Angelo's POV
The warehouse felt like a tomb, the air heavy with the metallic tang of blood and the scent of damp concrete. But all I could see was Jay.
She was huddled in the corner, a small, broken figure silhouetted against the grime of the industrial walls. When I reached for her, she didn't see her brother—the man who had spent his life acting as her shield. She saw another threat.
"Stay back! Don't touch me!"
Her scream didn't just echo; it shattered something foundational inside me. My hands, which had stayed steady through firefights and boardroom coups, began to tremble. I had to pin her arms—not out of malice, but to keep her from tearing at her own skin in her terror. As I pulled her shaking frame against my chest, the raw, jagged vibration of her sobbing bled into my own skin.
Beside me, Percy was a ghost. The boy who always joke, the strategist who could outthink anyone, was reduced to a shell. He didn't say a word, but the silent, hot tears tracking through the dust on his face spoke of a guilt that would never truly heal.
And Aries—Aries was leaning against a rusted pillar, his good arm clutching his stomach as if he'd been disemboweled. He wasn't just crying; he was mourning the version of Jay that had walked out of the house that morning.
"Jay, it's me. I've got you," I whispered, my voice thick with a sob I refused to let break.
When she finally went limp, her eyes rolling back into a trauma-induced sleep, the silence that followed was more terrifying than the violence.
I scooped her up—she felt so light, so fragile, like a collection of bird bones held together by blood-stained silk. I looked at the wreckage of Mykle and his thugs. They weren't just beaten; they were dismantled.
"Section E," I said, my voice dropping into a register of cold, absolute murder. "Clean this up. Don't let them die yet. I want them to be awake when I decide what their lives are worth."
Cin's POV
The hospital room was a sterile, blinding white that made my head throb. I woke up to the rhythmic hiss-click of a ventilator and the steady, haunting beep of a heart monitor.
"You're awake."
I turned my head. Angelo was sitting there. He looked like a king who had lost his kingdom—haggard, his eyes bloodshot and fixed on the girl in the bed next to mine.
Jay looked like a porcelain doll that had been dropped and glued back together.
"What happened, Cin? Every detail. I need to know what broke her."
I swallowed hard, the memory of the warehouse rushing back like a nightmare I couldn't wake up from. "She... she came for me, Angelo. She didn't hesitate. But when Mykle hit her... when she saw her own blood hitting the floor... it was like a light went out in her eyes and a furnace turned on."
I shuddered, the cold of that warehouse seeping back into my bones. "She didn't move like a person. She moved like a machine programmed for one thing: destruction. There was no mercy, Angelo. No hesitation. She was terrified while she was doing it—I could see it in her eyes—but her body just... it became a weapon. She didn't stop until there was nothing left to hit."
Angelo's jaw tightened so hard I thought his teeth might shatter. He didn't look away from her. The silence in the room was heavy with the realization that the "Jay" we knew was now sharing space with something much darker.
Keifer's POV
The boardroom in London was silent as the executives waited for my closing remarks. But I couldn't speak. A cold, oily sensation was pooling in my gut, a physical weight that told me something was fundamentally wrong.
My chest felt tight. An uneasy, vibrating dread was crawling up my spine. It was the same instinct that had saved my life a dozen times in business and in the streets—the feeling that the one thing that mattered most was in danger.
I pulled out my phone. Nothing. Percy didn't answer. Aries didn't answer. My calls to the Section E leads went straight to voicemail.
Something is wrong.
I stood up abruptly, the legs of my chair screeching against the marble. "Meeting adjourned."
"Mr. Watson? We haven't finished the—"
"I said, adjourned," I snarled, already dialing Edrix.
He picked up on the third ring. His voice was shaking. "Keifer... it's Jay. She's in the hospital. The industrial district... Mykle. It was a massacre.
"Cancel everything," I said to honey as I walked toward the elevators. "The next two days. Clear my schedule. Get the private jet ready for Philippines. Now."
As I marched through the airport, the "CEO voice" I used to command thousands was gone, replaced by the raw, primitive snarl of a man who had just realized his heart was bleeding out on a hospital bed thousands of miles away.
Mykle wouldn't just be looking at a lawsuit. He'd be looking at the end of his world.
I'm coming, Jay. Just hold onn name had protected me for years, but in that moment, I felt a primitive, raw terror.
I looked down at my phone. My last message to Jay sat there.My hand shook as I dialed Angelo. It took four rings—four eternities that aged me a decade.
"Angelo," I breathed, the word coming out as a ragged prayer. "Tell me she's okay."
There was a long, hollow silence on the other end, broken only by the clinical, rhythmic beep of a heart monitor. When Angelo finally spoke, his voice was a ghost of the brother I knew. It was cold, jagged, and dripping with a grief so heavy I could feel it through the line.
"She's breathing, Keifer," Angelo rasped. "But she isn't here."
"What does that mean?" I snarled, my voice cracking as I leaned against the cold glass of the terminal window. "What happened to her?"
"Mykle," Angelo spat the name like it was poison. "He lured her into a warehouse in the industrial district. He used Cin as bait. Keifer... they did things to her. They hit her until she snapped. By the time we got there, she had... she had dismantled them. There was blood everywhere. Her blood, their blood... it was a massacre."
I felt the world tilt. My knees hit the floor of the airport lounge. The image of Jay—my Jay—forced to turn into a creature of violence just to survive made me want to rip the stars out of the sky.
"She didn't recognize us," Angelo's voice broke then, a small, choked sob escaping him. "She screamed at us to stay back. She looked at Percy like he was a demon. She's in a trauma-induced coma now. The doctors say it's her brain's way of hiding from what happened."
When I heard that I remembered the scene with Ram that time also she didn't recognise me first."Angelo , I'm coming back.Nobody knows about it except you. I told my men they are searching for MYkle ",I told him in a formed voice.
"Don't let them kill him , Keifer.I want to teach that bastard a lesson for what he did to my sister ", Angelo said to me anger visible in his voice.
I ended the phone.You dare to touch my jay MYkle be ready to face the consequences