Malakai's POV
I had already left the house when I remembered.
The gates had rolled open, the engine of the car had barely settled into its low purr, and the city was waiting for me beyond the estate walls—steel, smoke, money, blood dressed in polished shoes. Meetings. Men in expensive suits with trembling hands. Contracts that would be signed with ink if they were wise, and with suffering if they were not.
But I remembered I had left a few things behind.
"Turn around," I said.
The driver obeyed without a word. They always did.
The car curved back through the iron gates of Blackwood Estate, tires whispering over stone. Morning had already settled properly over the house by then, pale gold sunlight pouring over the balconies and marble columns, pretending this place was normal. Pretending this house was not built on power, silence, and the kind of fear that made grown men forget how to swallow.
I stepped out before the car had fully stopped.
The air was cool, touched with trimmed roses, wet grass, and the faint sterility of polished floors drifting out from the open doors. I adjusted the cuff of my tailored black suit and headed inside without slowing. Everything about me was cut clean—my jacket fitted to the line of my shoulders, my trousers sharp at the crease, my shoes dark enough to reflect the morning. A man dressed for business. A man dressed for war.
For me, there was rarely a difference.
It was not easy being who I was.
People liked to think power looked glorious from the outside. They saw the cars, the estate, the tailored clothes, the quiet way rooms shifted when I entered them. They saw the empire. They never saw the rot beneath it. The sleepless nights. The calculations. The blood that never fully washed off, even when your hands were clean.
Especially when your hands were clean.
As I crossed the foyer, my gaze shifted, instinctively, to the dining room.
To the chair.
The one where Kiera had been sitting earlier that morning.
She ate but didn't finish it. She'd sat there like she was bracing for a blow that never came, shoulders drawn in, eyes too careful, hands too still. She laughed and smiled a bit with Bridget earlier. Even now, the image of her lingered at the edges of my mind in a way that irritated me.
I didn't do lingering.
Bridget had already gone to school. Nana Rose and the rest of the staff were moving through the house, tending to the ordinary rhythms of the morning—dusting, arranging flowers, overseeing the kitchen, preserving the illusion that this was just another home and not a stronghold held together by money, loyalty, and bodies buried where no one would ever think to dig.
I took the stairs two at a time.
My room was quiet when I entered it. Cool. Orderly. Everything in its place. I grabbed the folder I'd forgotten, the second phone from the drawer near the desk, the silver lighter I rarely used but always carried. Habit. Preparedness. In my world, small oversights became graves.
I turned to leave, then paused by the window.
From where I stood, I could see the hall below and, further down the corridor, the wing where Kiara's room was.
And then it hit me.
Clothes.
She had arrived with almost nothing.
No suitcase. No proper things. Nothing that looked like it belonged to someone being brought into a new life, no matter how unwillingly.
Last night had been I left the office and was met with her and this morning had been brief. I hadn't thought about it.
That irritated me more than it should have.
I stared down the corridor, jaw tightening.
When Bridget got back, I'd tell her to take Kiera shopping. She'd know what to do better than I would. Clothes. Toiletries. Whatever else women needed that I had never once had to think about. The decision was practical. Necessary.
Nothing more.
I was not a nice man. Everyone knew that.
They called me the Iced Viper.
Not to my face, of course. Men valued breathing too much for that. But I had heard it enough times in whispers, in intercepted conversations, in the fearful mutterings of people who had seen what happened to those who crossed me. The name suited me well enough. Cold. Precise. Fatal.
I could kill a man and not look back.
I had done worse.
So when I went to Kiara's house yesterday, I had not gone there to play savior. I had gone there to make a point.
Someone had tried me. Someone had forgotten who I was. Collateral was a language people like that understood well. Usually, when someone moved against me, I answered with fire and bone. I took sons. Brothers. Businesses. Fingers. Fortunes. If I was in a merciful mood, I simply ruined them. If I wasn't, I buried them.
When I asked for the other , it had been a test.
Not because I wanted her.
Because I wanted to watch.
And I had watched.
I had watched the stepmother's eyes flashed with fear.
I had watched the other girl had victory in her eyes when the woman pleaded on her behalf. I recoil, watched the household tighten with that ugly, familiar tension that only lived in places where cruelty was routine. And then I had looked at Kiera.
Really looked at her.
Not one person in that house had looked broken in the same way she had. There had been something in her expression—worn down, cornered, painfully quiet. A face trained to endure. A body that knew how to make itself small. Bruises hidden badly. Fear hidden worse.
And when I said I would take her, the woman had given her away too easily.
That told me everything.
My intention had not been to keep her. But the second I saw the truth of that house, I knew I wasn't taking collateral anymore.
I was removing prey from wolves.
It did not make me soft.
It merely meant I recognized darkness when I saw it.
Because I had been born into it myself.
I stepped into the corridor and made my way toward her room.
I didn't knock.
It was my house.
The door swung open—
—and something flew at me.
A phone
It missed me by a few centimeters and shattered against the wall with a sharp, splintering crack.
For half a second, the room froze.
My body had already gone still in that dangerous way it did before violence. Not startled. Never startled. Just sharpened. My gaze locked onto her.
Kiera stood near the bed, breathing hard, one hand still lifted from the throw. Fear hit her face so fast it looked like pain. The color drained from her already pale skin. Her lips parted, but the words stumbled over each other as they came.
"I—I'm sorry," she said quickly totally ignoring the fact that she just destroyed her phone.
Her voice shook.
Not with guilt.
With fear.
I closed the door behind me.
In daylight, I could see her properly.
She was too lean. Not delicate—there was nothing soft or ornamental about it. Just the kind of thinness that came from neglect. Her skin was pale in a way that spoke less of complexion and more of deprivation, and beneath the line of her neck, near the edge of her sleeve, I caught the faint discoloration of bruises trying and failing to fade. There was another one, half-hidden near her collarbone. Her face carried that same starved quality—not of food alone, but of safety. Rest. Kindness.
She looked like someone who had been surviving for so long that she no longer knew how to do anything else.
I said nothing for a moment.
I just watched her.
Then I walked over and sat on the edge of the bed, slow enough not to alarm her further, though alarm already clung to her like a second skin.
My elbows rested on my knees. I looked at her the way I looked at men across negotiation tables—carefully, clinically, peeling past what was visible into what they were trying to hide.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
It was not a question I asked often. Maybe never.
She hesitated.
Then, like so many people who had learned to survive by minimizing their pain, she said, "I'm fine."
Lie.
The word ripped through my head like a blade dragged over bone.
Lie.
I lifted my gaze to hers and held it.
I do not like lies.
Not from enemies. Not from allies. Not from frightened girls standing in borrowed rooms with bruises beneath their skin and terror in their eyes.
Especially not when the lie was so obvious it insulted us both.
I stood.
She tensed immediately, like she expected punishment. That alone told me more than anything she could have said.
I walked to the door, opened it, then paused with one hand on the frame. I turned just enough to look back at her.
My voice, when I spoke, was low. Cold. The same voice men heard before they lost everything.
"I do not appreciate lies."
Her breath caught.
Good.
Not because I wanted to frighten her—though I had—but because fear was sometimes the only language people listened to at first. And if she was going to live under my roof, she would learn one thing quickly:
I would accept many things.
But not dishonesty.
I left before she could answer.
By the time I reached the ground floor, I had put the mask back on completely. Whatever strange disturbance Kiara caused in the quieter corners of my mind was locked away where it belonged.
Nana Rose was near the kitchen entrance, speaking to one of the younger staff. She dismissed them with a gentle nod when she saw me and turned with that same warm smile she had worn since I was a boy too angry for grief and too young for the weight placed on my shoulders.
"Malakai," she said. "You're back?"
"For something I forgot."
Her gaze moved over my face with the ease of someone who had earned the right. "Dear boy, you look tired. I know you couldn't sleep last night. Is anything the matter?"
I adjusted my cuff again, more out of reflex than necessity. "Nothing is the matter. Just work."
"Mm." The sound carried every ounce of disbelief she didn't bother voicing.
My mother died when I was too young to remember the sound of her voice. My father died when I was old enough to understand exactly what loss cost, and cruel enough to learn that grief did not pause responsibility. He left me his company, his empire, his enemies, and the legacy of a name that carried both reverence and fear. By twenty-two, I had become everything the world demanded of me—efficient, ruthless, untouchable.
There had been no time for friends. No time for softness. School had ended, and the family business had swallowed me whole.
Nana Rose had seen all of it.
She had raised Bridget and me more than anyone else had. Yet no matter how many times I told her she no longer needed to work in uniform, no longer needed to remain in the staff quarters, she refused. She said dignity lived in labor honestly done. Said this life was the one she chose, and she would leave it only when she was ready to rest.
Because I respected her too much to force what she did not want, I let her have her way.
I pulled my wallet from my inner jacket pocket and took out one of my black cards, handing it to her
Nana Rose took the card slowly, her brows lifting just a little.
"Give it to Bridget when she comes back. Let her go shopping. Tell her to take Kiera along to get stuff for herself. "
Then she looked at me in that thoughtful way of hers.
A pause.
Then, softer, "Something about that girl bothers me."
My gaze shifted to hers. "What is it?"
She looked toward the staircase before answering. "I've barely known her a few hours, but I can already tell she has too much going on in her head. Too much pain in her eyes." Her mouth softened sadly. "A poor sweet soul brought into darkness."
The words settled between us.
Brought into darkness.
Most people weren't born for it. They were pushed. Dragged. Thrown.
Her eyes flicked back to me, and I knew she wasn't speaking only about Kiera.
I said nothing.
There were truths in this house that went unspoken because they did not need words.
She sighed, closing her fingers around the card. "I know you have a lot on your plate, child. I know you are carrying more than you should. But promise me you'll be careful. You don't sleep properly anymore. You work harder than you have all year, and I'm beginning to worry."
Only Nana Rose and Bridget could say such things to me and live to see another sunrise.
I inclined my head once. "I'll be fine."
She gave me a look that said fine was not the same thing as well, but she let it pass. "All right. I'll give the card to Bridget when she returns and tell her to take Kiera shopping. The girl will need proper things."
I nodded. "Good."
Then I turned and left.
The car door shut behind me with a soft, expensive thud.
For a while, I just sat there in the back seat as the estate gates opened again. Outside, the city stretched wide and merciless under the late morning light. My phone buzzed once in my hand. I glanced at the screen.
Raphael.
I answered.
"What."
A laugh spilled through the speaker. Warm, amused, entirely too alive for this hour. "Good morning to you too, sunshine."
I stared out the tinted window. "Say what you called for."
"See, this is why no one writes songs about you," Raphael said. "You answer the phone like a mob boss in an old crime film."
"I am a mob boss in an old crime film."
He barked out another laugh. "No, you're worse. At least those ones had the decency to monologue."
Raphael was my oldest friend. My only real one. Where I was winter, he was heat—jovial, reckless with humor, annoyingly human in ways that somehow never made him weak. He had the kind of presence that filled silence without fearing it, and he alone seemed committed to testing exactly how close he could get to my temper without losing a limb.
"Why are you calling?" I asked.
"To check if you're still alive," he said. "You've been working like a demon and disappearing like a guilty husband. Haven't seen you in days."
"I'm on my way to the office."
"Of course you are. Can't you ever take a break from work, Mal?"
"No."
A beat.
Then, lightly, "You know, one day they're going to bury you with a ledger in one hand and a death threat in the other."
"That would be efficient."
He groaned. "You are impossible. Has anyone told you that recently?"
"Frequently."
"Good. Then I'll add to the choir, you emotionally constipated tyrant."
A slow exhale left me. Not quite a laugh. Never that.
"Careful, Raphael."
"What? Are you going to glare me to death through the phone?"
"I could."
"Mm. Terrifying. I'm shaking." Then his voice softened just enough to be real. "Seriously, though. Is everything all right?"
My gaze drifted to the reflection in the darkened window. My face stared back at me—sharp, unreadable, carved from restraint.
"No problem," I said.
There was a pause long enough to tell me he knew I was lying, but he chose not to press. One of the reasons he was still alive.
"I might come by later," he said. "Today or tomorrow. If your terrifying schedule permits."
"I don't know when I'll be back."
"Then text me when you do. If you don't, I'll assume you've finally turned into a full reptile and I'll have Nana Rose stage an intervention."
A faint sound left my throat—something between a warning and a growl.
Raphael laughed in triumph. "There he is. That's the closest thing to affection I'm getting, isn't it?"
"Goodbye, Raphael."
"Love you too, ice prince."
I ended the call.
The city swallowed us street by street.
Glass towers rose like knives from the ground. Men hurried along sidewalks clutching briefcases and coffee cups, unaware of how close they brushed against worlds that could erase them. My office sat among them like any other monument to power—sleek, elegant, immaculate. No one looking from the outside would know what decisions were made behind those walls. What debts were collected. What lives were priced.
The car rolled to a stop.
I stepped out, buttoned my jacket, and looked up at the building.
Inside, they were waiting for me.
Some had come for meetings.
Some had come begging.
And some—foolish, arrogant men who had chosen to test the edges of my patience—had come to learn exactly why the city whispered my name with fear.
I walked through the lobby, and silence followed me like a shadow.
By the time the elevator doors closed, Malakai the man was gone.
What remained was the thing the underworld knew best.
Cold. Controlled. Merciless.
The Iced Viper.
And if anyone inside those offices had forgotten what happened to people who made the mistake of standing on my bad side, then by the end of the day, I would remind them.
Slowly.
Thoroughly.