THE HEIR THEY TRIED TO BURY

The smile

Ines gave me a room on the second floor, a clean white box with a bed and a bathroom, and she stood in the doorway while I stared at the hot water running over my hands. I hadn't realized how filthy I was until the water turned gray. When I came out, there was a black suit laid across the bed with the tags still on, and a pair of shoes that fit me better than anything I had ever owned. I did not ask how she knew my size. In this house, I was starting to understand, people knew things.

"Dinner is at eight," she said. "The whole family attends when Viktor is unwell. It is how they remind each other who is still standing."

Do I have to go?

"If you hide in this room, they will decide you are afraid. Afraid people don't last here." She straightened my collar with a quick, practiced tug, the way my mother used to before church. Watch everything. Eat only what others eat first. Smile as little as you can manage.

I thought she was exaggerating until I walked into the dining hall.

It was a long room under a crystal chandelier, and the table could have seated forty. Perhaps twenty people were already there, men in expensive suits and women in jewels that caught the light every time they moved. The talking stopped the moment I appeared in the doorway. Twenty heads turned in perfect unison, and I felt every pair of eyes land on me like a hand on the back of my neck.

Then a man rose from the far end of the table and came toward me with both arms open.

"Eli," he said, and the whole room seemed to relax around the warmth in his voice. "Finally. I was starting to think Ines had made you up."

He was maybe thirty, tall and handsome in an easy, careless way, with dark hair swept back and a smile that reached all the way to his eyes. Before I could step away he had pulled me into a hug, one hand clapping my shoulder, and he smelled of cedar and expensive soap. Nobody had hugged me since my mother. The shock of it went straight through me, and for one ugly second I almost leaned in.

"Lucian," he said, drawing back to look at me. "Your brother, if you'll have me. Half, technically, but I've never cared for fractions." He laughed, and a few people at the table laughed with him. "I've spent my whole life wondering if there was another one of us out there. Dad never said a word. You must have been so lonely."

"I was fine," I said. It came out stiffer than I meant.

"Of course you were. You're a Kessler." He squeezed my shoulder again, softer this time. "Come, sit by me. You must be exhausted, and I won't let these vultures swallow you before you've had a decent meal."

He steered me down the length of the table, one arm around my back, introducing me as he went. Uncles, cousins, men whose titles he rattled off too fast for me to follow. Each one rose halfway from their chair as I passed. A heavyset man with a gold ring on every finger bowed his head just slightly, his eyes never leaving mine. A silver-haired woman in green tilted her chin in a nod so exact it looked rehearsed. They were all polite, every one of them, and none of them were glad.

I noticed the ones who bowed and the ones who didn't. A lean man near the middle of the table kept his gaze fixed on his plate as I walked by, then lifted it only after I was behind him, and I felt that stare burn between my shoulder blades the whole way down. Two younger cousins whispered behind a wineglass. An older man with a scarred eyebrow looked at me the way you look at a car you're thinking of buying, calm and measuring and in no hurry.

Lucian seated me at his right hand. Directly across from us stood a chair at the head of the table, tall and carved, with an untouched place setting in front of it. Viktor's seat. Nobody sat near it, and nobody looked at it, and the emptiness had a weight that pressed on the whole room.

"To family," Lucian said, lifting his glass, and everyone echoed it. I raised mine because everyone else did, but I did not drink. Ines had told me to wait, and I watched Lucian take a long swallow before I let even a drop touch my lips.

The food came in waves, silver trays carried by silent servants. Conversation started up again, low and lively, and I realized slowly that it was a performance, every line of it. They spoke about horses, about an upcoming charity gala, about a cousin's wedding. Nobody mentioned my father upstairs fighting to breathe. Nobody mentioned me. Yet under every sentence I could hear another conversation running, in glances and pauses and the small clink of forks, and I felt like a man listening to a language he almost understood.

"You're quiet," Lucian said, leaning toward me with a conspiratorial grin. Don't let them intimidate you. They've been rehearsing their welcomes for hours. Uncle Roman practiced in the mirror.

Which one is Roman?

"The one with the scar." He didn't lower his voice quite enough. He runs the shipping side. Dad trusts him with the money and trusts me with everything else. If you ever need anything, anything at all, you come to me. I mean it.

He said it so simply, with such open warmth, that I wanted to believe him with every part of my exhausted heart. I had been alone for thirty hours, and this man was offering me a place at a table. My mother's voice rang in my head, not a smile, not a gift, not a kind word, and I looked down at my plate so he wouldn't see my face.

That was when I counted the chairs.

Twenty-two places had been set, and I'd gone around the table twice before I understood what was bothering me. Three seats stood empty besides Viktor's. One beside the silver-haired woman, one at the far end, and one just to my left, a place laid with a glass and a folded napkin and nobody to use them. I asked Lucian who the empty ones were for.

His smile stayed exactly where it was, but the light in his eyes went out for half a second, like a lamp flickering. Absent friends, he said easily. Don't worry about it.

I nodded and picked up my fork, and across the table Ines caught my eye from where she stood against the wall, her face unreadable, her fingers pressed flat against her stomach. She gave one tiny shake of her head. Don't ask again.

I ate what the others ate. I watched the knives, and I smiled as little as I could.