Night laid itself thick across the city, swallowing the rusted docks and fractured streets in black velvet. The kind of night where every shadow looked like a knife waiting to cut, where even the stars hid themselves as if unwilling to witness what the city was about to become. Elias moved like fire through the dark. His team was small, efficient—men who didn’t ask questions, only lit fuses and watched the world burn. Their boots whispered against the cracked asphalt as they fanned out across Pier 9, skeletal cranes looming overhead like rusted gallows. The salty tang of the sea clung to the air, laced with the sharp sting of gasoline. He paused, pulling a matchbook from his pocket, his teeth holding his cigarette steady as he struck a flame. The flare painted his scarred face in orange light before he tossed it down. Gasoline trails hissed alive, orange tongues racing across the ground. Within seconds, the first warehouse caught. Then another. Then another. The flames were greedy,
Marek had never been a man who relied on faith. Not in loyalty, not in family, and certainly not in mercy. Faith was a luxury, and luxuries were for men who could afford to sleep without one eye open. Marek hadn’t known sleep like that since he was a boy. Since long before Darius plucked him from the gutter and shaped him into a blade. Since before he learned that trust was just another kind of bullet—it always found your back. As he sat in the back of the black sedan tearing through the industrial outskirts, the city’s dawn still bleeding faint red across the horizon, he knew two things with bone-deep certainty: Lucian D’Argento would not stop hunting him, and Serrano would not open his gates without payment. But Marek had prepared for this. The fool who thought he could betray Lucian and buy favor with him had already been useful. A young intel rat, pale and desperate, who had been feeding Lucian scraps of Marek’s routes, hoping to buy himself a longer life. The kind of coward w
The taste of victory still lingered in the air.Smoke and whiskey clung to the penthouse walls, laughter echoing from men who only hours ago had stood ankle-deep in blood. Bottles were raised, voices cracked with relief, and for once, the war room resembled something dangerously close to home.The long table, once covered in maps and bloodied blueprints, was scattered now with glasses and ashtrays. Men leaned back in chairs with their boots propped up, smoke curling from cigars, the tension of weeks finally loosening from their shoulders. For the first time in too long, relief cut through the air like a fragile kind of grace.But Lucian didn’t drink.He sat in his chair at the head of the table, dark eyes watching his soldiers as though he could already see the next storm crawling over the horizon. His hand tapped once, twice against his glass, but he didn’t lift it. He wasn’t built to linger in triumph. Victory, to Lucian D’Argento, was nothing more than another rung on the ladder to
The day came too fast. It slipped past like air—one moment Marco was drowning in the memory of Isabella’s bruised face, the next he was staring at the calendar, realizing that tomorrow wasn’t “soon.” It was now. The eve of blood. Night had fallen heavy over the city, cloaking the penthouse in shadows and steel. The skyline gleamed through rain-streaked glass, but the atmosphere inside was harder than concrete. Lucian’s men moved with precision in the war room—steel boards scattered with maps, red circles drawn over Darius’s empire like wounds on flesh. Ayla cut through hesitation like a blade, her voice cool and sharp, while Elias barked orders as though the earth itself bowed to discipline. Every man drilled, polished, prepared. Everyone was locked in their roles. Everyone but Marco. His chest was a battlefield. His loyalty weighed against blood, Lucian’s trust against Isabella’s life. He could feel his pulse in his fingertips as if his very veins screamed with indecision. He s
Morning crept in, pale and unkind. The storm had broken, but its echo still lingered—puddles scattered across the streets, air heavy with damp, and clouds hanging low as if the city itself hadn’t yet exhaled. Inside the penthouse, there was no pause, no rest. Lucian drove his men harder than ever. The sound of boots striking the warehouse floor below rattled up through the steel beams. Gunfire echoed in timed bursts from the shooting range, each one met with Elias’s barked corrections. The lieutenants drilled until their muscles screamed, sweat slicking their backs as they sparred, ran simulations, and studied maps with feverish attention. “Two days,” Lucian had said at dawn, voice like iron. “Two days until Darius bleeds. Train like it’s your last breath.” And they did. Ayla stood beside him through it all, her sharp eyes never missing a gap, a weakness, a hesitation. She moved through the war room like a commander carved in glass, recalculating routes, marking red circles where
The storm had been building all night, and by the time it broke, the skies above the city seemed to bleed thunder. Rain hammered against the glass walls of the penthouse, a relentless percussion that drowned out the hum of traffic far below. The penthouse itself had been transformed. Not into a home, not into a sanctuary—but into a war room.Maps stretched across the long oak table, heavy with the weight of pins and ink. Files lay in messy towers, some marked in red, others circled and dog-eared with Ayla’s scrawled notes. A corkboard dominated the far wall, strung with red lines that connected photographs, names, and ledgers in a web so intricate it looked almost alive. At the center were three names, circled in black: Darius. Marek. Serrano.Lucian stood at the head of the table, his jacket discarded across the back of his chair. His sleeves were rolled to his forearms, veins standing out beneath the skin as his hand pressed down on the table. His presence filled the room, steady an