“Let them. Math never saved anyone in Villain.”
Two captains stepped forward—the loudest kind. Men who stirred up chaos and still believed they’d never be the ones bleeding on the floor for it.
They were all silent for a moment.
“You have our time. Do not waste it.” Nikolai spoke.
“The current arrangement isn’t suitable for us.” The first captain stood forward. “You don’t get to hold the monopoly anymore. You control too much. Streets. Ports. Casinos. Tech lanes. Weapons. Drugs. Everything flows through you.”
The second swept his arm at the others, needing a crowd at his back. “It’s suffocating the city. We’re losing money because of your chokehold. Bad business. We’re done with it. Tonight we take a vote.”
One of my brows lifted. “A vote.”
“On Crow dominance. We’re thirteen families. You’re six men.”
Luca went still.
Bastion’s knuckles cracked lazily at his sides.
Kingston shifted half a step, just enough to be closer to Nik’s shoulder, measuring exits, angles, which bones to break first.
White heat started climbing my ribs.
A rebellion.
On the night my boy came home.
I looked at them—guns, vehicles, their carefully arranged little plan. Maybe we really had been too generous.
“Thirteen families.” My gaze swept the ring. “And not a single one is smart.”
The crowd murmured. The captains puffed up more, mistaking patience for weakness.
“They think you can run everything alone.” The second captain’s voice rose, playing to the ring. “You can’t. This city’s tired of bowing. We’re done. Tonight we decide if Crow law still stands in Villain?—”
He was building to his moment when it happened. A hand moved in the crowd. A gun. The barrel came up and pressed against the side of Bastion’s head.
Everything inside my chest went very, very still.
Luca’s muscles locked, his whole body tightening with that mirrored panic only a twin could feel. Their formation never broke.
A gun at Bastion head was a gun at Lucas head. Something sick and deep twisted hard inside me. Failure.
I’d failed them. My boys. My sons. Because this should’ve never happened under my watch.
The syndicate man with the gun didn’t see brothers. He saw a tattooed Crow he thought he could put down and make a story out of.
I saw Bastion at five, both twins small and bone-thin, one on each side of me, curled tight into my chest that first week after we’d pulled them out of the cages. Their fingers locked across my chest. Too exhausted to cry, too scared to sleep alone. I saw myself at seventeen, arms around both of them, knuckles bleeding from breaking open locks with my bare hands, swearing I’d never let anyone cage them again.
Now someone had a gun to my boy’s head.
The air went quiet. The kind of silence all Crows recognised. Men at the edges shifted on their feet, instincts screaming even if their brains hadn’t caught up.
I stepped forward once.
“Lower the gun.”
The captain smirked and dug the barrel harder into Bastion’s skull.
