anyone who tries to take what’s mine. Don’t worry, I’ll have my men deliver the message.”

He gurgles something in Russian.

I understand enough.

He calls me the devil, or maybe just a devil’s son.

I press my boot to his throat until the sound stops.

Then I lift my leg and stomp, crushing his windpipe and along with it, any hope he may have had for survival.