Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 77171 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 309(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77171 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 309(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
I expected arrogance. Carelessness. Something coarse under the polish.
Instead I found…
I’m not sure what.
That’s what unsettles me.
He’s tall with unruly dark hair brushed back from a hard and ruthless—though breathtakingly handsome—face. His tailored black jacket stretched across his broad shoulders like it was made for battle instead of nightlife.
He stood in the middle of all that noise and liquor like none of it could touch him. Like he allowed the room to exist around him. Like he could break it with one hand if he so desired.
And when he looked at me, I had the appalling sensation that he wasn’t seeing what I wanted him to see. He was measuring for weakness.
My pulse trips again at the memory, and fury flares hot under my skin.
At him.
At myself.
At the simple fact that I noticed the shape of his mouth—God, his lips are full and kissable—while I was supposed to be studying him in his element.
A cab drives by. Somewhere farther down the block, a siren rises and fades.
I push away from the wall and start toward the subway. I replay every word, every glance, every shift in Samson Vexley’s posture.
He gave away nothing.
There has to be something I’m missing.
He watched the room without looking like he was watching it. He didn’t drink much. He didn’t lean. He didn’t fidget. He didn’t waste motion. Men with real power rarely do. Men who have used their hands for ugly things learn not to move without reason.
Samson Vexley is his father’s weapon. The oldest son. The one sent when a signature isn’t enough, when a warning needs a body attached to it.
Arthur Vexley built an empire by swallowing weaker men whole, and everybody in this city knows it even if nobody says it.
Real estate. Development. Acquisitions. Shell companies. Political donations. Quiet settlements.
Respectable on paper.
Destructive everywhere else.
Fifteen years ago, a man digging into the Vexley Group died.
Officially, it was an accident.
I never believed that.
I reach the subway entrance and tighten my grip on my bag. Damn these high heels!
I descend and wait for the train.
I’ve been following whispers for months now. A retired accountant who drank too much at lunch and said Arthur Vexley got rid of the wrong man once. A former assistant who wouldn’t tell me anything useful but went pale at the sound of the Vexley name. All threads, but enough to make me ask questions.
That’s why I went to the club tonight.
I needed to see one of Arthur’s sons with my own eyes. Not in a photograph, not in an article written by someone too scared or too paid off to say what mattered.
Now I have.
And I hate that my clearest memory of him is not the danger, but the heat.
The subway stops, and I get in. It’s a short ride, and I get out and walk the half a block to my apartment. My place is small, plain, and mine. A lamp by the window. Books stacked on the floor because I keep meaning to buy another shelf and never do.
I kick off the uncomfortable heels at the door and cross straight to my desk.
This is the real reason I came back to the city. I switch the lamp on and look at the corkboard above my desk.
Articles on Vexley Group acquisitions. Corporate filings. Old photographs. Legal notes. Dates. Names. A timeline in black ink with question marks. Arthur Vexley in one picture, silver at the temples and smiling. Samson in another, caught outside a gala with one hand tucked in his coat pocket, jaw set like he’s waiting for something. Nathaniel in a courthouse photo, elegant and cold, every inch the son who makes filth sound lawful.
And then Cain.
My file on the youngest brother is thinner than it should be. That bothered me the first time I realized it, and it bothers me more tonight.
Samson is easy to trace. He appears in security-adjacent records, incident reports, photographs taken at openings and charity functions where his size alone does half the talking. Nathaniel is easier still. Legal documentation. Interviews. Panel appearances. Foundation boards. He uses visibility to his advantage.
But Cain Vexley appears in some photographs and almost nowhere else.
No obvious board seat. No consistent operational title. No legal trail.
I sit down at my desk and pull out an old folder.
The paper inside is soft from handling. Copies of reports. Archived articles. I open to the same pages I always do, though I already know every line by heart.
A confrontation. A death. A conclusion delivered too cleanly.
Accident.
I stare at the word until it means nothing.
The timing is what always bothers me most. It makes no sense, and the more I think about it, the less sense it makes. The confrontation happened in a place only a handful of people should have known about. Yet the Vexleys were there.
I close the folder and lean back.