Four days had passed since Alen Royale’s funeral, but the city hadn’t stopped whispering. Ministers, magnates, and gangland brokers traded condolences in daylight and sharpened knives at night. The Vigilante Clan’s name still bent rooms to silence, yet the air felt thinner—like power itself had taken a breath and held it.
Just past midnight, a convoy of sleek black vehicles tore through an industrial district where the streetlights hummed like tired insects. In the back of a bulletproof limousine sat Owen Royale. Seven years old. Spine straight. Hands folded in his lap. The glow of the dash drew small pools of light over his pale face and pitch-black eyes.
The lead car vanished in a white-orange bloom.
Metal screamed, tires shrieked, and shrapnel rained like hail. The limousine lurched; the driver’s voice snapped, “Hold on, young master!” Bullets sparked against the armored doors. A sniper’s round webbed the window inches from Owen’s cheek. Another escort car fishtailed into a barrier—its driver slumped forward, crimson sprayed across the windshield.
Men in dark fatigues and masks flowed from alleys, methodical, professional. They moved to the rear doors with hydraulic cutters and crowbars, hands steady despite the gun thunder.
Inside, Owen’s fingers tightened once. His face stayed unreadable. The copper-salt scent of blood—his guards’ blood—thickened the air.
This was inevitable.
He did not cry.
The street answered with different shadows.
They came soundlessly—figures in matte black, gliding at impossible angles, the glint of short blades and suppressed muzzles like brief sparks in a storm. The first attacker staggered away from his own rifle, throat opened without a sound. The second dropped with a neat, dark dot centered between the eyes. The rest turned and fired wild; the new arrivals were already elsewhere—behind them, beside them, ending them.
It was finished in less than a minute.
The limousine door opened. A broad-shouldered man with old scars and colder eyes filled the frame. No mask. He never wore one.
“Master Owen,” John said, voice low and iron-steady. “It’s safe now.”
Owen stepped out. Glass crunched under small shoes. Bodies lay like discarded tools—guards and gunmen, friend and foe—the road painted red in broken arcs.
John went to one knee so their eyes met level. “No one touches you while I breathe.”
Owen’s lips trembled, once. He said nothing. John’s gloved hand rested—careful, anchoring—on the boy’s shoulder.
“Home,” John said. “Now.”
The night peeled back, and memory took him.
Three days earlier.
The villa had never been that quiet. No servants. No guards. Just a hush that made his footsteps echo too loudly across marble. Owen’s fingers brushed the wall as he walked the long corridor—steadying, counting the breaths between each step.
A door at the end stood slightly ajar. Warm lamplight spilled out, golden at the edges, but it did not feel warm.
Inside, Thanos Royale waited in a velvet chair, a leather belt looped in his hand. He rose, taller than the room, his face set in that familiar contemptuous calm—the look of a man who mistook stubbornness for strength and ignorance for righteousness.
“Come here.”
Owen stopped three paces away.
“Closer.”
He obeyed.
The belt cracked against the marble like a gunshot. He flinched, then stilled.
“You know why you’re here,” Thanos said, the words scraped raw. “Don’t lie to me.”
Owen shook his head.
“You do know,” his father hissed, stepping close enough that the cologne turned sour in the boy’s throat. “Deep down you know. Your brother is dead. You will take his place. Or you will follow him.”
The belt came down. Leather, air, flesh—each strike a bright burst of pain that tried to push a sound out of him. He bit his lip until he tasted iron and swallowed the sound whole.
“You will not shame this family,” Thanos said between blows, eyes glittering with a zealot’s certainty. “You will earn our name. You will be a man.”
“Y-yes, Father,” Owen whispered.
From the sliver of space at the doorframe, Norma watched. Her hand covered her mouth; tears traced clean lines down a face trained never to show weakness. Daughter of a lineage older and heavier than Thanos dared admit, she had been the bridge that turned his swagger into authority—seventy percent of his power borrowed from her blood and the network that came with it. And yet, here, she was a queen locked in a chessboard she didn’t arrange. When the belt fell again, she pressed her forehead to the wood and closed her eyes.
“Survive what’s coming,” Thanos said at last, breath rough. “Or don’t come back.”
The lamplight trembled on the belt’s edge.
The present folded around him again: cold air; smoke; sirens far off. By the time they reached the estate, dawn hovered gray over the city, catching on the ironwork of the gates. The Royale compound felt less like a home and more like a citadel—cameras like unblinking eyes, guards posted in still pairs, gravel raked with military neatness. Inside, the silence had changed. It wasn’t emptiness now. It was held breath.
Word had spread. The Vigilante Clan still ruled the largest province, but rival syndicates were meeting in back rooms, testing the edges; minor clans sniffed at alliances; the land mafia’s lieutenants weighed whether Thanos’s fury masked new weakness. Newspapers spoke of tragedy. The streets spoke of opportunity.
Aliza was waiting in the foyer—sixteen, composed on the surface, fear moving under her skin like a second pulse. She didn’t ask questions. She slipped her arm around Owen and led him upstairs, past portraits of ancestors who stared like judges.
In the bathroom, steam coiled above a drawn bath. Lavender drifted in the air.
“You’re safe,” she said softly. “You’re home.”
Dried blood clung to his hair, his cheek, the cuffs of his shirt. She undressed him with brisk, careful hands and knelt to wash away the red, speaking in the low, ordinary voice of routine—temperature, where it stung, whether he could lift his arm—giving him normalcy to hold onto. She stayed clothed, sleeves rolled, hair pinned back, the way a nurse turns ritual into shelter.
When she saw his gaze go glassy, she pressed a warm towel to his shoulder and eased him to sit, then wrapped him and guided him to the bench by the window. The sky was paling, colorless.
“Is this…” His voice was barely there. “Is this the price I have to pay?”
Her jaw tightened. “You did nothing to deserve—”
He cut across her, a whisper flat with exhaustion. “Do I deserve this?”
The silence stretched.
Outside, a crow beat its wings against the morning.
His fingers curled into fists. “Fine,” Owen said, not to her but to the emptiness between one life and the next. “Then I’ll pay. I’ll pay everything. I’ll survive. I’ll rule. No matter what he throws at me.”
The words hung in the tiled air, colder than the glass.
Aliza’s breath hitched. Not from disbelief—she believed him—but from the chill that came with understanding what such a vow would cost a child.
He did not sleep that day. When his body tried to fall, his mind brought him back to the flash of muzzle fire, the belt’s arc, Alen’s silent face behind his eyes. At dusk he rose and stood at the window, a small figure in a too-large room, watching the city light itself one building at a time.
Below, John took his place in the courtyard. Rifle slung. Earpiece half-hidden. He had once been tied to the clan out of obligation, but his oath now traced further back: to Norma’s father—Owen’s maternal grandfather—who had pulled him from a grave and asked only one thing in return. Protect the boy.
The team that answered to John—the Shadows—had long ago cut their strings to the clan’s broader apparatus. They did not belong to Thanos anymore. They belonged to Owen. They lived and died by a single brief.
Inside the estate, power rearranged itself in whispers. Some servants crossed themselves when Thanos passed; others looked to Norma for cues and found only stillness. The Vigilante Clan’s lieutenants arrived in silk and guns, their greetings too smooth. In the markets, men muttered that the Royals had been wounded. In ministries, appointments were quietly postponed. In the province, traffic checkpoints bloomed like thorns.
Owen watched the city breathe.
He did not cry.
He held the quiet like a blade inside his chest and let it sharpen.
John glanced up once and, through the glass, caught the outline of the boy’s face against the dimming sky. He had seen soldiers harden. He had seen killers decide. This was neither. This was a child swallowing the sun and deciding to live in the dark it left.
The boy wasn’t breaking.
He was becoming something else.
End of Chapter 2
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