Daggermouth (The Heart, #1) — Chapter no 3

CHAPTER THREE

Ask No Questions

The Heart’s entertainment district ran on blood and artifice. Every club and theater was a living organ in the city’s anatomy, pumping the elite through arteries of polished obsidian and gold-veined marble. On evenings like this, the whole district shimmered with the pretense of pleasure—one-way glass and pheromone fog masking the rot beneath.

Greyson moved with the indifference of a man born into luxury, onyx mask fixed so tight it seemed part of his skull. The stares that clung to him in the club- lined corridor were all protocol and predator. Dancers in their crystalline bodysuits hoping he’d open his wallet, masked patrons high on Boundary spice, too out of their minds to recognize him. He ignored them, or pretended to.

Every gesture was observed, cataloged and noted for use in future blackmail if needed.

Tonight, Greyson’s steps took him to the far end of the entertainment sector, an establishment dressed in platinum trim, playing shifting holograms of dancers whose bodies stretched and bled into one another with every pulse of the music. Above the entrance sat a simple sign.

Thane.

Even in the Heart, only fools used family names for clubs—unless you were too powerful to care, or too dangerous to be touched.

Callum Thane was both.

The inside was a velvet womb, with shadows clinging to every corner. Low light accentuated the dancers on their platforms and the masks staring up at them. Even at this early hour, the club was packed. There was always an uptick of business in Callum’s clubs the day after an execution, as if the elite needed to remind themselves that they were still alive.

Greyson pushed through the crowd, making his way to the back where stairs leading to Callum’s office sat. He didn’t need a meeting, didn’t need an

appointment to see himself up. The two guards standing at the base of the spiral stairs didn’t bother scanning his biometrics as he approached, only stepped aside so he could pass.

He took the steps two at a time, hands pushed casually into the pockets of his black business-casual attire, and watched as the large glass door slid open at his arrival.

Callum waited for him, perched in a leather desk chair, mask shimmering with gold and copper filigree. The rest of him was covered in a dark suit, the top buttons of his crisp shirt open to accentuate the deep brown of his tattooed flesh where necklaces hung against his bare chest. His ringed fingers tapped a restless code against the desk. He was always in motion, even seated. Excessive energy coiled under the practiced languor of a Heart-bred host. The air in the room tasted of smoke, expensive gin, and bleach.

“Grey,” Callum greeted as Greyson stepped inside the spacious office. He didn’t rise, just flicked two fingers in a lazy salute. “If you’re here to shut down my club, you’ll have to stand in line. Three Veyra have already come this week.

But you can skip to the front.”

Greyson eased the door closed behind him, the lock whispering shut. He crossed to the drinks cart—neatly curated with an array of options—and poured two fingers of gin into a tumbler.

“Only three? I would’ve expected the entire militia with those private anti- scan rooms you just opened.”

“You know how it goes. Lawmakers never live within the law. Of course, they left satisfied, and I gained three more secrets to keep them off my back.” Callum winked at Greyson as he lifted his own glass to the slit in his mask.

Greyson huffed; it was as close to a laugh as he could muster. He set the glass down on the desk’s edge, and leaned over it, head lowered. For a moment, neither spoke.

Callum’s mask caught the light, fracturing it into patterns that crawled across Greyson’s hands.

“You’re not here for pleasure or shit talk,” he said. “Something’s wrong.”

“Everything’s always wrong.” Greyson straightened, folding his arms. “Today it’s only more so.”

Callum waited, letting the silence thicken. He always did this, forced Greyson to fill the void, to name the thing that clawed at him.

Greyson looked away, eyes settling on the dance floor below through the one- way glass walls. “I hesitated, Cal. At the execution yesterday.”

Callum stilled for only a breath, then lifted his glass to the slit in his mask again, taking another swig as the rings on his right hand clinked against the crystal. “I saw.”

Greyson felt the anger again, rising hot beneath the cold. “She begged.

Begged. It wasn’t dignified. But it was…” He couldn’t finish it, so he let the silence say the rest.

Callum stood, smoothing his jacket with both hands. He closed the gap between them in four strides and rested a hand on Greyson’s shoulder. The gesture would’ve been dangerous outside the walls of this club, where Veyra eyes could construe it as weakness. Here, it was necessary. Their masks hid nothing from each other, not really.

“You do the best you can,” Callum said. “You always do.”

Greyson looked at him. “That’s not true.”

“You’re not your father, Grey. No matter how many times he tries to carve himself into you.” Callum squeezed, gentle but immovable. “You’re better than him. You still have a heart.”

The words should’ve comforted, but instead they scraped him raw. “If I’m so much better, why did I put a bullet in that man’s head? Why have I put a bullet in hundreds of rebels’ heads?”

Callum shrugged. “Because you’re not a fucking idiot. You still have survival instincts. If you didn’t, you’d both be dead. Maybe that’s not enough. But it’s something.”

Greyson exhaled a slow, shaky breath. “He’s arranging a Vow. Moraine Daunt. In four days’ time.”

Callum whistled, low and sympathetic. “That’s quite the match. They’re not even pretending, are they?”

Greyson shook his head. “He wants to make an example. Show the city I’m loyal. If I’m married off to that family, there’s no room for rumor.”

Callum took his hand from Greyson’s shoulder and tapped his ring against the desk’s surface once. “They’re fucking right about that. Are you gonna do it?”

“I don’t have a choice.” Greyson didn’t say the next part. That he was both afraid that he would, and that he wouldn’t.

Callum eyed him, searching. “Why did you really hesitate, Grey?”

Greyson didn’t answer at first. The memory of the woman’s scream hung in his mind, a ghost that refused to be exorcised.

“Because…” he started, “her only crime was falling in love with a man from the Boundary.” He surprised himself with his honesty. “And though I cannot fathom being willing to die for such a feeble emotion, I thought maybe, if I let her go, it would… balance something. That it would start to heal the hurt my family has caused.”

Callum shook his head. “Balance does not exist in New Found Haven. And it doesn’t matter whether it was by your hand, or the Veyra, she was never making

it off that platform alive.”

Greyson nodded. “I know.”

“Besides,” Callum started again, his voice lighter now, “love has brought down empires, and your father knows it.”

Greyson snorted. “What do you know about love?”

“Nothing,” Callum chuckled. “I only know of lust, and I would do unspeakable things in the name of lust. So, I can only imagine that if I found love, I’d also be willing to die for it.”

Greyson smiled then, shaking his head but saying nothing.

“Do you not love me, brother? Would you not die for me like I would die for you?” Callum added, with mock offense.

Greyson downed the remainder of his drink. “I’d kill for you without question, but dying for you… that’s debatable.”

A full-bodied laugh flowed from under Callum’s mask as he sat back down at his desk and propped his polished boots on the surface. “You may still have a heart, but you lack emotion.”

Greyson refilled his glass before falling into the chair across from him.

“You have enough emotion for the both of us,” Greyson teased as he swirled the liquid in his tumbler.

Callum’s smile reflected in his eyes. “That’s what got me kicked out of the Veyra training program. Too sentimental, and not enough of whatever the fuck they wanted me to be.”

Greyson remembered the first time he and Callum met. Late-night tactical drills, both of them exhausted, masks fogged with sweat, neither willing to let the other win. Callum would sneak rations to the janitorial staff, would hack Heart surveillance just to prove that he could. That kindness, mixed with his brilliant mind and firm hand, was what made Callum dangerous.

“You ever regret not finishing?” Greyson asked.

Callum shook his head. “I get to run my own show. Only now, I serve the liquor instead of the lies. Pleasure instead of death… for the most part.”

Greyson flinched at the word. His only job was to serve death on that platform. He studied Callum. “You do more good in this club than all the Veyra combined.”

“Tell that to my father,” Callum said, voice brittle. “Last time I saw him, he told me I was a parasite. Feeding off the city’s vices.” He laughed, a hollow sound. “I told him it runs in the family.”

Greyson’s lips curled. “I’m sure that went over well.”

Callum shrugged. “He didn’t disown me. Guess he’s still hoping I’ll make a scandal big enough to get myself shot by you on live stream. Until then, he gets free drinks and plausible deniability.”

Greyson swallowed back bile at the thought, the idea that his best friend could do something to land himself on that platform, and he would be the one ordered to take his life. Greyson would never do it. He would, in fact, die to protect Callum if it came down to it.

For a time, neither spoke. The music from the club below swelled, muffled by the double glass, but still present, like the ache in his chest.

Callum broke the silence. “So, what now?”

Greyson stared at the mask stand on the far shelf, empty except for a single antique specimen—blackened iron, a relic of the first generation.

Slowly he stood. “Now, I go to my family dinner. Pretend I care about the Vow, and try not to think about what comes after.”

Callum nodded, rising as well. “And what does come after?”

Greyson hesitated. “I don’t know. But something has to change.”

Callum stepped in front of him again, this time closer. He pressed a hand to Greyson’s chest, right over his sternum. Greyson could feel his heart pounding against Callum’s palm. “Don’t let him take this from you, Grey. Not ever.”

The masks made emotion unreadable, but the heat of Callum’s hand was

real.

“I won’t,” Greyson said, and meant it.

Callum pulled his hand back with a flourish. “You know the old rule, right?

If you break the Vow, you owe me a case of Boundary whiskey.”

Greyson’s mouth quirked. “If I break the Vow, you’ll die of shock, and I’ll just be dead.”

“I’ll die happy, then.” Callum’s laugh was softer this time. “Good luck with your mother. She terrifies me more than the President.”

“Her silence terrifies everyone,” Greyson replied.

Callum raised his glass in salute, found it empty, and mimed a toast anyway.

“You’re going to get through this, Grey. You always do.”

Greyson turned to go, then paused at the door. “Cal?”

“Yeah?”

“If anything happens to me, make them suffer.”

Callum’s answer was immediate. “I’ve got you, brother.”

Greyson nodded, then slipped from the room. The mask of the Executioner never left his face, but under it, for a moment, he could breathe.

He cut through the club’s main room, ignoring the hungry looks and the whispers that trailed him like the scent of blood. Outside, the city waited, hungry for another show of power. He straightened his jacket, checked the watch on his wrist, and walked toward the dinner that always ended in threats.

The Serel residence was a cathedral of old money and even older ambitions. No matter how much the rest of New Found Haven modernized, the President’s

quarters remained untouched by anything as fragile as progress. Corridors of burnished black walnut led to the great dining hall, where generations of the Heart’s rule hung in oil and canvas, every ancestor rendered with the solemnity of a funeral mask.

Greyson’s shoes made no sound on the inlaid floors, an empty man among ghosts. He paused at the archway to the dining room, and took a breath, steadying himself before entering the room then taking his seat.

If the entertainment district was all veiled violence and artifice, this room was naked power—set like a trap, designed to draw blood with nothing but a glance.

The table stretched forever, a plank of mahogany so polished it reflected the candelabra’s flames in a perfect mirror image. At its head sat the gold-leafed throne, reserved for Maximus Serel. President and Patriarch.

Four places were set. One for Greyson, one for his father, one for Elara, the mother who’d built the city’s mask tradition into ironclad law. Outside of these walls, she was a force to be reckoned with. She was cutting and lethal. But here, in this house, she was as trapped as the rest of them.

A fourth chair—Lira’s—stood at a carefully measured distance, closer to Maximus but always out of arm’s reach.

The housekeepers moved like smoke, seen only in the periphery, never acknowledged by name. Each place setting was calibrated to perfection. Folded napkin, obsidian-edged plate, water goblet filled to the meniscus. There was no music, only the sizzle of wax and the faint scratch of preparations flowing from the kitchens.

Elara arrived first, her mask a shimmer of white gold, delicate as frost. Her hand swept lovingly across Greyson’s shoulder as she rounded the table and sat.

She met his eyes behind her mask and held his gaze.

“You look tired, my dear,” she said, voice hushed. “Rough day?”

Greyson considered lying. “You could say that.”

She reached for her water glass but didn’t drink. “You should take better care of yourself. Your Vow will be in four days. You’ll want to look your best.”

He nearly smiled at her transactional tone. “Always the diplomat.”

Elara’s eyes flicked to the entrance. “It helps. Sometimes.”

Lira slipped in next, her mask a brutal geometry of rose-gold angles. She wore her hair up, every long dark strand lacquered into place. She didn’t greet her mother, nor her brother. She simply slid into her chair, arranged her napkin, and

waited.

Maximus entered last.

He wore no mask, but his face was more formidable than any metal. The lines had deepened since Greyson was a boy, the jaw a little sharper, the eyes colder.

He surveyed the table, assessed the seating, and sat without ceremony.

The meal was served in three silent courses. First, a soup as black as the city at midnight. Then, a slab of meat so rare it bled onto the plate. Last, a citrus tartlet.

They ate in silence. It wasn’t an awkward silence—there was nothing tentative about it—but a deliberate suppression, the kind that dared you to fill it

and risk being devoured.

Greyson was the one who broke it.

“Father,” he said, careful to keep his tone neutral, “I wanted to ask about Brooker.”

His brother’s name landed on the table like a hammer. Elara’s hand trembled, just once, before she set her spoon down. Lira’s jaw clenched, so subtly only someone who’d known her from birth would notice.

Maximus didn’t look up from his plate. “What about him?”

“Where are you in your search for the Daggermouth that killed him?”

Greyson forced himself to look at his father.

For a second, Maximus’s eyes flickered—something unsettling, lethal. Then he set his fork down, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and leaned back in the

chair.

“I thought I told you to drop this.”

Greyson did not drop it.

He would never drop it, not until all of the Daggermouths were wiped from New Found Haven.

He ignored his father’s statement. “I heard from a Veyra captain that—”

Maximus cut him off. “What you heard is irrelevant. He was murdered, and I will not risk more of my men to satisfy you with a name.”

Elara tried to intervene, her voice brittle. “This is not the place—”

“I did not tell you, you could speak,” Maximus snapped. He turned back to Greyson, eyes dark as pitch. “When I tell you to drop something, you drop it.”

Greyson’s fists clenched around his knife, his muscles pulling tight in an effort not to jam the utensil into his father’s jugular at the disrespect he showed his mother. At the disrespect he showed Brooker’s memory.

“He did everything you ever asked of him. He killed hundreds of people day after day in the plaza on your orders. People you hunted down over minor infractions to your law. And yet you refuse to look for the Daggermouth scum that murdered him,” Greyson spat, knowing immediately he should have kept his mouth shut.

Maximus smiled, lips thin as a blade. “Your brother was a greater man than you will ever be, you do not need to remind me of that. He was the son I wish had lived. To insult me, to question my loyalty to him, is treason.” Slowly, Maximus leaned forward. “The elite are not immune from the violence of the rings. The job of Executioner will make you enemies. Brooker knew that, and still, he did it without hesitation. He died for the Heart, and that is what I will honor. I will not give our enemies the upper hand by making emotional decisions.”

Lira spoke up, her words flat and dangerous. “His death wasn’t an honor.”

Maximus’s hand curled around the stem of his goblet, knuckles whitening.

“Please, speak plainly, Lira.”

She met his gaze, mask-to-face. “His death was a sign of weakness. A sign that the Daggermouths can get to us. And your hesitation to retaliate only gives them more power.”

The silence that followed was so pure, so total, it threatened to fracture the room.

Elara recovered first, smoothing her napkin with trembling fingers, daring to speak again without permission. “We’re all tired,” she said, voice a shade above a whisper. “Let’s not fight tonight.”

The back of Maximus’s hand struck the side of her face faster than anyone could stop it, knocking her out of her chair and onto the floor with a whimper of pain.

Greyson shot from his chair with a snarl as Lira gasped beside him.

“Sit. Down,” Maximus growled, raising a single pointed finger at Greyson.

Greyson hesitated, every instinct screaming to pull his gun from its holster and put a bullet into the back of his father’s head. His fingers splayed on the tabletop, breaths rough through his mask.

The decorum of the room demanded submission, but every knot in Greyson’s body flexed against it.

He forced himself to sit, knowing that would be the only way to protect his mother from another blow. Maximus held his gaze for a long, balanced moment then turned away.

Maximus’s voice trembled not with regret, but with rage. “This family is not a democracy. You will mourn your brother however I tell you to mourn. And you will never again question my choices.”

The words slashed through Greyson, and he felt the sudden irrational urge to laugh. To laugh at the irony of it all, the cruelty that rotted the inside of this family while its outside looked polished and pristine.

Instead, he forced his jaw tighter, grinding the fury down to a stone he could swallow, and watched as his mother straightened her mask. She struggled to her knees, steadying herself on the arm of her chair with no help from his father.

Slowly, she slipped back into her seat and cleared her throat as she smoothed out the front of her cream blouse, now stained with drops of blood.

“Now, let’s finish this pleasant family meal, shall we?” Maximus said, the coolness of his voice more brutal than the violence of the moment before.

The scraping of silverware against china was the only sound that filled the room as each of them picked at their dessert, tasting nothing.

At last, Maximus set down his utensils and addressed the room. “The Vow is scheduled for Saturday. I expect full attendance. No exceptions.”

He rose, wiped his mouth, and left them with nothing but the echo of his footsteps. Elara’s voice caught as she rose, excusing herself to hurry after him, sparing a single look toward her children before disappearing into the corridor.

Greyson waited until they were alone, the room shrinking around them.

“You shouldn’t have said anything,” he said, but without the heat he’d intended. “He’ll make you pay for it.”

Lira’s own voice was flat. “I don’t care, Grey. Not anymore.”

“You need to care. You need to let him think he’s won. He will hurt you, Li.”

“I need,” she replied, pushing her chair back with an abrupt scrape, “to get out of this family, before it eats me alive.”

Greyson watched Lira go for only a breath before he followed her into the corridor, catching up to her near the elevator. For a moment, neither spoke as they waited for the lift to arrive.

“If he’s not going to do it, we have to,” Lira started. “We have to find the Daggermouth that killed Brooker, and kill them ourselves. He deserves that much.”

He wanted to argue, to tell her that she shouldn’t get involved, but couldn’t find the words. She put a hand on his arm, just above the elbow, squeezed once, then stepped into the elevator.