I was the King without feelings, but Danika saw through my bullshit. She’d built the same type of wall to survive the fucker, Shah. I could still remember how she held her head high, even when people commented about her cold persona time and time again.
Jayna’s temperament leaned on the scale toward fire, where she would blow up and fight everyone who stood in her way. Danika tipped in the opposite direction, all ice, freezing out the world if it meant others left her alone to do what she wanted.
The one exception was Nik. He’d seen through her cool veil to the fiery woman underneath. From the time we ran the old neighborhood together, the two of them had intense chemistry. Once they reunited, their youthful love turned into something explosive.
Kir and Rey had the same deep connections with their wives, Jayna and Lilly.
Then there was me.
Only one woman had ever made me crave something more, a future outside the one Arin had molded me to take. Then she’d chosen the easier path, a life she claimed to despise with every fiber of her being. A life where she felt as if she had no choice but to sleep with a knife under her pillow.
The chime of the service elevator rang out, making me wish I’d thought to lock down access to my place.
If it was one of my brothers, they’d get a punch to the face for bothering me so late. Fuckers made it a sport of dropping in unannounced to see if I had anyone over.
Danika, Jayna, and Lilly usually sent a text before they came over.Usuallybeing the operative word. If something riled them, they’d come into this place like a tsunami flooding inside.
The only other woman who’d ever crossed the threshold of this place was a Solon director who’d invited herself into my home. And to this day had never used the front door to visit me.
She’d utilized her vast array of resources to acquire the early nineteen-hundreds blueprints for this building and then followed the hidden crawl spaces into the service elevator shaft.
Nothing ever seemed to scare her. Not the possibility of getting stuck in a tight space, caught by the top-notch security team guarding the building, or detected by the state-of-the-art monitoring system Danika had installed along the perimeter and floor. Even the very real threat of my shooting her with the arsenal strategically hidden throughout each room in my apartment hadn’t deterred her.
The slide of the elevator shaft said my guest had arrived, but the absence of footsteps meant it could only be one person: Rey’s wife, my sister-in-law, Lilly. I viewed her as a Jane of all trades—spy, hacker, mob princess, and of course, former Solon agent. Although when I thought about it, I highly doubted she’d stopped aiding and abetting her former director altogether.
“Knock, knock,” Lilly said in a British accent as she came into view.
She wore her dark brown hair piled into her signature messy bun atop her head and a loungewear set. Her stormy gray eyes swept the room, taking in everything from my attire to the level of the alcohol in the decanters at the bar.
Cop eyes, as I liked to call them, from my days on the streets.
“What can I do for you, Ms. Cora Hass?”
She shot me a scowl for using her now-defunct hacker name. A name so notorious it had placed her on the CIA and Interpol’s most wanted list. And probably, at least eight other countries’ most wanted lists, if I thought to look.
“You think you’re so funny. Don’t forget, if you piss me off, I can make leaving your ultra-tech-savvy home very difficult. Then how will the property raider Samir King move about all his billions on his chessboard?”
“I would never think of upsetting any of the King ladies. Each one is lethal.”
My statement barely scratched the surface when describing Danika, Jayna, and Lilly. Each woman possessed knowledge and skills to boggle the mind, and when they combined their efforts, one better watch their back.
The fact any of my brothers could hold their own with their wives was a feat in itself.
Then again, Nik, Kir, and Rey needed women who wouldn’t put up with any of their bullshit. Street-hardened men required partners who accepted them but pushed back when necessary.
I moved to the stocked bar in the back of my living room, poured Lilly’s preferred spirit, and then handed it to her before moving to the leather armchair near the windows.
“Is this late-night visit business or something else? Dani’s already conducted her required sisterly check-in.”
Lilly remained quiet for a few moments as she sat on the sofa across from me and then asked, “Is your relationship with Van over?”
Van, the operative name for the Director of Solon North America, Devani Maya Patel.
To Lilly, Devani was the director who risked her life at every turn to protect her agents. The leader who’d use any trick in the book to ensure the innocents had a chance to see another day. Hell, Devani had taken on the directors of another continent to save Lilly and Rey out of pure loyalty to Lilly.
“I was never in a relationship with anyone named Van.”
“You know what I meant.”