THE KASTELLAN HEIR.

THE SECOND HEIR.

Glass rained across the floor like hail.

A black rope whipped through the shattered window, and men in tactical gear swung in on it, boots first, weapons raised, shouting. "Police! Drop your weapons! Drop them now!" Red dots swept across the concrete. A flashbang bounced off a steel beam and burst in a wall of white noise.

Ronan threw himself sideways, dragging the briefcase with him. He hit the ground, rolled, and came up on one knee. The floor was a blur of shouting, smoke, and drifting glass.

"Sienna!"

She was already moving. During the confusion, she'd twisted against the cord, and now something silver flashed between her fingers, a sliver of glass from the broken window. She sawed at the rope with a grunt of pain and stumbled free just as Preston, panicking, swung his pistol around.

"Don't move!" he shrieked. "Don't move! I'll shoot her! I'll..."

"Preston."

The voice came from a few feet away. Ronan stood up slowly, empty hands spread, dust in his hair.

"Put it down," he said.

"Shut up! You ruined everything!"

"You ruined it yourself."

"I loved her!"

"You loved what she could give you." Ronan walked toward him, unhurried. "And when she couldn't give it anymore, you told her to sign the papers. You're not a villain, Preston. Villains have plans. You've only ever been a man who wanted whatever was standing nearest."

The pistol trembled. Tears spilled down Preston's face. His finger tightened on the trigger, and for an endless breath, Ronan wondered if he had miscalculated.

Then Sienna's boot cracked against the back of Preston's knee.

He screamed, folding. The gun clattered across the concrete. Two officers were on him in a heartbeat, wrenching his arms behind him, and he sobbed into the floor.

"I'm sorry," he choked. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't want to. He said he'd get me my money back..."

Ronan turned away.

At the far side of the room, a different fight was ending. Crane, bleeding from a graze on his forearm, had made it halfway across the floor, cornered by three officers with weapons raised. His face was a stone. He lifted his hands slowly, palms open, and dropped to his knees.

"That's it," someone said. "Cuff him."

But Aldric was gone.

Ronan's eyes swept the room. The concrete, the broken window, the wisps of smoke. A door ajar on the far side, swinging.

"The stairwell!" Sienna shouted. She was on her feet, one hand pressed to her ribs, her gun in her hand. Someone had returned it to her. "He's going for the roof!"

They ran.

The stairwell was a steel cylinder of switchbacks, dim and echoing. Ronan took the steps three at a time, Sienna at his shoulder, both of them panting. Above them, the clatter of a cane rang out on metal.

"Aldric!" Ronan shouted.

"Go back, boy!" The old man's voice floated down from above, thin and manic. "You cannot follow me! I have a helicopter waiting!"

"There's no helicopter. Your pilot was arrested an hour ago."

A long, stunned silence.

Then the door at the top banged open, and Ronan burst out onto the roof.

Wind hit him like a wall. The sky was a bowl of stars, the city a carpet of light below. The rooftop was a flat expanse of gravel and steel, ringed by a low railing. At the far edge, silhouetted against the night, Aldric Neville stood with his cane in his hand and his coat billowing behind him like a cape.

"Stay back!" he cried.

"It's over."

"It is never over!" The old man's face was contorted, his eyes bulging, his composure finally, utterly gone. "I built this! I built every stone! I gave thirty years to that family and they gave me nothing! I earned it! I earned it!"

"You earned a cell," said Sienna.

"Silence!" Aldric spun toward her. "You are nothing! A secretary! A servant's brat!"

"My grandfather," Sienna said, in a voice like frozen steel, "is going to be very interested to hear you say that."

Aldric's face twitched. His grip on the cane tightened, and Ronan saw, with a lurch, that the ivory handle had twisted. A blade flashed from within the shaft, a thin steel needle, six inches long.

"I am not going to prison," Aldric whispered.

He lunged.

Ronan had no time to think. He barely had time to move. The blade sliced through the air, and something hot lit a line across his forearm. He stumbled back. Aldric surged forward, a white-haired wraith with murder in his eyes, and Ronan caught his wrist in both hands and wrenched.

They fell together. The gravel scraped Ronan's cheek. The old man's weight, astonishingly strong, bore down on him. A gnarled hand closed around his throat.

"You look just like him," Aldric hissed. "Patrick. The same eyes. The same damnarrogance!"

"You're not fit to say his name."

"I'll end his line tonight!"

The blade glinted. Ronan twisted, and it drove into the gravel an inch from his ear. He drove his knee into Aldric's ribs, and the old man gasped, and rolled, and staggered up.

He was at the railing now. Behind him, there was nothing but a six-hundred-foot drop and a sky full of stars.

"Aldric," Ronan said, rising. "Step away from the edge."

"You would let me live?"

"I would let you stand trial."

"For what?" The old man laughed, wild and cracked. "For love? For thirty years of loyal service? Your grandfather killed my brother, you know. Nobody remembers that. Nobody ever remembers what the Kastellans took."

"That isn't true," Sienna said.

"Ask him."

"Ask who? He's dead."

"Then ask the dead!"

Aldric stepped backward, and his heel struck the low railing. For an instant, the whole night seemed to hold its breath. He looked down at the drop, and then at Ronan, and something changed in his face. Not fear. Something more terrible. Recognition.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, my dear boy. Now I see it. You are his son."

And he smiled.

"Give my regards to the second one," he whispered.

Then the wind gusted, the railing shuddered, and Aldric Neville stepped off the edge of the world.

Ronan lunged.

His fingers closed around the old man's coat sleeve. The weight yanked him against the railing, knocking the breath from his lungs. He held on, both arms straining, boots skidding across the gravel, as the man who had murdered his parents dangled six hundred feet above the sleeping city.

"Sienna!" he cried.

She was already beside him, her hands beside his, gripping the cloth.

Below them, Aldric hung, coat flapping, cane gone. He looked up into Ronan's eyes, and there was no pleading in his own.

"Let go," he said.

"No."

"You want to. I can see it."

"Yes," Ronan said. "I do." His arms shook. "But my father didn't raise me. Someone else did. And she taught me that a man is not what he wants. He's what he does."

He heaved.

It took both of them, and every ounce of their strength. The old man came up over the railing in a tangle of coat and limbs, gasping, sobbing, and collapsed on the gravel. Police swarmed across the roof, weapons raised.

Ronan sat back against the railing, his arm bleeding, his chest heaving, and closed his eyes.

Somewhere beyond the tower, the first pale line of dawn had begun to lift over the city.

"Ronan," Sienna said, breathless, her forehead against his shoulder. "What did he mean? The second one?"

He opened his eyes.

"I don't know," he said. And for the first time that night, he was afraid.