Novels by Ziri Ink

LEON’S POVI read the note twice.Then I set it down on the cushion exactly where I’d found it because some instinct said don’t disturb anything, this is a crime scene now whether anyone has called it that yet or not.The sitting room looked wrong in the specific way rooms looked wrong when something had happened in them recently. Not ransacked. Not violent, at least not visibly. Just off. A glass broken near the chair. Stefena’s bag still on the side table, which meant she hadn’t left voluntarily, nobody left their bag, not even in a hurry, not if they had a choice about it.Justin was gone too.“Check the house,” I said to Kate.She was already moving, out of the sitting room and down the corridor, calling Justin’s name. I heard her take the stairs, heard her voice moving through the rooms above me, and I stood in the sitting room and looked at that empty chair and felt something I hadn’t allowed myself to feel in a very long time.Helpless.Just for a moment. Then I pushed it back

KATE’S POVThree days ago.I did the math without meaning to. Three days ago was before the dinner where she’d dropped that photograph of me and Oliver on the table. Before any of us knew Carter had found anything. Before the press conference, before Martha’s name made headlines, before any of it had cracked open in front of the cameras.Stefena had authorised a security firm before everything became public.Leon had gone completely still beside me, phone pressed to his ear, and I watched something move behind his eyes that I’d only seen once before. The night his composure had actually broken in that car, after the dinner, after the photograph.“Send me everything you have on that authorisation,” he said. His voice didn’t shake. It just went flat. “Every detail.”He hung up.For a second neither of us said anything. The marina had gone quiet again, just water against the dock and the distant hum of the city beyond it. Luciana’s sister was sitting on a bench a few feet away, wrapped i

LEON’S POVThe scream cut off almost as fast as it started.I grabbed Kate’s wrist in the dark and pulled her toward the cabin door, my other hand finding the wall, the doorframe, anything solid. Behind me Wakefield was saying something, fast and panicked, but I wasn’t listening to him anymore.“Bryan.”“Here.” Close. He’d already moved toward Carter.“Get my father off this boat.”“On it.”The deck outside was no better, the marina lights along the pier dimmed to almost nothing, just the faint glow of distant buildings and the moon catching the water in broken patches. I could hear movement. Footsteps on wood. Someone running.“Stay with me,” I said to Kate, and felt her hand grip my arm tighter in response.We came out onto the deck and I scanned the dock as fast as the darkness allowed. The scream had come from somewhere to the left, further down the pier, past the next two berths.A shape moved near the water’s edge.I started toward it before I’d fully decided to, Kate right behi

KATE’S POVThe silence after Carter’s voice was worse than the shout itself.Bryan moved first. Low along the dock, fast. Leon caught my arm before I could follow him.“Stay behind me.”“Leon—”“Please.” Just that. Not a command this time.I stayed half a step back. Close enough to see. Far enough that he could tell himself I was listening.We reached the gangway. Bryan crouched near the boat’s edge, signaling something with two fingers, then one. Leon understood it immediately. I didn’t, not until later, but I followed anyway.He went up first.The deck creaked. He froze. Waited. Nothing happened so he kept going, slower now, and I went with him, my heart somewhere up near my throat where it had been sitting most of the evening.Through the cabin window I saw Wakefield standing near a table, hands raised slightly, palms out. The posture of a man trying to look reasonable in a situation that had stopped being reasonable several minutes ago.Natalie stood beside him.And Carter was on

LEON’S POVKate pulled the phone from her ear and looked at me.“He said don’t come for him.” Her voice was steady but her hand wasn’t. “He said go to Natalie’s lawyer. Someone named Wakefield.”Wakefield.The name landed somewhere specific in my memory and stayed there, turning slowly until the context found it.Mr Wakefield. Family lawyer to the Romanos.The same man who had sat in Jared Adams’ living room with a briefcase and a marriage proposal and the practiced calm of someone who had delivered difficult news so many times it had stopped feeling like anything.He had represented us.Or I had believed he was representing us.I took the next turn without indicating, cutting across a lane, the tyres finding the road again cleanly. Kate grabbed the door handle but said nothing about the driving.“He’s been working both sides,” I said.“Wakefield.”“He had access to everything. Every document, every arrangement, every conversation that went through official channels.” I kept my eyes o

KATE’S POVThe cursor was still blinking.Like the phone had been waiting. Like whoever left it here had expected someone to find it mid-sentence and just hadn’t known who.Leon read it over my shoulder. Neither of us spoke for a moment. The shipping yard was the kind of quiet that had noise underneath it, water somewhere close, metal settling, wind cutting between containers, but none of that registered properly. Just the cracked screen and those seven words and the cursor doing its small relentless thing.Leon, if you’re reading this, I—I stood up slowly.“He knew,” I said.Leon looked at me.“He knew something was going to happen before it happened.” I held up the phone slightly. “You don’t start a message addressed to someone specific unless you’ve already decided they’re the one who needs to find it. He wasn’t just typing. He was trying to leave something behind.”Leon took the phone from me carefully.He looked at it for a long moment without saying anything. I watched him thin

RowanHe was already in the east hall when I arrived.Sitting at the far end of the table like he owned it, one ankle crossed over his knee, a glass of something dark in his hand at eleven in the morning. That was Rurik. Always already there, always already comfortable, always making sure you noticed both things.We shared a father. That was the beginning and end of what we shared.He looked up when I walked in, smiled with all his teeth. “Brother.”“Rurik.” I pulled out a chair on my side of the table and sat. Didn’t pour a drink. Kept my hands visible and still, an old habit from negotiation training. Show them your hands, show them nothing’s coming, let them relax just enough.“Congratulations are in order I hear.” He swirled his glass. “The runaway princess has returned. And with a gift.”“Watch your mouth.”He raised both hands, the picture of innocence. “I only meant the child. A daughter, yes? She has your eyes, they say.”“Who says.”“People talk.” He shrugged. “Palaces talk.

AthenaI made a mistake.Not a catastrophic one, nothing that couldn’t be managed, but I let my guard down for approximately forty minutes in the east grounds watching my daughter befriend a wolf, and now I was paying for it by standing in my room thinking about what Rowan had said.I’m bad at this. I’m working on it.Six years ago he wouldn’t have said that. Six years ago he wouldn’t have crouched down to her level in a corridor and answered questions about wolves for twenty minutes with the patience of someone who actually had it and not just the performance of it.People changed. I knew that, had lived it myself, had changed so completely from the girl who’d broken a bond on her knees spitting blood that sometimes I barely recognized her.That didn’t mean I had to do anything with the information.I changed out of the east grounds clothes and sat at the small desk by the window with my sketchbook. Drawing helped me think, always had, my brain settled when my hands were doing someth

RowanVera had apologized.I hadn’t told her to. Lake had, apparently, on his own initiative, which meant I was going to have to have a conversation with him about overstepping, except that the outcome had been fine so the conversation was going to be difficult to frame correctly.I’d watched it happen from across the dining hall. Athena walking over, sitting down, the whole thing done quietly and without spectacle, no raised voice, no scene. Just her, a chair, and whatever she’d said that had made Vera’s face do what it did.Then Vera crossing the room twenty minutes later to apologize and Athena accepting it like she was signing off on a document.Lake slid into the seat across from me. “She handled that well.”“I saw.”“Better than expected.”“I expected her to handle it well.” That wasn’t entirely true but I wasn’t going to say that out loud.“Rurik wants a meeting.” Lake said, moving on with the efficiency of someone who knew when not to linger on a topic.“Of course he does.”“T

AthenaI found the dining hall on my own.Took two wrong turns and ended up in what I think was a weapons storage room before I got my bearings, but I found it. Small victories.It was early enough that I’d expected it to be mostly empty. It was not mostly empty. Maybe thirty wolves seated at various points across the long tables, the low hum of conversation that stopped in sections as I walked in, like someone turning down a volume dial one notch at a time.I kept walking.Chase was behind me, Amara’s hand in mine, and I could feel her looking around with that wide open curiosity of hers that hadn’t yet learned to be self conscious. I envied her that.I found a spot at one of the side tables, not the head, not the far end, somewhere in the middle that said I’m not hiding but I’m not performing either. Chase sat across from me, Amara beside me, and I picked up the menu card on the table and looked at it like thirty pairs of eyes weren’t doing what they were doing.Food came. We ate. A

AthenaThe east wing was nice.I hated that it was nice.I’d been prepared to find something to complain about, some deliberate slight in the room choice, something that would confirm what I already believed about being here. Instead I walked into a suite with high ceilings and wide windows overlooking a garden, furniture that was heavy and dark and clearly expensive, and a connecting room that had already been set up for a child.Amara walked into it and stopped dead.There was a small bed with carved wolves on the headboard. A window seat. A shelf with books on it that someone had clearly placed there recently because the spines were too neat, too deliberate.“Mama.” Her voice came out hushed.“I see it.”“There are wolves on my bed.”“I see that too.”She turned to me with an expression that was trying very hard not to be delighted and failing completely. Then she ran and threw herself on the bed and the stuffed rabbit flew somewhere and I stood in the doorway watching her and felt

RowanShe arrived on the third day.I knew before anyone told me. Something shifted in the air around midday, some low pull at the base of my skull, faint enough that I could have ignored it if I’d wanted to. I didn’t examine it too closely. Just set down the report I’d been reading and looked at the window.Lake appeared in the doorway twelve minutes later. “She’s at the gate.”“I know.”He opened his mouth.“Tell the council the meeting is postponed.” I stood. “And keep Rurik away from the east wing.”“He’s going to ask questions.”“Let him ask.” I straightened my jacket. “Just make sure he asks them from a distance.”The courtyard was half full when I got there. Word moved fast in a palace, it always had, and I could see the staff finding reasons to be near windows, near doorways. I ignored them. Walked to the front steps and stood there with my hands clasped behind my back and waited.The car came through the gate and stopped.Chase got out first. I’d known about Chase, had him lo