The lift hummed down. My stomach dropped with it.
Two weeks.
32
Vince
Villain didn’t belong to the men with the sovereign crests on their lapels. The syndicate boys who thought a block of docks and a handful of guns made them kings. They were decorative monsters.
The city was Crow.
Steel, glass, water rights, tunnels, ports, every artery that mattered ran through our hands. Judges, club owners, freight bosses, pretty heirs playing gangster in custom tailoring…didn’t matter. In the end, they all answered to the same thing.
Us.
They just liked to forget it.
My job was to remind them. And to make sure my brothers learned how to do the same, hands on, where it was ugly enough to be honest.
The tunnels were best for that. Down here it was concrete, pipes, and consequences. Villain stripped to bone and nerve.
It always put everyone else on the back foot.
Bastion, Rome, and Luca were a year out from the Academy. Still, I insisted one of them shadowed me. Villain was home to beasts, in boardrooms and in alleys, and I needed my brothersto see exactly how you break those beasts. How far you had to push before fear turned into obedience.
One day, I wouldn’t be here.
When that day came, I wanted the city to already know the truth: it didn’t matter which Crow walked into the room.
Villain would remain Crow.
Rome whistled something tuneless, hands in his pockets like we were out for a stroll instead of heading toward a meeting that might end with someone face-down on the floor.
“You know,” he said, glancing at the rusted pipes overhead, “we really should get Nik to put some mood lighting down here. Bit of neon. Maybe a bar.”
I stepped over a broken pallet. “You want atmospheric violence now.”
“I want my workplace to reflect the brand.”
“The brand iswe own you. The tunnels already convey that.”
He smirked. “You’re very poetic tonight, Lord of Villain.”
Lord of Villain. They’d called me that with varying degrees of respect and resentment since I was eighteen and started making decisions that cost people real money. I’d never cared what they called me, as long as they remembered one thing.
It was our city.
Crow city. Crow tunnels. Crow sky.
Anybody who forgot that ended up down here.
We turned a corner. Two of our men stood by the steel hatch ahead, guns visible. Behind them, through the small wired glass panel, I could see the glow of fluorescent light and the vague shapes of men at a table.
Rome rolled his shoulders. He nodded to the guards. They stepped aside and pulled the hatch open.
Get this the fuck over with so I could call Madeline.
Noise spilled out—low voices, a nervous laugh cut short, the scrape of a chair leg. The space beyond was one of our oldstorage rooms, long since emptied and gutted. Bare concrete walls. One heavy table bolted to the floor. No windows. One door. One camera in the corner, disguised as a dead bulb.
