Chapter 1
Luca
The Dominion always smelled like something had just ended or was about to. Blood washed from gutters. Oil slicks shining rainbow beneath streetlamps. Damp concrete and old money and the faint, sour rot that drifted from the wrong parts of the city when the wind turned. People liked to call it home because they had no other word for the place that raised its children with one hand around their throats. But even then, even at seventeen, I knew cities were only ever cages with better branding.
Rome stood beside me on the balcony, one hand braced against the stone rail, the other flexing slowly at his side. He did that when he was angry. Open. Close. Open. Close. Like his body needed to keep reminding itself that it knew how to crush something if asked. He was taller than me by enough to make people notice, broader too, already carrying himself like gravity answered to him personally. It annoyed me, how natural it all looked on him. The command. The weight. The way men twice his age straightened when he entered a room, as if some old animal part of them understood they were looking at the kind of thing that ruled simply because it existed.
Below us, the DeSantis estate was lit gold against the neon sweep of the city. Music drifted out from the ballroom downstairs. Laughter and the clink of glasses. Politicians and faction heads and sleek men in tailored coats drinking our father’s whiskey and pretending the city did not want to eat them whole.
Our father loved these nights.
He said power needed spectacle. Said fear worked best when wrapped in beauty, because then people mistook it for divinity. Roman DeSantis never wasted a lesson. Every room he entered became a lecture, every silence an expectation. Rome thrived under that sort of thing. He had always understood our father better than I did, or maybe he simply wanted to. I had spent most of my life trying to decide whether obedience and love were the same thing in this family, and had come up with different answers depending on the day. I had hated it all.
“You look like you’re about to throw yourself over the edge,” I said.
Rome did not glance at me. “You talk too much, brother.”
My shadow crows flew over the balcony, into the air, dancing in circles above us. My burnmark flaring light blue as it always did.
“Go back inside, Luca.”
“No.”
His jaw ticked. “For once in your life, do what you’re told.”
I leaned my elbows on the balcony rail and looked out over the city instead of at him. From here, Dominion looked almost holy. Towers covered in rain. Neon coloring the puddles on the streets. The dark scar of The Hollows splitting the glittering center like a wound no one could stitch closed. You could almost believe from this height that the city belonged to us. That all of it did. Every road, every district, every terrified little prayer muttered under breath when the DeSantis name crossed someone’s mind.
But cities belonged to no one. Not really. They let men pretend for a while, then buried them with everyone else.
“I hate these parties,” I said.
“That makes two of us.”
“And yet here we are. Smiling for people who’d sell our bones if they thought it would buy them another month.”
Rome finally looked at me then. His eyes were our father’s eyes. Cobalt and cold and too sharp in certain light.
“Where’s Beckham?” I asked.
Rome’s mouth flattened a fraction. “Grayson was unwell, he and Derek stayed home with him.”
That surprised me enough to glance at him. Beckham never missed one of Father’s nights unless he was made to. Even then, he found a way to appear eventually, polished and unreadable. He was younger than us by a few years, still caught in that strange in-between place where Father had brought him into the house but the house had not fully decided what to do with him. Too sharp to ignore. Too quiet to trust. Pretty enough to make people think softness lived somewhere in him. Yet, I knew better.
I huffed a laugh and glanced back through the open doors behind us. Music drifted out from the gallery. The chandeliers downstairs were reflected in the upper windows, turning the glass into pieces of gold. Somewhere deeper in the house, someone laughed. Somewhere else a tray clinked. The estate was alive with the usual performance. The DeSantis name gleaming. Guests fed and watered. Guards at every entrance. A kingdom dressed up as a party.
And still something in the air had been wrong all evening.
A small drag beneath the skin. That instinctive itch between the shoulder blades that told you something unseen had already stepped too close.
“You feel that?” I asked.
Rome turned his head slightly. “What.”
I listened.
Rain. Music. Voices below.
Then, from somewhere beyond the gate, a shout. Then someone screamed.
We hit the ground floor just as the ballroom broke.
Bodies surged toward the side exits in a wave of silk, tuxedos, perfume, and blind fear. A tray shattered beside the door. One of our guards slammed into a column hard enough to crack bone, then folded with his throat half-open. I smelled blood instantly. Too much of it. It spread over the white marble in glossy sheets, sliding into the lines, creeping beneath shoes and dress shirts.
At the center of the ballroom stood Father, Hollow gun raised, Mother behind him with one hand locked around his arm.
He did not look frightened. He looked furious.
That image stayed with me for years. Him in black tie, purple burnmark flaring, jaw set, cobalt eyes blazing, the room coming apart around him while he stood in the middle of it like the world had made the fatal mistake of trying to take something that belonged to him. One Hollowborn attack was all it took to decimate the entire DeSantis line, until only Rome, Beck, Grayson and I remained. That was the night Roman had become king. The night I had become the Prince of Crows. Though all I had wanted, even then, was to disappear into the night before that crown could ever find me.
But that was the cruelty of wanting, wasn’t it? The world rarely denied you outright.
Somehow, always, you ended up with the very thing you had never asked for.
