William Lex Webb shut the door behind him and the world reduced down to a number—one man's vision in a glass box. He told his lieutenants to wait in the antechamber; they remained where power demanded them: outside and obedient. He alone would drink the thought undiluted.
Outside, the city stitched itself awake like a wound stitched badly: blurred commuters, drones like flies over the river, the slow, viscous workings of a state that had not yet learned how to die politely. Inside the office, William walked its length like a monarch inspecting a realm he had always known belonged to him. The skyline spread; below it, the old institutions—ministries, parliaments, charities—sat like sleeping animals. He smiled the slow smile of men who have learned how to hide hunger beneath charm.
He realized the limits of his previous ambitions the way a sculptor realizes the whole marble block. Money, products, devices—these had been toys. They had bought influence, newsroom clout, favors at the edges of law. They had won things that tasted sweet and brief. But he wanted more than purchase or praise. He wanted shape. He wanted to remold the city into a machine that bent to him.
A king, he decided, could not merely own. A king made people kneel willingly.
He called the brothers in. The three men—Salvatore, Diego, Rafael—stood like newly sworn officers of a religion whose god wore business suits. William's voice, when it came, had been tuned for auditorium magnetism.
"Gentlemen," he said, "we have spent riches bribing tables and quieting tongues. That was phase one. Phase two is reclamation. We will forge a new order—one where mercy is a flaw, not a virtue. We start in London."
Rafael's brow tightened. "How? The city is not ours to take with money alone."
William had anticipated the question. He unfolded a plan like a ceremonial map: rhetoric, spectacle, systems.
"No more Sangre de Luna," he said. "Not at first. We will not rely on poison for belief. We will offer purpose. We will craft a narrative of decay: that the government squandered the peace after the Avalum war; that parliament failed them; that the borders have been bled dry for elites. We will be the clean hands. We will give them work, security, a future. Then we will give them the means to hold it."
Diego's mouth opened. "Are you suggesting a militia? A movement like—" He hesitated at the word, and William did not let him finish.
"Not a blind movement," William corrected. "A structured force. Private, efficient, and, above all, legitimized. We will build an army with contracts, uniforms, and a payroll. We will fund it through shell companies, charitable institutions, delivery contracts. We will seed it with veterans, with disaffected youth, with men and women who want a chance at dignity. We will use technology—Crescent OS, Ynkeos hardware—to tie loyalty into identity. A device that promises them order will also bind them to us."
Salvatore's eyes narrowed. "And public opinion? Won't they know we push it?"
William's lips thinned into a smile that had warmth only in recordings. "We control the stage. We will call a press conference. We will show up not as monsters but as saviors: a technology that reconnects the lost, jobs for the unemployed, security for the frightened. We will make the war look unnecessary and the government incompetent. The people are already fed up—the war took their sons, their money, their calm. We give them an enemy who can be removed by our hands. We give them purpose."
He tapped the screen. "Crescent OS becomes our hymn. Its early rollouts will be framed as benevolent: emergency services connected, neighborhoods linked with live safety feeds, 'You are never alone.' But the OS will also carry the architecture for loyalty: verification, microloans, points for community service. Points translate to rations, housing, status. We will naturalize obedience into reward. When hunger comes—and hunger does come—those who obey us will be fed. Those who do not will be allowed to become inconvenient history."
Diego made a face. "You're proposing a marketplace for loyalty."
"I'm proposing a polity," William corrected. "And once you control the polity's incentives, you stop needing stars to favor you. You make stars irrelevant because people will choose you."
Rafael's voice was quieter than William had expected. "And Sangre? The brothers asked about it."
William smiled thinly. "Sangre's place is later. When you need zealotry, when you need converts who will perform the last acts of faith unasked, we will refine it. But first the rhetorical conquest. Then the infrastructure. Then we feed devotion with a taste of transcendence."
He saw belief not as a mystery but as a lever. He kissed his ring—an old habit that was also an invocation—and sent them out. The brothers left to do what men in his position had always done: warm the engines of fear and coincidence, arrange the right leaks, the right deaths, the right scandals.
---
The press conference came as clean as a knife. William stood under a white halo and spoke about renewal. He spoke of jobs, of sovereignty, of ending wasteful war. He spoke about a "return to greatness," about "clean streets and honest leadership." Cameras drank his every syllable. The crowd that gathered outside the hall roared like an animal learning to love its cage.
Alexia watched with Marc as William unfolded a country's fairy tale. She turned from the screen, unsettled. "Is he one of them?" she asked, the phrase sounding small and inadequate for the man on stage.
Marc did not answer immediately. The television filled the room with William's easy cadence; Marc felt every pitch as if it were being used to measure him. "He started the undoing," he said finally. "He's the axis under a wheel we didn't see. His rhetoric will work because people are tired. They are looking for a shepherd who will give them back the thing they lost: stability."
Howard burst through the door like a thunderclap. He had been at the Ministry trying to hold a thread of protocol together; now he looked like a scientist who'd seen the equation tip.
"What do we do now?" he demanded. "He's painting himself as the man who can fix everything. He'll get recruits. He'll have contracts. He'll be legal before we have a chance to stop him."
Marc said, "Calm down."
"Calm down?" Howard laughed, brittle. "You walked into a press conference and watched a king being crowned live. He will decommission dissent under the code of law. He'll buy police loyalty with bonuses and the charity network with seed funds. You think a city with a thousand tents of discontent won't flock to him?"
Howard paced, restless. He turned on Marc like a jury confronting a defendant. "You're too soft. You play the long game, but the long game is a luxury. He's already moving his pawns. You keep waiting for some cosmic reset." His voice grew sharper. "You have power and you don't use it. Why not strike now before he squarely places the first legal brick of his throne?"
Marc thought of the limiter at his neck, the god inside him who had cautioned and bound; he thought of Alexia's face tuned with a fear that hugged him at the waist like a child; he thought of the tube with the devoured and the price he'd paid ripping graft from a man who had called himself blessed. He felt the pull between Howard's hard, practical urgency and the small, fragile human world he'd built with Alexia.
"He's building a state with human appetites," Marc said slowly. "He's not just creating an army. He's creating consent—manufactured, but consent nonetheless. If we move too soon and all we have is wrath, we become his mirror image. If we wait, he grows institutions." He looked at Howard. "I hate waiting."
Howard's hands went to his hair. "I know. But waiting is how we get plans. If we strike him now—without support, without understanding how Crescent OS ties the economy, the social points, the surveillance—he will outmaneuver us. He will turn our violence into justification for his anger. He'll call us terrorists and he'll have the law and his devices to prove it."
Alexia crossed the room then, grounding the two men with something steadier than rhetoric. "We need to be pragmatic," she said. "We need to protect people first. That means building coalitions. Not just waiting for stars or throwing punches." Her gaze found Marc with a quiet insistence. "And it means you don't become what you say you want to stop."
Marc's chest contracted. The man who had ripped a graft from a body and smashed it into stone had already chosen violence once. He had felt the god's limit on him like a chain and had broken free enough to finish a sentence of justice. Howard demanded leverage; Alexia demanded humanity.
So Marc weighed the law of gods and the law of love like two knives in his palm.
"We build," he said at last. "Howard and I will build a different infrastructure. He will work on the Aetherian tech—reclaim what we can, reverse engineer what we must. Alexia will do what she does best—teach, connect people. We will build the counter-incentives. We will make sure people who join the Crescent movement for food or housing have options that do not pass through William's systems. We will expose prototypes of Crescent OS, prove its surveillance hooks, and give people the tools to stay off-grid."
Howard's breath came in quick hope and terror. "You mean a counter-OS? A mesh network? Offline solutions? We can—" He stopped, thinking of the mountain ahead.
"Yes," Marc said. "We do that. But we also prepare for the moment when we must strike. Then we strike surgically. Not for vengeance. For removal."
He turned to Alexia, who stood like a harbor. "If I do this, if I go further—if I vanish for months—will you stay?"
Her hand found his. "I'll stay," she said. "But don't make me hold the story you can't bear to tell."
He wanted to promise her everything and found he could not. The city outside already leaned in William's direction. The press conference was a beginning, a seed in a ground already thirsty.
Howard looked between them, fierce and frightened. "Fine. We build. We prepare. But if he moves a single piece that kills people, we take him down before the law bends around him."
Marc nodded. "Agreed."
Outside, William's recorded voice drifted into millions of living rooms: "We will rebuild. We will be strong. We will be safe." People clapped for the idea of safety like it was a hymn. The machine of consent whirred to life.
Inside the cottage, the three of them—one mortal, one hybrid, one demigod—began the slow work of being what the city would need if it were ever to be free again. The war for the soul of London had moved from ritual and blood into the daylight of politics and platforms. And the hardest fights were no longer always fought with fists and teeth; they were fought with code, with stories, with who people chose at morning's light.