Page 110 of Shades of Grey & Gold

All the eyes and heads in the room turn towards me and I brace myself.

The room is one large open space—a great room with a dining table that runs almost the full length of it, dark wood, eighteen chairs. Seventeen of them are occupied.

Older men cluster at the far end near the head. Younger ones standing at the edges of the room, backs against the walls, some faces I know and some I don’t, but they’re here, which means they belong here.

I stand in the doorway and stare at the table.

At the far end, the head chair is empty.

I look at it for a long moment.

Around me no one moves.

I can feel every eye in the room tracking me the way someone tracks a thing it isn’t sure about yet—not hostile, not welcoming, just waiting to be told what to do or what to think.

But I can’t focus on them or what they think.

Because all I can see isthat chair.

I have seen my father sit in that chair more times than I can count. I have stood at the edge of this room as a boy and watched him hold court from it, watched men twice his age defer to him, watched the way power arranged itself around him like furniture around a fireplace.

I hated it. I hated the way he loved it. I hated that I understood why.

And I hate that the expectation in this moment is that I sit in it, become him.

I think of the men who died because of decisions made from that chair. Orders given with a wave of a hand, a nod, a silence. Men in our family. Men outside it. Men who had families of their own and went home in boxes or not at all because my father decided they were a problem to be solved. The specific brand of violence he considered efficient. The accounting he kept where human lives were entries in a ledger.

For what?

For this room. For this table. For that chair.

To leave behind a legacy that another family wants to destroy.

For me and Nico to have to pay for his sins.

No—for Max to pay for his sins on my behalf.

I glance at Nico, who has followed me in and stands in front of the double doors behind me. And I see it on his face—the slight tightening around his eyes, the set of his jaw. He called them here. He asked them to come. And now he’s seeing what I’m seeing, which is forty-some men looking at me with the neutrality of people who are withholding judgment, who are here out of loyalty to a dead man and a name and a history and are not yet sure if any of that applies to me.

I told you,Nico probably thinks.

He tried to tell me they wouldn’t just accept me.

I’ve been the interim. Been the placeholder.

And they know it.

Nico looks through me, waiting.

I look back at the table.

I stalk forward.

The room parts without being asked—the men standing at the edges shift back slightly as I come through the center, past the staring faces.

I come to the head of the table and I stop.

I stand in front of my father’s chair.