The basement stank of rust and wet stone, a sharp tang of blood hanging heavy in the damp air. A single bulb swung above the concrete chamber, its light weak and yellow, swaying slightly from the vibrations of footsteps overhead. Shadows stretched long across the floor where the fight had ended hours ago.
The assassin sat slumped against a steel pipe, wrists bound behind him with wire so tight it bit into his skin. His mask had been torn away, revealing a face smeared with blood, one eye swollen shut. His chest rose and fell in shallow bursts, but his gaze was still defiant, the defiance of a man trained not to fear death.
Arkellin stood before him, sleeves rolled, knuckles still streaked with red. His expression was carved from stone—no anger, no pity, only that cold steadiness that made even his own men fall silent when he entered a room.
The lieutenant hovered nearby, cigarette glowing in the dark. "Boss… we should hurry. He won't last long."
Arkellin ignored him. He crouched low, leveling his gaze with the assassin's, his voice low, unhurried. "Who sent you?"
The man spat blood onto the floor, lips curling faintly.
Arkellin didn't move. His tone sharpened only by a fraction, calm in a way that made the air colder. "You don't need to tell me everything. Just one name. One clue. That's all it takes for me to unravel the rest."
The assassin's breathing grew ragged. His good eye flickered—not fear, but calculation. He wet his cracked lips, then hissed between his teeth: "Council doesn't forgive failure."
Arkellin studied him, the line of his jaw tightening. A shard of silence cut between them.
Then the assassin smiled—a broken thing, jagged and red.
Arkellin's eyes narrowed. His hand twitched toward the man's jaw, too late. The assassin's teeth clamped down hard. A dull crack sounded, followed by the hiss of liquid breaking loose.
Foam blossomed at his lips. His body convulsed once, twice.
"No!" The lieutenant lunged forward, too late to pry his mouth open. The assassin's head lolled back against the pipe, eyes glassy, froth spilling down his chin.
The bulb swayed harder now, throwing light across the floor where blood and foam mixed into a grotesque stain.
Arkellin rose to his feet, silent. His men shifted nervously at the edges of the basement, muttering curses under their breath. The assassin's last words still hung in the air like smoke, heavier than any bullet.
Council doesn't forgive failure.
Arkellin wiped his hand slowly on a rag, his expression unchanged, but in the pit of his chest the certainty locked deeper: this was only the beginning.
The basement fell still after the assassin's body slumped lifeless against the pipe. The only sound was the buzz of the old bulb and the drip of water from a corroded pipe in the corner, each drop hitting the concrete with a hollow rhythm.
Arkellin stepped forward. He crouched again, but this time not to question. His hands, steady and deliberate, searched the body with the precision of someone who knew killers never came empty-handed.
The men around him shifted uneasily. Smoke from a dozen half-burned cigarettes curled toward the ceiling. One muttered, "He'd rather die than speak. That's Council discipline."
Arkellin ignored them. His fingers paused at the assassin's belt. He slid the sheath of a combat knife free, turning it over in the dim light. Something felt off—too heavy. He pressed his thumb along the inside seam.
A soft click.
The lining peeled back.
From within, he pulled a sliver of metal no bigger than his thumb—a drive, slick with blood and oil. The faint glow of an encrypted indicator blinked once, as if taunting him.
The room erupted.
"Boss, that's proof!"
"They sent one of their own, with data? They're mocking us."
"Enough talk. Let's burn their docks to ash. Show the city who rules its underworld!"
Fists slammed tables. Chairs screeched across the floor. Rage boiled in the smoke-filled chamber, the kind of fury that wanted fire, bullets, bodies in the streets.
Arkellin rose slowly, the drive pinched between his fingers. His shadow stretched across the wall, tall and cold. The noise grew louder, voices demanding blood.
Then his voice cut through, soft, sharp as a blade unsheathed.
"Not yet."
The men froze.
Arkellin turned, holding their eyes one by one. His face was unreadable, carved from something harder than stone. "A king doesn't shout. He waits until silence falls. Only then does the blade move."
The silence that followed was heavy, suffocating. The men lowered their eyes. The rage didn't vanish, but it bent—forced to heel before the weight of his authority.
Arkellin slipped the drive into his pocket, wiped his bloodied hands on the rag hanging at his side, and looked back at the lifeless body.
"Clean this up," he ordered. "No trace. No sound. Not even a whisper."
And with that, he walked up the stairs, boots echoing against the iron steps, the blinking drive tucked close to him like a secret the Council never wanted him to see.
Morning in Aurelia broke sharp and fast, sunlight bouncing off mirrored skyscrapers and flooding the streets with a glare that made the night's violence feel almost unreal. But the city never forgot what it saw. And this time, it saw too much.
Screens across downtown flickered with fresh headlines.
"CLOCK CORP UNDER SHADOW?"
"Heiress Empire Linked to Underworld Killings."
The front pages bled with a single photo: a grainy shot of one of the dead assassins, half his mask torn away, his features blurred but close enough—close enough to resemble a junior staffer from Clock Corp's logistics division. The caption below twisted the knife: "Evidence ties assassin to corporate payroll."
Inside the upper floors of Clock Tower, Mira sat rigid behind her glass desk. The sleek lines of her office reflected her image back at her, fractured into a dozen shards. Her tablet trembled faintly where her fingers gripped it, the headline bright across the screen.
"It's fabricated," she said, more to herself than anyone else. "It has to be. Council planted this."
Across the room, Myra sprawled in a chair, still wearing the smirk of someone who used humor to hide her nerves. She scrolled her own phone, lips curling. "Fabricated or not, sis, it's working. They've got everyone whispering that you hired killers on the side. Honestly…" She tossed the phone onto the table, the screen still glowing with comments. "It's almost clever."
Mira's eyes flashed up. "This isn't funny."
"I'm not laughing." Myra's smile slipped, her tone quieter now. "I'm just saying—we're not fighting gossip anymore. They're dragging our name into the blood."
Behind the frosted glass of the office doors, the hum of staff voices was louder than usual. Snatches of gossip bled through: "…looked just like Daniel from logistics…" "…if the heiresses are tangled with the underworld…" "…stocks will tumble again…"
Mira's jaw tightened. Every instinct she had screamed to storm into the boardroom, to hold a press conference, to put out the flames with her iron voice. But the doubt had already sunk into her veins. This wasn't something she could smother with a speech.
And Myra—playful, reckless Myra—wasn't smirking anymore. She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, eyes serious in a way Mira rarely saw. "If they can make us look guilty with one photo, imagine what else they can spin."
Mira lowered her tablet onto the desk, the glass surface catching the reflection of the headline: Blood on Glass. Her reflection stared back at her, eyes shadowed, lips pressed tight.
For the first time, she understood that Council's war wasn't just knives in alleys. It was cameras. Screens. Words turned into weapons sharper than steel.
And for the first time, Mira Clock wondered if the empire her family built could survive both.
The safehouse was quiet again, too quiet. The floor above still reeked of bleach and blood, the kind of stench that clung to skin no matter how hard a man scrubbed. The shutters rattled faintly in the wind, and the city's neon glow leaked through the slats, painting fractured red lines across the concrete walls.
Arkellin sat alone in the war room. The map of Aurelia still lay on the table, its corners stained dark where assassins had bled across it. But his eyes weren't on the map now. They were on the sliver of metal in his palm—the drive pried from the dead assassin's knife sheath.
It blinked. A single, patient pulse of light.
He set it into the laptop, the hum of the machine rising in the silence. The screen flickered, lines of encrypted code dancing like static, too fast for ordinary eyes to catch. Arkellin leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, gaze steady.
A logo burned briefly across the dark screen. A jagged "C," stylized, fractured like glass. Then a message appeared, stark in white:
"You can't protect them. Not from us."
Arkellin's jaw tightened. His reflection glowed faintly in the laptop's black bezel—eyes sharp, hair streaked white catching the neon, a man carved by war.
Behind him, the room seemed larger than it was, shadows stretching like ghosts. He could almost hear their intent in the silence: the Council didn't need to kill him outright. They only had to break everything he stood on.
His empire.
His name.
The two women upstairs in the villa he swore to shield.
His fingers drummed once on the table before he shut the laptop, the sound echoing like a gunshot in the empty room.
"They're not trying to kill me," he said into the dark, voice low, iron-bound. "They're trying to burn everything I protect."
The drive kept blinking, even after the laptop closed, a heartbeat of its own. A reminder.
And Arkellin, silent, stared at it with the cold certainty that this was only the beginning.