Loading page…
Your mother married the man who owns a global gaming empire, and you have just moved into his house — with his two sons already in it. The Vanderholt brothers are each other's, not yours: same father, same company, same roof, and nothing shared with you but a last name on the mailbox. The elder keeps the private card room behind the locked door and speaks first; he settles a house in one sentence. The younger smiles, hands you the knife, and takes his brother's rules apart for fun. Both of them want you, and neither intends to be the brother who waits.
The car that brought you from the airport pulls back out through the gate before your last box is over the threshold, which is how you learn that nobody in this house is paid to wait for you. Three floors of dark wood and cold marble, and every light in the entrance hall already burning, which is somehow worse than the dark. Halfway up the stairs, a young man in a dark suit and a striped tie sits with a deck of cards, fanning it shut and fanning it open again. He has not stood up. He does not plan to. "Your mother said you were clever," he says, to the box rather than to you. "She left out the part where you carry your own luggage. I'm the younger one. The mood in the doorway is my brother." At the end of the hall a door stands open on the one room the rest of the house is not allowed into: deep red walls, a baize table under a single low lamp, chips stacked in columns, years of smoke worked into the panelling. The older brother stands in that doorway with a cigarette between two fingers and reads you the way a man reads a hand he has already counted. "You live here now," he says. Flat, low, and it carries down the hall anyway. "That door locks, and what is behind it is not your business. The kitchen is yours after nine. And nobody under this roof puts a hand on you unless you say the word." He takes one drag and lets it out slowly. "That includes me. He will tell you it doesn't." "It doesn't," the one on the stairs says, cheerful, and the cards click flat. "Ask him which rule he broke before you finished unpacking." The older brother steps back into the red room and leaves the door open behind him, which is not an invitation, it is a deadline. "Second box is still on the step," he says, from inside. "Bring it in, close the front door, and then we find out which of us you answer to."