The elevator ride up to the War Room felt longer than the flight.
Glass. Steel. The soft hum of the tower’s heart. Below us, Villain glowed like a circuit board—ports lit, casinos pulsing, Aureum strip burning blue-white against the dark. The same city we’d bled for, killed for, rebuilt.
The doors slid open.
The first thing I saw was the jet. Not a real one. A hologram, hovering above the war table—sleek, silver, rotating slowly on its axis. Flight paths arced around it in pale blue lines. Altitude stats hovered in the air. Tail number: Aurelio Marcellus’ private aircraft. Highlighted in Crow red.
The second thing I saw was Vince.
He stood at the end of the table, shirt sleeves rolled. There was a coffee cup on its side bleeding onto a stack of manifests, one cigarette still burning in the ashtray, another dead and flattened under his thumb like he’d put it out too hard. Faint sighs of white lines. My brother was pushing himself to stay sharp.
He didn’t look up when the elevator chimed.
“—we don’t need the whole wing gone,” he was saying, voice low and steady in the way that meant he was anything but. “Just enough structural damage on ascent. Force the pilot to call in an emergency and dump it over water. Engines flame out, bird drops, everyone screams, some of them live if they swim fast enough.”
He tapped a section of the jet’s projection. A red overlay flickered along the undercarriage.
“And then,” he continued, “we hire a salvage crew to strip the wreck. I take a piece of the fuselage, mount it over my office fireplace as a reminder not to let anyone touch what’s mine again.”
I stared at him for two full seconds.
“Absolutely the fuck not.”
His head snapped up.
Dark eyes. Bloodshot. Too bright. I’d seen that look on soldiers who’d been awake three days.
“Nik.” He exhaled, as if he’d ordered me like a drink and I’d just arrived. “Good. You’re here. Look at this.”
“No,” I walked in. “On principle.”
He frowned. “You don’t even know what I’m proposing yet.”
“I heard ‘drop a sovereign heir’s jet into the ocean and hang a trophy on my wall.’ That was enough.”
“It’s not a sovereign heir,” he snapped. “It’s Aurelio Marcellus.”
“Same difference. Dead enough to start a war either way.”
He stabbed his finger through the hologram, enlarging a cross-section. “Who said anything about dead? We don’t need a fireball. Just a break. Engine failure. Fuel leak. I don’t care. I want him terrified. I want him thinking the air hates him.”
“The air,” I repeated.
“Yes.” He pointed at a glowing coordinate. “Here. Over deep water. I don’t want debris washing ashore with his fucking crest on it.”
“You want to drop a man’s plane into the ocean because he put a ring on your girl’s finger. Not even his fault, by the way.”
His jaw worked. “Don’t call him ‘her man.’”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I said ‘he put a ring on her finger.’ There’s a difference.”
“It’s not happening. She’s not marrying him.”
“Then put away the crash simulation.”
“No.”
He said it with the flat, immovable tone that had scared grown men since he was seventeen.
