THE SONGBIRDS CAGE
Years ago, an “accident” arranged by street-level thugs left her with a permanent limp and a permanently smaller life. Now she survives in the shadows of the underworld, pouring everything she has left into midnight songs at a bar nobody important is supposed to notice.
Until a lieutenant with an agenda drags her onto center stage at a closed-door gala where two rival syndicates sit close enough to kill each other over a wrong glance. She should be terrified. Instead, she opens her mouth to sing, and the room of murderers goes silent.
Two men are undone by her that night. One is the arrogant heir who once humiliated her for the very limp she can’t hide, a man used to owning everything he wants. The other is his own underboss, quiet and lethal, the one who hunted down and buried the men who crippled her, and never said a word.Now she’s a prize in a war she didn’t start, a piece both sides want to claim. But she’s done being anyone’s victim, anyone’s pawn, or anyone’s quiet girl in the corner. If they want her, they’ll have to survive her first and neither of them is prepared for what she’s capable of when she stops hiding what she truly is.
Baca
Chapter: Chapter 6: TaliaWren's Pov:I can't fall asleep after reading the note. I remain seated at my kitchen table until the sky outside my window begins to lighten, a flower still in a glass of water beside me. I kept it unsure of why, perhaps because throwing it away felt like an admission of fear. I pick up the note once more."I am aware of what they stole from you."Only six words.I've read them so frequently that they no longer resemble words. Just six small marks on a sheet of paper, appearing like a closed door I am hesitant to open.I have decided to burn it on three occasions.Three times I have reached for a lighter.Three times I have hesitated.When the sun finally rises, I am drained. It is not the type of weariness that can be remedied by sleep. It is the kind that settles deep in your bones after spending the whole night anticipating something dreadful.At nine, Talia enters my apartment without knocking. She has been doing so for two years.Ever since she discovered me crying behind The Bl
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-08-21
Chapter: Chapter 5: The Shadow*Kiryan's POV*Control is not a personality trait. People like to believe it is that some men are simply born still, born quiet, born capable of standing in a room full of violence without their pulse ever climbing. It isn't true. Control is a wound that is scarred over correctly. It's the thing you build, brick by brick, out of every moment you don't allow yourself to feel what you were feeling, until eventually the wall is so well made that even you start to believe there was never a fire behind it.I have been building that wall for six years.I'm standing across the street from The Blue Note when she leaves tonight, close enough to watch the particular rhythm of her walk weight on the right, cane forward, the left leg following a half-beat behind like it's still negotiating the terms of its teamwork and far enough that she will never once, not in six years, have caught me here.I don't follow her out of duty. Nobody assigned me this. If Dario knew how many nights I've spent standi
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-08-18
Chapter: Chapter 4: The Heir*Dario's POV*I was born into a house that measures love in territory.My father taught me to shoot before he taught me to ride a bike. He taught me to read a room for weakness before he ever taught me to read a book for pleasure. By the time I was twelve, I understood that the empire I would one day inherit wasn't a gift it was a debt, accruing interest every single day of my life, and I would spend the rest of my existence paying it off in loyalty, blood, and whatever pieces of myself didn't fit neatly into the shape of a good son.I'm thirty-one years old, and I still don't know what my own laugh sounds like when nobody's watching to see if it's the right one.Tonight I'm standing on the balcony of my father's study, a glass of something expensive going warm in my hand, looking out over the grounds of Casa Nera as they belong to me because they will, eventually, the way a noose eventually belongs to the man standing under it. Below me, staff are already stringing lights for the gal
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-08-18
Chapter: Chapter 3: The Lieutenant*Vas's POV*Nobody remembers the second son.That's the first lesson this world ever taught me, back when I was young enough to still believe loyalty got rewarded instead of spent. My father served the old Don for thirty-one years. Thirty-one years of broken knuckles and buried bodies and a devotion so complete it should have bought his family something more than a modest house and a funeral nobody important bothered attending. I stood at that funeral in a borrowed suit and watched the current Don shake exactly four hands before he left, and none of them was mine.I decided that day I would never again be a man whose name people forgot to remember.Fifteen years later, I'm still not the name they remember first. I'm the lieutenant, the fixer, the man who makes uncomfortable things disappear so the men with better origins can keep their hands clean and their consciences cleaner. I've buried more secrets for this family than the ground under Casa Nera has room for. And still, when Dario
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-08-18
Chapter: Chapter 2:What the Leg Remembers*Wren's POV*When I blink, he's gone.Not gone the way people leave a room with no door swinging, no scrape of a chair, no ripple through the crowd where a body should have moved. Just gone, as the doorway swallowed him back into whatever dark he came from, and for one long, ringing second I genuinely don't know if I imagined him at all.My hands are still on the keys. I don't remember lifting them off. Marek is saying my name, Wren- hey, Wren from somewhere that sounds very far away, and when I finally turn my head toward him, he's got that look he gets when I go somewhere he can't follow, careful and unsurprised, like he's done this before. He probably has. I don't remember most of it when it happens."You good?" he asks, setting a fresh glass of water in front of me like it's an offering to something he doesn't fully understand."Fine," I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel, which is its own small victory. "Thought I saw someone.""A lot of people are here." He shrugs,
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-08-18
Chapter: THE BLUE NOTEWren's POVThe pain starts in my left hip the way it always does a low, patient ache that wakes up about an hour before I do, like it wants a head start. By the time I've pulled myself upright and swung my legs over the edge of the bed, it's already climbed all the way down to my knee, settling in for the night's work.I don't fight it anymore. Fighting it just makes it louder.I wrap my hand around the cane leaning against my nightstand plain, black, no decoration, because decoration invites questions and I stand. There's a rhythm to it now, after six years. Weight on the right. Cane forward. The left leg drags itself into line like it's still deciding whether it wants to cooperate tonight. Some nights it does. Some nights it makes me pay for every step between here and the door.Tonight, it lets me go easy. Small mercies.I don't look in the mirror on my way out. I know what's there, a woman who used to move like water and now moves like something being poured out of a cracked jug,
Terakhir Diperbarui: 2026-08-18
Masuk
