Page 111 of Shades of Grey & Gold

It’s wooden. High-backed. Dark with age and use. There is nothing remarkable about it except that for thirty years it meant something in this room.

I turn around. Face the room.

Every face looking back at me.

Seventeen men seated around the table, countless men standing around the room—and Nico at the doors.

I look at the chair again. I look out at the room again.

I scrub a hand across my jaw and let out a short, disgusted laugh.

I walk with purpose back to Nico, give him a look and he steps aside.

With both my hands, I push hard on the double doors, and I don’t wait to watch them open. I turn to walk back to the table, the path unoccupied as the men standing in my way steer clear of my path.

The doors bang as they hit the walls of the guest house as I make it back to my father’s damn chair.

Then I reach down, wrap both hands around the top rail of the chair, and lift it above my head.

I turn and hurl it.

It flies through the open double doors and hits the concrete of the back patio with a crack that echoes off the walls of the house. One leg splinters off. The seat skids. It comes to rest against the far wall of the patio in pieces.

The silence in the room after it lands is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.

I look at every man in the room. My eyes stop on the man to the right of where the chair used to be—older, sixties, silver at his temples, a face carved by decades of doing what my father asked without question. Ferraro. My father’sconsigliere. His most trusted. The man who has been in more rooms like this one than anyone else here.

He meets my gaze and doesn’t look away.

“If anyone wants to leave,” I announce, and my voice comes out level and certain and loud enough for even the man at the very back of the room to hear it clearly.

I turn back.

I point at the doorway.

“There’s the fucking door.”

Nobody moves.

Nobody breathes.

From my left I hear it—just barely, just a thread of sound—Nico. Snickering. And then, from beside him, my cousin Mikey, twenty-three years old and constitutionally incapable of keeping his fucking mouth shut, excitedly mutters under his breath: “Let’s fucking go, brother!”

I don’t look at them. My eyes stay on the table.

“If you stay,” I say, “you play by my rules.”

I look back at Ferraro.

He holds my gaze for a moment—a long moment, the kind that has weight. Then he stands. Slowly. He adjusts his suit jacket with both hands, smooths the lapels, buttons it with one hand, pushes his chair in. His face gives nothing away and I think he’s going to walk. He’s going to take half the room with him and we’re going to do this with whatever’s left.Fuck them.

He takes two steps toward me.

He extends his hand.

I shake it. I keep my face where it is while the shock absorbs inside of me somewhere.

“Your father would be proud,” he says it loud enough for every man in the room to hear it.