Chapter 31 - Family Ties

The following morning Jaxon decided to make a little visit over at the Morreau estate.

"I'm going to see my mother," he informed Raven, "wait for me at the club, I'll see you there soon."

He left with a mission in mind.

The gravel crunched beneath Jaxon’s shoes like bones. The Morreau estate loomed ahead, an expanse of manicured grounds hiding rot under velvet. It was the kind of place that whispered wealth and screamed silence. No cameras. No guards at the front gate. But Jaxon knew better. His mother didn’t need surveillance when she owned the monsters outright.

The door opened before he could knock.

“Jaxon,” the butler said with a slight bow. “Your mother is expecting you.”

Of course she was.

He walked past him without a word, through the marble corridors that smelled of roses and decay. Every painting, every chandelier, was another mask over blood. He remembered hiding under the mahogany piano as a boy, listening to deals whispered behind champagne. He remembered the ice in his mother’s voice when she told Zane to stop crying. “Morreau men do not weep,” she had said. “They conquer.”

He stepped into the drawing room and found her at the window, sipping tea like she hadn’t funded hell itself.

“Tell me you’re not here to moralize,” she said without turning around. “I only indulge sentiment when there’s champagne involved.”

“I’m here for Zane,” he said, voice flat. “Cut him off.”

She turned slowly. Her silver hair was coiled like a crown, her face as ageless as stone. “Why would I do that?”

“Because he’s trafficking girls, laundering millions through charities and he’s burning everything the family built.”

Her lips curled faintly. “No, darling. He’s preserving it.”

Jaxon stepped forward, fists clenched. “You know what he’s doing?!"

“I know exactly what he’s doing,” she replied coldly. “And I know what you’re doing, too. Playing savior to that little reporter. How quaint.”

He went still. “Leave Raven out of this.”

“She’s already in it.” Her voice sharpened. “You think I haven’t had her background checked? Raven Knight, daughter of a washed-up addict, brother dead from an overdose, mother vanished. No college. No family. A ghost with a pretty face. And you brought her here. Into our bloodline.”

Jaxon’s nails bit into his palms. “Don’t talk about her like that.”

“She’s a liability,” his mother snapped. “She’ll bring everything down. She already has. Zane is flawed, yes, but he’s predictable. You? You let a whore with a typewriter unmake you.”

The word landed like a slap. Jaxon’s jaw twitched.

“She’s ten times the human either of your sons ever became,” he said. “And she’s the only reason I haven’t walked away from all this.”

Her smile was cold. “You don’t walk away from a dynasty. You either lead it… or die trying.”

There it was. The truth.

“This isn’t about legacy anymore,” he said. “It’s about rot.”

She sipped her tea. “We don’t clean rot, Jaxon. We polish it.”

He turned to go. “Zane will fall. With or without you.”

“You burn him,” she said softly, “and you burn yourself.”

He paused at the door. “Then I guess I’ll see you in the fire.”

Back at the war room, Raven hunched over a laptop, her fingers flying across the keyboard. The newest intel she’d traced led to a freight shipment flagged for customs clearance out of Dover, but the digital trail stank, charity seal, diplomatic escort, no listed contents. Too clean.

She cross-checked the charity name with Zane’s list of dummy nonprofits.

“Got you,” she whispered.

A shipment scheduled for tomorrow. She pinged the IP address linked to the manifest and traced it to a Morreau holding company in Brussels.

She texted Jaxon: Shipment. Dover. Diplomatic cover. I’ll send the route.

His reply was immediate: Not yet. Eyes on you. Don’t move until I say.

Raven closed her eyes. Her stomach twisted, not from fear, but from the weight of what she was doing. Every step they took brought them closer to something irreversible. She could feel it in her skin.

She got up, moving to the bathroom, and stared at herself in the mirror. Her reflection didn’t look like a journalist anymore. Not even a woman. Just war in human form.

The bruises from their last desperate night were fading along her inner thighs. Her wrists bore faint red lines from old bindings. Jaxon had touched her like she was glass and fire, and she hadn’t known which would shatter first, her or the world they were building.

She rinsed her face and returned to her laptop. She opened the exposé draft she hadn’t shown Jaxon yet. Paragraph after paragraph, each bleeding with facts, witness accounts, the ledger’s coded transactions, all of it ready to detonate, but she hesitated on the save button.

She wasn’t ready to end it yet. Not until she knew whether Jaxon was still hers.

The war was coming fast, but love, real love, was slower and far more dangerous.

Hours later, the door opened quietly behind her. She didn’t turn.

“Did she know?” Raven asked.

Jaxon’s voice was like gravel. “She’s the architect.”

She looked back, eyes wide. “She sanctioned it?”

“She funds it,” he said, stepping into the room. “Justifies it. Says it's for legacy.”

Raven’s mouth went dry. “And what do you say?”

He stared at the board. “I say if we’re going to end this…”

He looked at her, dark eyes unreadable. “…we have to burn it all.”

Raven sat beside Jaxon in the dim light of the war room, the glow of monitors flickering over maps, documents, and her pale face. His words still echoed between them.

“We have to burn it all.”

Not just Zane. Not just the mother who treated blood like currency, but everything tied to the Morreau name, the clubs, the shell charities, the money pipelines that ran like veins beneath cities. If they went through with this, there’d be no going back.

Jaxon traced a red line on the digital map, highlighting the freight’s projected path from the Dover dockyards to a secure storage facility in Marseille.

“If it moves through France with diplomatic clearance,” he muttered, “we lose jurisdiction, even black-market.”

Raven nodded. “I can intercept the truck before the tunnel. We just need the exact timing.”

“You’re not going alone,” he snapped, voice sharp.

Her eyes met his, a slow-burning defiance in them. “I know how to disappear better than you do. You’d set off every alarm from London to Paris.”

He exhaled, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You’re not disposable, Raven.”

“I never was,” she said quietly. “But I’m not breakable either.”

He studied her like he was memorizing her shape. Then, with a grim nod, he handed her a burner phone and an encrypted USB.

“Take this. If anything happens, if you even get a sense someone’s onto you, you call. No hero shit.”

Raven’s hand wrapped around the phone, but her fingers lingered on his. “And what will you be doing?”

“Calling in every favor I have left. Blackmail, threats, IOUs. Doesn’t matter. If they want war—” his voice darkened, “—then they’ll remember why I used to win.”

The night air outside Dover reeked of salt and diesel. Raven wore a courier’s uniform with false credentials and a forged manifest chip sewn into her vest. She walked with practiced ease toward the parked truck she’d tracked for days.

The driver was distracted, arguing on his phone in French. She passed behind him and slid under the trailer chassis. One wire clipped. A second rewired. GPS rerouted. When the truck moved again, it would be heading into a warehouse Jaxon owned, not Marseille.

She dropped down silently and walked away, adrenaline humming.

But someone was watching.

Meanwhile, Jaxon met with an old contact at an abandoned boxing gym in South London. Domenico Rossi. One of the last real fixers from the old syndicate days.

“You’re out of your fucking mind,” Dom said, arms crossed. “Taking down your own family? Your mother?”

“She’s not my mother anymore,” Jaxon replied. “She’s an institution, and institutions can be dismantled.”

Dom handed him a packet: names, routes, and private server locations. “This is everything I have, but once you do this, you’re not Don Morreau anymore.”

Jaxon smiled coldly. “That’s the point.”

Back in the temporary war room, Raven’s phone buzzed. The shipment was en route, heading toward their trap. She allowed herself a breath.

But something felt off.

She checked the tracker, only one vehicle. No chase, no escort. Too clean.

Her phone buzzed again. A message from an untraceable number: You’re too late, little dove. She’s already gone.

Raven froze then instantly called Jaxon. “We have a problem. Zane’s moved something. Or someone.”

“Talia?” he asked, already turning for the door.

“Yes.”

The silence that followed was razor-edged.

Jaxon’s voice was steel. “Then we escalate.”

They met hours later in a private apartment above Club Eden. The place was stripped down, minimalist, a far cry from Jaxon’s usual curated elegance. It felt like a bunker.

Raven paced, phone clenched tight. “She was our one link,” she muttered. “We had a chance to get her out, get her to testify.”

“She’s not dead,” Jaxon cut in. “Zane needs leverage. He wants to hold her over me like a blade.”

Raven turned to him. “Then what do we do?”

He walked toward her slowly, tension in every line of his body. “We hit the Morreau name in the one place it can’t survive, public scrutiny.”

“You’re serious?” she breathed.

“I want you to finish it,” he said. “Your exposé. All of it. Every name, every crime. The charities, the clubs, my mother, me.”

She blinked. “You’d let me print it?”

His voice was low. “I’d help you write it.”

Raven’s throat tightened. “They’ll come for you. You’ll lose everything.”

He stepped closer, fingers brushing her jaw. “I already lost my soul. If I can give you yours back… that’s enough.”

Her lips parted, but no words came. He kissed her like it was the end of the world. No finesse, no seduction, just raw need and the taste of inevitability.

When they broke apart, he whispered against her skin, “We do this together. We finish it. Or we fall trying.”

The next morning, Jaxon stood before a fire pit in the safehouse garden, holding a silver-plated Morreau crest, a family emblem passed down for generations. Behind him, Raven clutched a hard drive containing the full exposé draft.

He looked at her. “Last chance.”

“No,” she said. “First choice.”

He dropped the crest into the flames. She followed, dropping the drive in after it. It hissed and melted. Together, they watched it burn, but their plan had changed. The real copy, encrypted and fragmented, was already on servers worldwide.

The fire wasn’t for destruction. It was for rebirth.