Page 81 of Shadow Waltz

The man only laughed, red bubbling on his lips.

Troy didn’t blink. He pressed the gun to the man’s head and pulled the trigger.

Silence.

The street was quiet now. The helicopters receding, sirens in the distance. Troy turned to me, eyes searching.

“You good?” he asked again, softer this time.

I nodded, body aching, soul wrung out. “We made it.”

He clapped me on the shoulder, pride and relief warring on his face.

“That’s what family does,” he said.

And suddenly, for the first time, I understood: family wasn’t just blood. It was this—killing and bleeding and surviving together.

We limped back toward the building, every step echoing with the weight of the lives we’d just taken, the price paid for love in a world that demanded violence.

As we disappeared into the shadows, I found myself thinking about Luka, about the collar on my throat—heavier now, weighted with the knowledge that choosing love came with a cost I was finally willing to pay. Whatever happened next, I’dchosen this family. I’d chosen him. And I’d keep choosing, again and again, until the very end.

14

VELVET AND STEEL

LUKA

The elevator doors closed with a whisper that sounded like secrets being sealed away from the world. I watched the numbers climb, each floor bringing me closer to the conversation that would determine whether what I'd been building with Ash was real.

My hands were steady as I adjusted my cufflinks, the small ritual helping me transition from the Prince who'd just orchestrated a rescue operation to the man who was about to face the only person whose opinion of me mattered. The building hummed around me with the controlled chaos of my empire—security teams debriefing, communications being encrypted, bodies being disposed of with the same methodical care as any other business expense.

But all of that felt distant now, secondary to what I was about to discover in my private suite. The question that had been eating at me since Troy confirmed Ash was safely back in the building: had he chosen to come back? Or had duty and fearsimply brought him home? The distinction mattered more than I wanted to admit.

The hallway outside my suite was empty except for the usual security measures—cameras that tracked my movement, pressure sensors in the floor, the kind of paranoid protection that had kept me alive for fifteen years. But tonight, they felt less like safety and more like barriers between me and something I was afraid to want too badly.

I paused at the door, hand on the biometric scanner, and allowed myself a moment of honesty that would have been dangerous in front of anyone else. I was terrified. Not of bullets or federal investigations or rival organizations trying to tear down what I'd built, but of discovering that what I felt for the young man wearing my collar was just another form of ownership disguised as care.

The scanner read my palm print and disengaged the locks with a series of soft clicks that sounded like bones breaking. I stepped into my domain—marble and crystal, bulletproof windows overlooking a city that belonged to me in everything but name—and found Ash exactly where I'd expected him to be.

He stood by the windows with his back to the door, silhouetted against the city lights like something carved from shadow and defiance. The collar was visible at his throat, black leather against pale skin, and seeing it there sent heat racing through my veins that had nothing to do with ownership and everything to do with the choice he'd made to wear it.

“You came back,” I said, closing the door behind me and engaging the privacy locks that would ensure this conversation remained between us.

Ash turned slowly, and in the golden light streaming through bulletproof glass, I could see something in his expression that hadn't been there before. Not submission, not fear, but a kindof settled certainty that made my chest tighten with emotions I wasn't ready to name.

“Did you think I wouldn't?” he asked, and there was challenge in his voice that reminded me why I'd paid half a million dollars for the privilege of calling him mine.

“I thought you might choose differently,” I replied honestly, moving closer until I could smell his skin and the faint scent of expensive soap that had replaced his street-kid wariness. “Reddick offered you everything I can't—genuine freedom, a fresh start, the chance to build a life that doesn't depend on the whims of a monster.”

Ash's laugh was soft and bitter. “You think that's what you are? A monster?”

The question caught me off guard because it forced me to confront something I'd never examined too closely. “I think I'm someone who's done monstrous things for so long that the distinction doesn't matter anymore.”

“It matters to me,” Ash said quietly, and the words hit harder than any accusation could have. “Because monsters don't ask permission. Monsters don't care about consent or happiness or whether the people they own actually want to be owned.”

I studied his face in the golden light, looking for any sign that he was telling me what he thought I wanted to hear rather than what he actually believed. But there was steel in his ice-blue eyes, the kind of resolve that came from making difficult choices with full knowledge of their consequences.

“And you want to be owned?” I asked, the question coming out rougher than I'd intended.