Mathias hated restaurants like this. Too clean, polished, so many people pretending they mattered. The soft lighting, the low piano music, glasses clinking, it was all a performance.

He didn’t come for the food. He didn’t come for the air, not even for the beautiful women at every corner of the room,

He came because no one would expect a man like him to whisper poison in a place dripping with class.

He sat in the back booth, tucked beneath a chandelier that threw fractured light across the ...