Richard Lansing did not rise to power by being careless. Pain had taught him precision, loss had taught him cruelty. Davina's strikes, though sharp, were only scratching the surface of an empire carved in blood and fear.
So he bled back.
The first strike came at dusk. A hospice burned in the outskirts—one of Houna's safe points, ash and smoke rising like an omen. The fire didn't kill Houna, but it maimed the network she built over decades. The second strike was quieter: three loyalists to Gina's bloodline vanished without a trace, their bodies found floating by dawn.
And then came the worst blow.
Richard's men snatched Davina's closest friend from the academy where she had trained in secret. A note was left in Davina's locker, written in Richard's own hand:
"War is never won by orphans."
Davina stood over the note, her chest tight, her brother pacing like a caged animal behind her. He was only fifteen, still learning to sharpen his edges, but the rage in his eyes mirrored hers.
"We go for him now," he spat. "We don't wait."
Davina's fingers curled against the paper until it tore. She wanted nothing more than to storm the Lansing fortress, to carve her father's name into Richard's bones. But even as her heart thundered, her mother's voice rang inside her skull:
"A storm without control destroys even itself."
She swallowed hard. Her father's death had awakened something primal in her—something that craved vengeance at any cost. But what of her brother? What if he drowned in this same rage before he ever became a man?
Davina leaned close to him, gripping his shoulders. "Listen to me. If we fight like him, we become him. Do you understand?"
Her brother's jaw trembled. "Then how do we win?"
Davina's eyes, black pools of fury and fire, fixed on the city beyond the safehouse window. "We strike smart. We strike where it hurts. And when the time is right… we don't just kill Richard Lansing."
She exhaled slowly, a vow cutting deeper than any blade.
"We erase his name from history.
But even as she planned, Richard's shadow grew long. He had eyes everywhere, and each move Davina made was already being watched.
The storm was here—but the Don was ready to meet it head on.
Davina had learned patience from Gina, ruthlessness from Houna, and fire from her father's blood. Now, she carried all three like weapons hidden beneath her skin.
Richard Lansing thought he had rattled her with his note, that he had cornered her with fear. Instead, he had given her clarity. Revenge would not be served with fire alone—it would be a chess game, one slow move at a time.
The first piece she took was financial.
One of Lansing's shell companies, an arm that fed his trafficking routes, collapsed overnight. Accounts frozen, assets exposed to authorities Davina had quietly bribed. It was a surgical strike, masked as bureaucracy. The newspapers called it "a routine investigation." Richard's accountants knew better.
The second piece she moved was human.
A trusted lieutenant of Lansing woke up one morning to find his family gone—spirited out of the country under Davina's command. Days later, he defected to her side, whispering secrets he had guarded for decades. With every word, Davina peeled another layer from Lansing's armor.
The third was personal.
Davina sent him a package. Inside: a single white chess queen, painted in streaks of crimson. No note. No message. Just the quiet, suffocating reminder that the game was already underway, and she was not a pawn.
Her brother trained by her side, his hands blistered from combat drills, his eyes too old for his years. She worried about him—worried he was slipping too fast into shadows he could not yet navigate—but she also knew he was her blood. Together, they were their father's unfinished story.
Late at night, she lay awake, whispering his name to the silence.
"For you, Dad. For every breath they stole from you."
And somewhere, in the mansion Richard Lansing now kept fortified like a fortress, the old Don nursed his wounds, his paranoia sharpening. He knew he was being bled, but not by whom. His son's death still haunted him, his empire was fracturing, and for the first time in decades… he felt hunted.
Davina smiled in the dark. The storm had only begun to gather.