Part 1: The First Pig Falls (first person: Damian).
Setting: The Lantern Club
The novel begins not with the brothers, but with the city, dripping and neon-saturated dystopia where even the air is taxed. We move in to the world of Damian: the edited mess of his club, The Lantern Room. We find him at his home, flattering a venal magistrate with words, and at the same time telling a bartender to stop short a drunkard lieutenant. He is a trafficker of prohibited melody, yet music is tearing. His grin is crunchy, he perspires through his velvet jacket. The rumors about this are already going: The Wolf in the city.
It is not some covert invasion. It's a statement. Viktor Draaven does not creep inside the club; he comes in a stolen garbage truck and rolls it through the club right through the doors. This chaos that follows is the one in which we find the Breathworks at work. The Puff breathing of Damian calms his hand as he pulls a concealed pistol, but as a sycundicate enforcer Damian owes a debt attempts to take advantage of the fray, Damian loses control. He Huffs--a quick shallow gasp--and his gestures turn into a smear of shattered glass and paroxymnias. It's effective, but it's wild. It leaves him gasping.
This expression brings the Wolf nearly to laughter because he breaks the security of Damian with cruel, economical gestures. He is not simply fighting he is dismantling. He breaks a coolant pipe, filling the dance floor with suffocation vapor of freezing. He does not kill Damian as soon as possible. Instead, he methodically dismantles the club the bar, the safe, the secret ledger room he literally rips down the house Damian constructed. Sharp and gasping, Damian calls in a desperate encrypted line- to his eldest brother, Declan. It concludes with the Wolf finally giving himself up to Damian, under the painted balaclava a jagged smile can be seen, and then the lights in the club flicker and go out.