Malakai's POV
Night came the way it always did in this city.
Not gently.
It crept in along the rooftops first, swallowing the last of the grey from the sky and pulling the warmth out of the streets with it. Then it pooled in the alleys. Then it climbed the windows of the high buildings one floor at a time until even the glass towers looked like teeth in the dark.
By the time I left the house, the world had gone the right kind of black.
The kind I worked best in.
I rode in the back of the car with my elbow against the door and my eyes on the window, watching the city slide past in streaks of dull gold and wet asphalt. It had rained earlier. Not enough to clean anything. Just enough to make the streets shine like they had something to hide.
I kept thinking about Kiera. And wanted ti go hame quick to be with her. The thought of her almost make me laugh but I had to pull it together.
Tiger sat across from me.
He had not spoken since we left the house.
That was unusual for him. That alone told me he already knew what kind of night this was going to be.
He was dressed the way he dressed when work got serious. Dark coat. Dark shirt. None of the usual color, none of the usual flash. Even his rings were gone. When Tiger stripped himself of decoration, it meant he expected to put his hands in something he did not want to wear home.
He finally broke the silence somewhere near the bridge.
"You've got that face on."
"What face?"
"The one you wore the night we found Tomas in the basement."
I did not answer.
He gave a low sound that was almost a laugh, but not quite.
"That's what I thought."
The car turned off the main road and slid into the older part of the city, where the streetlights stopped being decorative and started being broken. Buildings here leaned closer together. The neon got cheaper. The people on the corners stopped looking up when cars passed, because looking up in this part of town was the kind of habit that got you remembered.
We were headed to a warehouse on the river.
That was where the second name lived.
The first name was already taken care of. He had been pulled out of his apartment two hours ago by men who knew how to do it quietly. He was waiting for me now in a room he was never going to walk out of.
But the second name was the one I wanted first.
The second name was the one who had reached.
The warehouse was exactly what a warehouse on the river always was. Wet concrete. Rust on the doors. A flickering light above a side entrance that buzzed faintly like a dying insect. Two of my men stood near the door without moving, hands folded in front of them, faces blank.
They straightened when they saw me.
I did not speak to them.
I walked past.
Tiger fell into step behind me.
Inside, the air smelled the way warehouses always smelled — old water, old metal, old things that had been left to rot because nobody had any reason to care. A single bulb burned in the high ceiling, casting a circle of dirty yellow light onto the concrete floor.
And in the center of that circle, tied to a chair, was a man named Vincent.
He had been Castellan's second.
He had been mine, too.
That was the part I was here about.
He lifted his head when he heard my footsteps. His face was already swollen on one side. Not badly. Just enough to remind him that the conversation had begun before I arrived. One of his eyes was darkening. A thin line of blood traced down from the corner of his mouth.
He saw me and his whole body went still.
That was the right reaction.
The wrong reaction would have been begging.
The wrong reaction would have been talking.
He did neither.
He just looked at me with that long, hollow stare men got when they realized the door behind them had closed and was not going to open again.
I stopped a few feet from the chair.
I did not raise my voice.
I did not need to.
"Vincent."
"Mr. Blackwood."
"Do you know why you're here."
His throat moved. "I have an idea."
"Tell me what the idea is."
He held my eyes for a moment. He had been with me long enough to know that lying would only buy him more pain, not less. He had also been with me long enough to know that telling the truth too quickly was its own kind of insult.
He chose somewhere in the middle.
"The shipment?"
"The shipment."
"I—" He swallowed. "I didn't take it."
"I know you didn't take it."
He blinked.
"I took the call," he said carefully. "From the other side. I took the call. I didn't move the shipment. I didn't open any doors. I just— I took the call."
I let the silence sit on him for a second.
"Who called?"
His eyes dropped.
That was always the moment. The pause before a name. The breath a man took when he understood that the name he was about to say was going to outlive him, and his job from this point forward was to make sure it did not outlive him for very long.
He gave me the name.
It was not a surprise. Romano.
I had already suspected. But suspicion and confirmation were two different tools, and I needed the second one for what came next.
I nodded once.
"Anything else you want to tell me, Vincent."
He looked up at me.
For a moment, I saw something in his face that surprised me. Not fear. Not even regret. Just exhaustion. The deep, settled kind. The kind that came from a man who had spent years pretending he was someone he was not, and had finally been caught, and was almost relieved by the catching.
"No, sir."
"All right."
I turned to Tiger
"Make it clean," I said.
Tiger nodded once.
I walked out before the sound came.
That was the only mercy in any of this. Not for him. For me. I had stopped needing to watch a long time ago. The watching was for younger men, men who had not yet decided what they were. I had decided.
The door closed behind me.
The night swallowed the rest.
In the car, on the way to the next address, I sat with my hand resting along the window and my eyes on nothing.
The second name lived in a quieter neighborhood. The kind of neighborhood that pretended it had nothing to do with people like me. Tree-lined street. Low fences. Cars parked nose to nose along the curb. The lights in most of the windows were already off.
That was good.
I did not want an audience.
Tiger got into the car at the corner, two minutes behind me. He slid into the seat across from mine and shut the door without a sound.
"Done?" I asked.
"Done."
"Clean?"
"Clean."
I nodded.
He looked at me for a moment.
"You're somewhere else tonight," he said.
"I'm here."
"You're here," he agreed. "But you're also somewhere else."
I did not answer.
He did not push. He never did, on these nights. He understood the difference between teasing me in at work and prying at me in a car on the way to a second house.
But he watched me a second longer than usual.
Then he said, quietly, "Whatever she's doing to you, boss, just— be careful."
I turned my head and looked at him.
He did not flinch.
"I am being careful," I said.
He let out a slow breath through his nose.
"No, you're not," he said. "But that's not the same thing as being stupid. So I'll allow it. Some staff have talked about her. She seems nice. But I'll be the judge of that when I meet her"
"Hmmm". Was all I replied with.
The car turned the corner.
The second house came into view.
I let the conversation die there.
The second name did not go quietly.
He never would have. He was not the kind of man who had built himself out of careful work. He was the kind of man who had built himself out of other people's careful work, then convinced himself he had done the building. Men like that always thought they were owed something. Men like that always thought, when the moment came, that they could talk their way out of it.
He tried.
He talked for almost a full minute before he understood that no one was listening.
When he understood, his face changed.
I had seen that exact change a hundred times. The moment a man stopped believing his own voice could save him. The moment the room got very, very quiet inside his own head.
I let him have that moment.
It was the only honest moment a man like him had ever had in his life.
Then I closed it.
Tiger waited in the doorway with his hands in his coat pockets, looking at the ceiling as if it had personally offended him.
When it was done, he stepped forward without being asked and helped me move what needed to be moved. He did not speak. Neither did I. We had done this so many times that the choreography had become its own language. A look. A nod. A small gesture toward a door.
By the time we left the house, the night had moved to that strange hour where it was no longer late and not yet early — the dead, blue stretch where even the city seemed to be holding its breath.
We got back into the car.
The driver pulled away.
The street stayed quiet behind us.
For a long time, neither of us spoke.
Then Tiger said, "Two down."
"Two down."
"There's a third."
"I know."
"Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow."
He nodded.
We rode in silence again for a while.
Then, without looking at me, he said:
"You know, if you'd told me a year ago you'd be the one going quiet on a night like this, I would have laughed in your face."
I did not look at him either.
"I'm not going quiet."
"You're going somewhere," he said. "Quiet's just what it looks like from the outside."
I let the comment sit.
He was right. I would not say so out loud.
I watched the city pass.
Somewhere in one of those buildings, a girl was asleep in a room I had given her. Or maybe not asleep. Maybe lying awake with her fingers twisted into the blanket, listening for the sound of a car in the drive. Maybe sitting on the edge of the bed the way she had been sitting when I left her, with that small, tired weight in her shoulders that I had not been able to lift off her tonight before I walked out the door.
I did not know.
I would not know until I got home.
That, more than anything that had happened in either of those two rooms tonight, was the thing that bothered me.
I had spent my whole adult life knowing exactly where every important thing in my world was at every moment of the day. The shipments. The men. The money. The enemies. I had built a life out of knowing.
And tonight, there was one room in my own house whose contents I could not account for from a distance, and it was the only room I actually wanted to know about.
That was new.
That was dangerous.
That was the thing Tiger had seen on my face in the back of the car.
The driver took the long way home.
I had asked for that without realizing I was asking for it. I needed the extra minutes. Not to think. The thinking was already done. To bury.
You did not bring this kind of night into a house with a sleeping girl in it.
You left it on the road.
You left it in the alleys you drove through.
You left it in the second house, and the first one, and the warehouse by the river, and the part of yourself that was made for those places. By the time the gates of the estate came into view, the man who had walked into Vincent's warehouse three hours earlier was already gone.
What stepped out of the car when we pulled into the drive was something cleaner.
Not clean.
Cleaner.
That was the most any of us could ever offer the people we were trying not to ruin.
Tiger got out with me.
He did not follow me into the house.
He clapped me once on the shoulder — brief, almost brotherly — and turned toward the second car waiting at the edge of the drive.
"Get some sleep," he said.
"You too."
" I never sleep. But i appreciate." He smiled faintly and walked away.
I stood in the drive for a moment after his car pulled out, looking up at the house.
Most of the windows were dark.
One was not.
Hers.
The lamp on her side of the room was still on. I could see the faint warm glow through the curtains, soft and unmoving. She had either fallen asleep with it on, or she was still awake, or she had left it on for some other reason I was not going to know until I went inside.
I stood there for a longer moment than I should have.
Then I walked up the steps.
The house was quiet.
I made my way through it the way I always did at this hour. The staff knew not to be in the halls when I came home from these kinds of nights. The lights were low. The doors were closed. The whole place felt like it was breathing carefully around me.
I climbed the stairs.
At the top, I paused.
Her door was closed.
The strip of warm light underneath it was still there.
I stood at the end of the hall for what was probably too long. I told myself I was simply checking. Habit. The same way I checked sightlines in every room I entered. The same way I read silences. Nothing more.
I almost believed it.
Then I made myself walk past her door, down the hall, and into my own room.
I shut the door behind me.
I know I promised to see her when I'm back. I will. But I need to shower first.
I peeled off the dark coat. The dark shirt. The watch. The whole shape of the night, piece by piece, until what was left was just a man standing in the middle of his own bedroom at three in morning completely nude.
I looked at my empty bed and unto the side where I don't usually lay.
The empty side that, last night, had not been empty.
I stood there for a long time then went to the shower
I let the freezing cold water fall down my body from my hair, to my chest , to my abs, to my dick then my legs. My hand grazed against the place that was stitched. It felt like I felt her fingers there. Carefully trying to heal me.
Why am I so obsessed?
My hands ran down to my dick which was half erect. I started stroking it gently from the shaft to the tip . Pleasure hit my body and groans started coming out. I increased the pace on my now fully erect cock.
Faster....Faster..
I had her on my mind.
The redness of her lips, her soft features, her long brown her, her petite and curvy body.
My balls quickly tightened. I'm close. Really close.
I am big. Really big. About 12 inches. And as thick and a fist. Something I'm really proud of but no one got to see. Even the random hookups I fuck.
I fuck and go. No touching, no playing with it and definitely no sucking it.
I increased my pace feeling really close to my release.
I rarely have sexual encounters. I'm a man of pride. I have a great body and I honour it by keeping to myself and not whoring myself around. Unlike most people my age and older who get pride in increasing their body count, I take pride in abstaining from it but when I do give in, I make sure the girls are satisfied and literally beg for more.
So this is something I never thought I would do because of a girl. What is so special about her that k making me go out of my way?
The hug. Her warmth. She smile.
The way she was curled into me last night while sound asleep. The little sounds she made while adjusting.
Finally, the feeling of her ass unconsciously grinding and grazing on me last night. That was it.
Her name rolled out off my tongue
"Kiera...."
I came....violently. Hot cum shooting everywhere. On the walls, the floor, my thighs. Everywhere.
A mess created by a predator who just found out he is obsessed with his prey.
I cleaned up and left the bathroom. I put on a shirt and some shorts then sat on my bed a bit....
This girl is really starting to fuck with my mind.
I rubbed a hand slowly down my face.
"What are you doing to me," I murmured into the dark.
The dark did not answer.
It never did.
After a while, I stood again. Walked to the window. Pushed the curtain aside half an inch with two fingers, the way I had done in her room earlier. Old habit. I checked sightlines in every room I entered. I always had.
Below, the drive was empty.
Above, the sky was beginning to lose its blackness at the edges.
Somewhere down the hall, behind a closed door with a warm strip of light still glowing underneath it, a girl I had no business caring about this much was either sleeping or pretending to.
I left my room and went straight to hers.
She was asleep. Obviously. The rise and fall of her chest as she was peaceful tangled with the blanket. Peaceful. Innocent.
I walked over quietly and laid on the bed. I was right beside her.
She was wearing a silk night gown which had slid up pass her inner thigh and was on her hip . She laid on her side and I saw the slight scar on her hip. It was the one she had broken.
Anger flared through my nostrils. The audacity of them to something so terrible to a soul so pure.
I adjusted myself a bit trying in anyway possible not to wake her up.
Suddenly, warm arms wrapped around me and was adjusting the body to be closer.
" You're back..." She said with an angelic sleepy voice.
I ran my fingers through her hair hair and smiled a bit as she rested her head on my chest. I wrapped one arm around her waist while the other was behind my head giving me a better positioning.
" Yes Mishka. I'm back." I said then she gave a slight smile before falling back down into her dream world.
It felt like the world revolved around this moment.
Apart from Bridget, I had never wanted to keep someone comfortable. Especially to this point where I am like her life sized pillow.
But Bridget is my sister. This is totally different.
I looked her button nose and few freckles around it. She truly was a work of art.
I switched off the lamp and just laid down with her warm small body on mine.
I didn't want to think of work . Or finding traitors or paying Romano a surprise bloody visit tomorrow.
I wanted to think about things to do to make her happy. To help wipe away the pain of the things she had gone through in the past. Make her feel safe and comfortable.
This is how my supposed collateral is slowly becoming the center of my world.
And this guys....is the beginning of our story.