All Chapters of The Night Boss: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The Rules:The First ImpressionThe Boss Shop didn’t look like much from the outside.Rico had thought that the first night he stumbled in — bruised knuckles, blood crusted on his lip, nothing to his name but a lighter and a half-crushed cigarette.A rusted sign, a faded paint and a narrow lot squeezed between two forgotten warehouses. Neon letters spelling out CAR WASH — half of them flickering, one permanently dead. It could’ve been any rundown business on the center of the city.That was the point.Nobody looked twice. Nobody lingered. Nobody cared.But inside?Inside, it was a different world.From the main floor, it looked legitimate. Bays lined up in perfect order, hoses coiled neatly, soap buckets stacked against the wall. The air smelled of motor oil and citrus cleaner. Cars came in dirty and left gleaming.To a stranger, it was just another 24-hour wash.But Rico had been here long enough now to notice the patterns.The extra cameras angled away from the public. The hallways

Before RicoThe Boss had seen them all.The runners, the fighters. The ones who bent the knee at the first meal, and the ones who stayed wild until hunger broke them.He knew their types — the ones who laughed too loud, the ones who cried when they thought no one could hear. The ones who clung to him like a father, and the ones who tried to stab him in his sleep.They all blurred together after a while.Until him, the stubborn one.He hadn’t been looking for another boy that night. He’d been there for business — a debt to collect at the back end of a pawn shop on 7th Street. Rain slicked the sidewalks, neon bleeding into puddles.Then he saw him.A fight spilling out of the alley. Three men, older, heavier, cornering someone smaller.A boy — thin but fast, fists like lightning, eyes wild as broken glass.Rico.Rico didn’t fight like the others.He didn’t flail and he didn’t panic.He waited for openings. Took hits he didn’t have to take because they set up the ones he needed to land.

By sunrise the following morning, the city was already buzzing.Headlines bled across every paper in the newsstands:“The Man Behind the Glass: Inside the City’s Most Mysterious Car Wash.”“From Streets to Empire — The Boss Speaks.”“Loyalty or Control? The Truth About the Boys at The Boss's Shop.”Some articles were measured, painting him as a rough-edged savior rescuing forgotten kids. Others were sensational, hinting at darker things — loyalty bought with fear, boys bound by invisible chains, rumors of secrets locked behind one-way glass.For those who’d never heard of the shop, curiosity flared. For those who had… suspicion deepened.By midmorning, the shop’s name wasn’t just whispered in back alleys. It was trending. Talk radio debated him. Social feeds lit up with speculation. Even city officials issued vague statements about “looking into conditions.”The fortress he’d built on silence was now trending with noise.The boys were restless.Ty had a newspaper folded under his arm,

Rico didn’t sleep that night.He stayed in his bunk, staring at the water-stained ceiling until the shadows started moving like living things. The hum of the generator outside droned on, but his thoughts were louder — pounding, insistent, like a drumbeat he couldn’t silence.He had been naïve, stupid even. He thought “the Boss” was just a name, a man with influence and control over a tight crew. He thought the shady meetings, the late-night phone calls, the odd deliveries were just part of the underworld glamour he’d stumbled into.But now he knew.He’d seen the papers in the office — the ones left half-covered under a ledger when the Boss walked out to take a call. He’d heard the recordings on the flash drive Marco had “accidentally” left plugged into the desktop, like bait. Names. Dates. Cargo lists. Payments. Some in cash, some in blood.And the picture that formed in his head wasn’t a man running a business. It was a man running an empire of shadows — drugs in containers marked as

The rain came down in heavy sheets that night, hammering the tin roof of Boss’s Spot until the sound drowned out the clatter of tools in the shop below. The wet asphalt and motor oil drifted up the stairwell, and Rico stood at the top, staring out the half-open window.The city was blurred by the rain, all its corners softened. But even through the haze, he could see the streets he used to run, the alleys where he’d learned to disappear before anyone could catch him. The place he had sworn to never look back on — now pulling at him like an open wound.He lit a cigarette, the smoke curling lazy, the way his memories never did. They came fast, without warning.It wasn’t the first boss he’d worked under. And it wasn’t the first time he’d been told that loyalty was the only currency that mattered.Six years ago…He was twelve when Kross found him — a man with golden teeth, long fingers, and a laugh that could slice open a room. Kross didn’t run a shop; he ran a crew of boys who knew how t