The file sat on the table like a live bomb.Jayden hadn’t moved it since the night before, but its weight filled the safehouse, bending every conversation back to the same question: Who was pulling strings above the Council?Malikah broke the silence first. “We’ve always known someone out there feeds the chaos. Guns don’t walk in themselves. Politicians don’t just ignore us out of kindness. But seeing his name She tapped the folder, her jaw tight. “that makes it real.”Burned Boy shifted, arms crossed over his thin chest. “Maybe it’s planted, boss. Misdirection. Maybe they want us to think he’s involved.”“No,” Jayden said, voice low. “This isn’t random. You don’t put a man like him in a case file unless there’s a thread.”He thought of the billboards uptown the smiling face beside schools, food drives, charity foundations. A man who sponsored festivals while the slums rotted. Respectable. Untouchable. A mask so perfect, no one would think to tug it off.Amara leaned in the corner, e

The night after the wiretap kept replaying in Jayden’s head, he couldn’t rest. Mama Nuru’s voice, calm and hushed, still clung to his mind like smoke. “Favor in exchange for a body.” He had heard enough to know the council wasn’t just fractured they were bleeding him from inside. He couldn’t call her out, not yet. If he accused without proof, the Council would close ranks around her, and he’d look paranoid. But if he let it slide, the knife would find his ribs before he ever saw the hand holding it.So he built a trap.Jayden gathered his closest crew Malikah, the Burned Boy, and two lieutenants he’d tested in blood and fire and laid a stack of papers across the table. Each was false intelligence, crafted with care. Some hinted at hidden caches of weapons, others described secret meetings with police informants. Each one was unique, marked in his mind like a signature.“Each of these stories goes to a different Council ear,” Jayden said. “Big Sef will hear about a laundering route thr

The raid had come and gone. Malikah returned bloodied, carrying rifles still dripping with Razor’s men’s blood. She threw the weapons down in the warehouse for all to see, defiance carved into every scar on her face.Her loyalty wasn’t questioned again at least not openly.But Jayden’s trust in the world was already fraying, every rope pulled tighter, every knot suspicious. And as the tension inside his ranks cooled, the whispers outside grew sharper. Razor’s men kept striking, but now with uncanny precision. The police pushed harder on his routes, not random anymore but pointed, like they knew exactly where to hurt him.And behind it all, the one thread that kept tugging at Jayden’s mind: Mama Nuru.The old woman had been there since the beginning. She had fed him as a boy, slipped him bread when others ignored him. She had brokered truces when bullets were the only language on the street. She had whispered advice in his ear about which vendors to approach, which corners to hold, whi

The tape still sat on the table the next morning, its silence louder than any gunshot. Jayden hadn’t slept. His mind replayed the voice over and over until it seemed burned into his skull. Someone from his own circle had promised Razor an opening, and now every face he saw carried suspicion.By the time the crew assembled in the den, his eyes were bloodshot, but his stance was iron. He paced the room like a caged animal, the Burned Boy perched near the door with restless energy, Malikah leaning in a corner, Amara sitting silent with her arms crossed.Jayden held up the cassette. “Last night this came to me. A gift. A curse. It’s proof that one of us fed Razor.” His voice was gravel, sharp with fatigue and fury. “This isn’t whispers in the market or Council lies. This is truth recorded.”A murmur rippled through the crew. Eyes darted, shoulders tensed. Fear mixed with anger.“I’ll play it,” Jayden said. “And when you hear it, you’ll know why I can’t sleep.”He slid the tape in, pressed

The smoke of the execution still clung to the streets, rising like a curse from the square where the elder’s blood had soaked into the dirt. Jayden had walked away without looking back, though his shadow seemed heavier that night. The Council had fractured; whispers of betrayal had cut deep, and the lesson he had carved into the stones was unmistakable. But even as he tried to hold the city’s underworld by its throat, another kind of pressure was tightening around him. The kind that couldn’t be silenced with a knife in an alley or a torch set to a rival’s den.The police.Not the corrupt ones who had always taken envelopes and closed their eyes. Not the usual half-drunk detectives that looked the other way so long as their bellies stayed full. This one was different. Inspector Idris. Word traveled fast in the underworld, and it carried his name like a cold wind. A man who did not take money. A man who didn’t drink on the job. A man who had refused the envelopes slipped his way more ti