Free Power Games by Victoria Fox

brim with a restless injustice. He had been robbed.
    Turning to go, he almost didn’t see it. From darkness, a glimmer of light …
    Voldan looked, and looked again.
    If the wheelchair hadn’t become stuck in the groove between two floorboards, he might never have found it.‘Janika!’ he yelled—at least it felt like a yell, even if it did come out in that wretched, miserable, bionic drone. ‘ Janika! ’
    ‘I am here, Mr Cane!’ The maid came rushing up the stairs. She was middle-aged, with a frizz of mouse-brown hair, a flaccid chin and a sagging bosom. Seeing him stranded lopsided in the furrow, she hurried over, flapping her arms like the wings on a nesting turkey. ‘Oh, Mr Cane,’ she cooed, righting him. ‘What happened?’
    The floorboard was loose. Voldan felt it give beneath the wheel. That was what had caught him. The monotone was back:
    ‘There is something under the floor,’ he said, the words betraying none of his excitement. He had thought he knew every inch of his son’s domain, but no, here was more. Something Grigori had tucked away, kept to himself, a parting secret.
    Something he had wished his father to find.
    Janika removed the floorboard with a sturdy grunt. Inside was a wooden box.
    ‘Lift it,’ Voldan demanded. Janika did as she was told. ‘Open it.’
    Darkness fell across the turret window. Clouds brooded and in the distance came the first rumble of thunder. The lid prised open.
    Janika tilted the box so that Voldan could see its contents.
    He didn’t understand. ‘Who are they?’
    Janika removed one of the photographs. It was a picture of a woman. Across her face was streaked a giant red cross. The red was smeared, turning to brown.
    Blood?
    The maid extracted another. This one was a boy. It bore the same red mark.
    Angela Silvers and Kevin Chase. What had they to do with his son?
    ‘The rest,’ instructed Voldan electronically. ‘Empty the rest.’
    There were five more: seven in total.
    Journalist Eve Harley … Model Tawny Lascelles … Investor Jacob Lyle … Senator Mitch Corrigan … and Celeste Cavalieri, the jeweller.
    All defaced by that same blood cross: the mark of Grigori’s plague.
    ‘What is this, Mr Cane?’ Janika whispered.
    Voldan’s eyes hardened. On the back of each photograph was scrawled a single word. BITCH. LIAR. THIEF. FRAUD.
    ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, already tasting on the tip of his tongue the sweet, sticky nectar of revenge. ‘But I intend to find out.’

10
    Las Vegas
    ‘A ngela Silvers! Just as pretty as I remember, hey, Don?’
    Carmine Zenetti, casino boss and hotel magnate extraordinaire, greeted them in his palatial office above the Parisian. Angela remembered him from her childhood—a squat, stout man with a black monobrow and hands like bear paws. She knew her father hated being called Don. Her father knew she hated every minute of being here.
    ‘No need to remind me,’ Donald said amiably, as he accepted a cognac and they were encouraged to sit. The panorama looked out on the dazzling Strip, where in the spring sunshine tourists milled amid the peaks and spires of the replica city. Giant billboards screamed news of the hottest show in town while glittering hotels ushered through the next bout of spenders. The air was charged with the sharp tang of money.
    Angela refused her drink. She had no appetite. Since her father’s revelation in Boston, she had barely let a thing pass her lips.
    ‘I gotta say, I’m glad you finally came around.’ Carmine smiled fatly. ‘All these years there I was thinkin’ we were meant to be, but you had me wondering there for a time …’Carmine waggled a heavily jewelled finger at her father, one of a handful of people in the world who was permitted to do so, and chuckled. ‘But now you see it makes the best kind of sense. Zenetti and Silvers, united for the future.’
    Angela clenched her fists in her lap.
    ‘But hey,’ went on Carmine, eagerly rubbing his palms, ‘what are we waiting