Chapter 15 - A Question at Dinner
That evening, Della sat across from Royce at a table far too large for two people, the silence between them comfortable rather than strained — a rarity, she was learning, in a house built for entertaining crowds rather than for quiet family dinners. Candles flickered along the centerpiece, though neither of them had asked for anything so formal; Mrs. Alvarez had simply decided, in her quiet, unassailable way, that the house needed more moments that felt like a home and fewer that felt like a boardroom.
Della had spent the better part of the day wandering the estate's gardens, one hand resting on the swell of her belly, trying to convince herself that the unease she'd woken up with was nothing more than hormones and exhaustion. But it had followed her through breakfast, through her afternoon nap, through the long, golden hour she'd spent simply sitting by the fountain listening to the water — a small, persistent shadow at the edge of her memory that refused to fully surface.
"You've been quiet all evening," Royce observed, setting down his fork. He had learned, in the short time they'd shared this house, to read the particular quality of Della's silences — this one was different from the tired quiet of early pregnancy, or the overwhelmed quiet of adjusting to a life of sudden wealth. This one had the texture of something being turned over and over in someone's mind, examined from every angle.
"Can I ask you something?" Della said finally, setting down her own fork, no longer pretending interest in the meal in front of her.
"Always," Royce said. "You never have to ask permission to ask me anything, Della."
"That night, in the alley," she said carefully, choosing her words the way one might step around broken glass in bare feet. "Do you remember anything before I found you? Anyone else who might have been there? Anyone... watching?"
Royce's expression flickered — not suspicion exactly, but a distant, searching look, like a man trying to read a page that had long since faded with water damage and time. He set down his glass, and for a moment, the powerful, composed king of the underworld looked almost young, almost lost, the way she imagined he must have looked seven years ago, bleeding out on cold concrete with no one in the world coming to look for him.
"I remember pain," he said slowly, his voice quieter than she'd ever heard it. "A cold so deep it felt like it was coming from inside my own bones, not the concrete beneath me. I remember your voice — steady, even when I could hear your hands shaking as you pressed against the wound. You kept telling me to stay awake, to look at you, to count backward from a hundred so I wouldn't slip away." He paused, his gray eyes distant, unfocused, staring at some point far beyond the dining room walls. "Everything else is fragments. Flashes of light. The sound of sirens that felt like they took a lifetime to arrive. Why do you ask, Della? What's brought this up tonight?"
Della hesitated, turning her water glass slowly between her fingers, watching the candlelight refract through it. "No reason," she said, though even as the words left her mouth, she knew how thin they sounded. "I just... I woke up this morning from a strange dream. About that night. There was someone else there, at the edge of the alley. A shadow. I couldn't see a face, just eyes — catching the streetlight, watching us but never moving, never helping." She shook her head, trying to laugh it off, though the sound came out unconvincing even to her own ears. "It's probably nothing. Just nerves. Pregnancy dreams, or whatever they call it."
But Royce had gone very still, the particular stillness of a man whose instincts, honed over seven years of building an empire from nothing, had just caught the scent of something dangerous in the air.
"Della," he said carefully, "I need you to think very hard. Was this a dream, or a memory surfacing after seven years of being buried?"
The question startled her — not because it was unkind, but because some part of her, some quiet and persistent part she'd been trying to silence all day, had been asking herself the exact same thing since the moment she woke.
"I don't know," she admitted softly. "It felt too specific to be just a dream. The scar on his temple. The way he never moved, even when I was screaming for someone, anyone, to help me. At the time, I told myself I imagined it, that I was too scared and too focused on keeping you alive to trust my own eyes. But now..."
"Now?"
"Now I keep wondering if I imagined him at all," she said, "or if I've spent seven years convincing myself I did, because the alternative was too frightening to sit with — that someone watched you almost die, and chose to do nothing."
Royce reached across the table and took her hand, his thumb tracing slow, grounding circles across her knuckles, though his mind had already begun turning, methodically and coldly, through every enemy he had ever made, every family secret his own mother had refused to discuss before her death, every unanswered question about the years before he'd clawed his way out of poverty and into power.
"If something is bothering you, Della, you can tell me," he said gently. "Always. That's not going to change, whatever it turns out to mean."
May you like
He meant it as comfort. But even as he said the words, a colder, more calculating part of him — the part that had built an empire on instinct and preparation — was already reaching for his phone beneath the table, already composing the message he would send Viktor the moment dinner ended: Pull every file we have on my mother's side of the family. Every one. I don't care how old or how buried.
Because if Della's half-remembered shadow was real, then somewhere in his past, a secret older than his empire, older even than the alley where his life had nearly ended, was finally beginning to stir.
