’This is not the life I bargained for.’
Nico kept the Mercedes steady on the empty road, one eye on the potholes ahead, the other flicking to the side mirror every few seconds. Habit, mostly. Except tonight it wasn’t just habit.
His three passengers sat in silence behind him. His wives, if the paperwork was to be believed. The Fenris triplets. Mira, Kira, and Nira.
Mira had taken the front seat, moonlight hair pale against the headrest, crimson eyes fixed somewhere past the windshield. She hadn’t said a word since they left the estate. Her silence felt deliberate, like she’d chosen it as what to wear.
In the back, Nira had already given up on staying awake, her head tipped onto Kira’s shoulder. Kira kept shifting under the weight, easing her sister’s head back into place every time it slid too far, muttering under her breath about how long the drive was taking.
Nico had watched her do it for the better part of an hour. He hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t said much of anything since James Fenris told him, flatly, that he was the backup groom.
The whole arrangement had been contractual from the start. His older brother, Silas Ashford, first son of the Ashford family, had struck a partnership with the Fenris household. One clause in that deal required Silas to marry the Fenris triplets.
Nico understood by now that the marriage was never really about strengthening ties between families. James Fenris’s daughters were cripples in the only sense that mattered to a mafia bloodline: they’d inherited no power at all.
(Cripples: term used by bloodline ability users for humans without bloodline powers.)
Bloodline powers weren’t decoration. A boss who could pass down power built stronger soldiers. Stronger soldiers meant more territory held, more rivals kept in line, and eventually more money moving through the family’s hands. That was the whole equation.
James had three daughters and none of them fit into it. So he handed them to Silas as a condition of the deal, effectively getting rid of a problem while calling it a gift.
Not long after the wedding, Silas was murdered.
The details were still murky, but Nico had dug enough to know the trail didn’t lead back to him. It led to the triplets. Silas hadn’t been the target. He’d died protecting the three women sitting in this car.
And because Silas had no children of his own, everything he’d built, and everyone he’d married, passed to Nico as the rightful heir.
Nico was the youngest of four Ashford brothers, and by a wide margin, the weakest. He was the one born without a bloodline power, and his family had never once let him forget it.
Silas was the exception. He hadn’t cared what Nico could or couldn’t do. He’d pulled him in close, trained him himself, and built the family’s empire with Nico standing right beside him as underboss.
Which was how Nico had ended up here: heir to an empire he didn’t build, husband to three women he barely knew, and the only thing standing between them and whoever wanted them dead.
That last part was becoming a full-time job.
He checked the mirror again. The same black Nissan had been holding its distance for almost an hour and a half now, never closing in, never falling too far back either.
At first he’d told himself it was nothing. A car heading the same direction, coincidence, nothing worth losing sleep over. That excuse had stopped working the moment he turned a forty-minute drive into nearly two hours.
He’d taken every long way around. Backroads nobody used this late, turns that made no sense unless you were trying to lose someone.
The Nissan was still there.
’It’s just as I thought.’
’Their informant is from the Fenris household.’
Nico had planned for tonight for weeks. The only person outside the Fenris estate who knew he was picking up the triplets today was Lucas, his own assistant, and even he’d only been told to have a contingency ready in case things went sideways.
If someone had known to send a car after them the same evening they left the Fenris estate, that information had come from inside. Fast, and recent enough that whoever leaked it had barely given the assassins time to move.
’Well then. Two can play that game.’
Nico stopped taking detours. He put his foot down and drove straight for home, tires crunching gravel as he pulled into the driveway of a modest two-story bungalow.
The place was nothing flashy. Nothing that screamed money or mafia wealth. Just a house.
"We’re here," he said.
Nira stirred against Kira’s shoulder, mumbling something none of them caught. Nico killed the engine and stepped out first. Kira was out of the back seat almost as fast, stretching with an exaggerated groan.
"Wait, this is it?" She looked the house up and down, unimpressed. "I figured it’d be bigger."
Mira and Nira climbed out after her, and that was when the front door opened.
A man stepped out to meet them. Short blond hair, blue eyes, a smile that looked like it had been welded onto his face years ago and never come off. He wore a white shirt, black pants, and a walk that carried more dignity than the outfit had any right to.
"Master." He bowed his head slightly. "I’ve been expecting you."
Nico frowned at him a beat longer than he meant to, then turned to the three women standing in his driveway, waiting for an explanation he wasn’t sure how to give yet.
"Girls," he said, "this is Lucas. He’s my... butler."