He looked up.
“If my son is hurt,” I said evenly, “there will be nothing left of this city they can recognize.”
Petros inclined his head. He understood.
This had stopped being a hunt.
Now it was a war.
And whoever had taken my son had just signed their own death warrant.
The California underworld was a five-headed hydra—ancient families with modern weapons, each head snapping at the others while feeding from the same poisoned streams.
They fought over fentanyl corridors that ran from Mexican ports to suburban cul-de-sacs, over casino skims laundered through tribal land and shell charities, over human cargo routes that moved desperate bodies as easily as produce.
Power shifted weekly here, alliances forming and dissolving with the speed of wildfire.
The Thompsons and the Vasquezes had recently become the loudest names among the five most powerful underworld families in California.
Old money and new brutality, stitched together by ambition.
Rumors had circulated for months about a marriage alliance—one carefully staged union meant to merge their armies and finally crush the three smaller, fractured families who refused to kneel.
In their world, weddings were never about romance. They were treaties disguised in lace and champagne, contracts written in rings and bloodlines.
A bride was collateral. A groom was leverage.
The Thompsons and Vasquezes believed the union would give them the numbers to wipe the board clean.
They were wrong.
My arrival had shattered their calculations.
They saw me and made the same mistake men always did.
They saw the Greek king—the man who had dismantled entire syndicates across Europe, who controlled ports, shipping lanes, and silence—and assumed I’d come to carve out a sixth throne on American soil. They mistook proximity for ambition.
The probes started immediately.
Drive-bys near my temporary properties.
Shipments tipped off to customs.
Anonymous threats left where I’d be sure to find them—burner phones buzzing once before dying, envelopes slid under doors, bodies placed just carefully enough to make a point without starting a war.
I ignored all of it.
California was not my soil.
I ran no business here. No drugs. No guns. No extortion.
I didn’t touch their markets, didn’t poach their contacts, didn’t even correct their misinformation.
My men were instructed to be ghosts—no noise, no blood, no footprint. My only interest was vengeance, and war would only slow me down.
Until today.
Until they touched my son.
