Aleksi sat at the back of the cold, gray room, his body curled in the wing backed chair like a spider in its web. Dimitri always had to fight a sense that he was young again, small and back in his uncle’s power, even after so many years, and so many of these visits. Outside this room, he felt powerful. Outside he could forget he was the replacement heir. But once inside…at ninety the old man still had presence, Dimitri could concede as he strolled forward and settled in a chair without waiting for the gesture that had been permission in the past.
A gleam in the almost dead eyes had him leaning back, his legs crossed with seeming casualness, though he’d never be at ease, not now, not when his uncle was dead. If the years of waiting, the years of watching his uncle watch his back, had taugh
