Lahat ng Kabanata ng OWNED BY THE DEVIL: Kabanata 41 - Kabanata 44

Elara: First Person POVMarkets don’t begin with gunfire.They begin with invitations.That was the first thing Dominic said after the purchase orders were confirmed and the room cleared. His tone wasn’t dramatic; just precise, like he was reciting physics instead of strategy. The kind of truth that didn’t need emphasis because it always proved itself eventually.We relocated within the safe house to a quieter operations wing, fewer people, thicker walls, signal-controlled airspace. It felt less like a bunker and more like a vault. Appropriate, considering someone had just tried to buy the world around us.I sat across from him at a narrow steel table, reviewing the spread map again. Influence nodes. Communication exchanges. Quiet takeovers. No explosions. No assassinations. Just ownership shifting like tectonic plates.“They’re not loud,” I said.“They don’t need to be,” Dominic replied. “Noise is inefficient.”“And you’ve crossed them before.”“Yes.”“And lived.”“Barely,” he said;

Trust doesn’t collapse all at once.It thins first, like ice under invisible heat. You still walk on it. You still believe it will hold. And then one step lands wrong, and everything gives way beneath you.The internal breach changed the air inside the safe house. Not panic, Dominic never allowed panic, but compression. Voices lowered. Movements sharpened. Every access request became suspect. Every familiar process felt newly fragile.Someone inside one of our protected channels had sold routing metadata. Not operational plans. Not identities. But pathways, how information moved, where it paused, who touched it.In the wrong hands, pathways are more valuable than payload.“Show me the leak geometry again,” I said.We were in the strategy glass, a sealed analytics room wrapped in smart-surface displays. Dominic stood beside me, jacket off, sleeves rolled, posture relaxed but charged, like a blade resting flat.I expanded the network lattice and replayed the breach cascade. Three hops.