The pressurized cabin hummed around her, a sterile cocoon of recycled air and distant engine vibration.
A stewardess paused by her first-class seat, her smile professionally pleasant.
"Ma'am, please power down your devices for takeoff."
Aegates gave a single, shallow nod as her fingers pressed the key command to encrypt and send the final data packet to Gabriela before she powered off the laptop with a soft, definitive click of a button.
The screen went dark, reflecting her own impassive face for a moment before she closed the lid.
She turned her head toward the window. Her hazel-green eyes fixed on the concrete ribbon of the runway as it began to stream past, faster and faster, until the individual lights blurred into a single fleeing line.
Her gaze held the vacant, drilling intensity of a soldier scanning a mental battlefield.
She sat with a posture so straight and still it seemed woven from the aircraft's very frame—regal, effortless, a study in controlled tension.
The expensive drape of her tailored suit whispered of quiet authority.
She was aware of the glances from the men nearby—the businessman two rows up, the young executive across the aisle—their looks sliding toward her then quickly away, deterred by the sheer, silent force field of her focus.
Such attentions were irrelevant atmospheric noise. Her mind was a tactical map, lit with the cold, flickering lights of more pressing concerns: the shifting alliances of rival gangs, the predatory maneuvers of evil corpos, the things that moved in the city's forgotten arteries that could only be called monsters.
She blinked.
'Monsters.'
Her thoughts, unbidden, shifted to Rainer.
The memory was crystalline, viewed through a high-powered scope atop a radio tower: his figure, small and determined, walking toward the bar.
The world erupting in fire and sound, swallowing the bar whole. The shock of seeing his silhouette stumble out of the smoke minutes later.
The chase through the refinery's skeletal remains. The brutal, desperate fight with the werewolf—a creature of myth made violently, exhaustingly real.
She had watched, intending to measure the full extent of Rainer's mysterious power.
She had failed.
Her initial calculus had been clean, efficient: let the beast kill the unpredictable variable, then eliminate the beast. A clean, two-problem solution.
But Rainer had done… something.
A word, a gesture, an emission of pure, unclassified will that had sent the predator fleeing into the night.
The result was a third, more complex problem: a power she could not assess, wielded by a man she could not control.
An uncertainty she could not afford.
Yet, she had lowered her handgun.
She had let him live.
...There was a truth, heavy as cold stone in her gut.
The organization was still reeling.
Capo Breaker's death had not been a surgical cut; it had been a detonation. The shockwaves had rattled the very foundations of the GBG's internal structure, leaving fractures in chains of command and pools of anxious ambition.
The current organization was a wounded beast—fierce, but ill-prepared for the inter-city wide takeover she envisioned.
It needed time to heal, to restructure, to grow into something... more.
It needed soldiers. More Capos. More loyal, hardened flesh to fill the ranks her ambition required. That was her purpose for returning to Veridian Falls—to stand before the Don and the Consigliere and present the blueprint for the family's next, necessary evolution.
But in the interim, Greyhaven had to be held, though with limited resources.
With a beehive already kicked over at the docks, Capo Slick and Mr. Man would be all that's left to manage the spiraling consequences in her absence.
Her mind logically ran possible scenarios: The police, galvanized by the crime, could accelerate their crackdowns. Rival gangs could coalesce against them due to fear.
Even the corpos could act against them in the shadows—if Festus' information retrieved from Rainer's belongings wasn't proof enough.
'This would be a season of constant pressure.'
Aegates expression tightened.
The worst-case scenario, however unlikely, had to be accounted for: the formal involvement of a monster clan. Not a lone werewolf, but a coordinated assault by a group.
In their current state, that would be checkmate.
Every strategic instinct, every lesson in risk mitigation, screamed at her to eliminate the unknown factor. To tie up loose ends.
But she decided to gamble.
***
Rainer sat, held upright only by sheer, fraying will.
"Fun. Belief. Family. Subjugation."
The words. Cold. Cryptic. Utterly alien in their combination, a broken creed from a shattered mind.
"…Are these your final reply?"
Silence.
His exhausted gaze, stripped of all its performative fire, barely held onto hers.
She saw the consciousness draining from him, and her eyes tightened.
There were other questions she needed to ask, but the window was closing.
A sigh, almost inaudible, escaped her. And she raised her pistol, not at him, but beside his head then pulled the trigger.
*Ting!*
The round buried itself in the metal plate with a sharp shriek. But instead of jolting him alert, the sound was the final snip of the string.
Like a puppet cut loose, his head slumped forward.
Aegates' arm dropped to her side, and the weight of the weapon felt suddenly immense.
Her expression soon settled into one of pure, resigned acceptance.
***
She believed Arianna would have approved of her choice. No—she was certain. Even the Consigliere himself understood the value of a calculated gamble, of a weapon too dangerous to wield but too potent to discard.
Aegates drew in a slow breath, feeling the pressurized air of the cabin fill her lungs. It tasted artificial, lifeless.
Every fiber of her instinct screamed at her to stay. Greyhaven was a board in mid-play, and she was walking away from her pieces.
But the weight of her responsibilities—to the Don, to the Family, to the soldiers whose lives were ledger entries in her plans, pulled at her constantly.
Sometimes, like now, in the quiet hum of transit, when the pressure in her marrow pressed heavy. A chill would spawn deep within her soul, a cold so profound it made her feel numb, brittle, like glass under immense strain.
Sometimes, she imagined she could hear the cracks spreading.
Biting her lips, her gaze hardened into something unyielding.
She would do it. She would bear it all.
For the Organization. For the Family.
She only prayed the structure of her will—her mind, would not fracture before her designs were complete. And if it did…?
A final, unbidden thought, vulnerable and small, spiraled up from the depths she kept locked.
She sucked in another breath, this one shallower, as the plane's nose lifted and the world tilted away.
'Would he care?'
The question was a ghost in the machine of her mind.
'If I broke… would he even try to put my pieces back together?'
Her eyes tracked the vast, indifferent sky swallowing the horizon. And for a fleeting second, something raw and unguarded flickered behind them.
'Would you save me—Neo?'
—❦—
Deep in the southern highlands, in a place forgotten by maps, a dry cave exhaled a breath of ancient dust.
A single shaft of sunlight, piercing a crack in the world above, fell like a blade into the darkness. It illuminated a raised stone dais, and upon it, a metal box that gleamed with the cold, patient sheen of surgical silver.
But the light did not touch the surrounding gloom at the far edges.
Around, shapes lay slumped in the dust—men in shredded tactical gear, their bloodied forms strewn haphazardly under the glow.
Suddenly, from the deepest edge of the light, where illumination frayed into nothing, something massive shifted.
A scaled bulk, darker than the stone itself, slithered with a sound like grinding pebbles. There was a powerful, coiling tension, then a swift and a brutal tug.
Instantly, one of the bodies vanished into the darkness.
A moment of pure silence.
Then—the wet, percussive crunch of meat and bone succumbing to immense, grinding pressure.
A low, vibrational growl followed, so deep it seemed to tremble up from the earth's core, shaking fine dust from the cavern ceiling.
Soon, there. In the absolute dark beyond the silver box, a single eye slid open.
Luminous. Grey. Pupilless.
It did not blink.
It watched.