The underground base breathed like a living thing.Steel ribs hummed softly as power cycled through hidden conduits. Screens glowed with maps, numbers, shifting routes—drug corridors, casino money flows, shell companies bleeding red under Black Hand pressure. Somewhere above, the world kept turning, unaware that something new and dangerous was carving its name into the bones of the underworld.Adrian stood alone at the central table, hands braced against cold metal, eyes tracking streams of data faster than any human should have been able to read.One ambush. One leak. Predicted—and neutralized.Still, something gnawed at him.A hesitation. A fraction of a second too long during the raid. A man who had looked away when he should have advanced.Not fear.Choice.“You’re watching ghosts again.”The Regent’s voice came from behind him—calm, steady, heavy with experience that stretched far beyond one lifetime of war. Adrian didn’t turn. He didn’t need to. His instincts mapped the room aut

The server room didn’t exist on any map.That was the first thing that told Adrian it mattered.It was buried beneath an abandoned logistics hub near the old rail spine—no signage, no registry, no digital footprint. The kind of place accountants never visited and killers never needed to. Power hummed through cables thicker than wrists, feeding racks of quiet machines that never slept. Money slept here. Money dreamed here.The Black Hand called it Vault-Red.Adrian stood behind the glass wall, arms folded, eyes unfocused—not watching the screens, but listening to the pattern beneath them. He felt it before the hackers finished speaking. A familiar pressure. Like standing at the edge of something that didn’t want to be seen.“Okay,” Nyx said quietly, fingers dancing across three keyboards at once. “I think… yeah. This is it.”Nyx had no real name anymore. None of them did. She’d burned it herself the night she joined the Hand—deleted every trace, salted the backups, let the past die scr

The Black Hand didn’t celebrate victories.There were no cheers when shipments vanished without bloodshed, no raised glasses when a family collapsed overnight, no laughter echoing through the underground corridors of the mobile base. Success was treated like weather—acknowledged, measured, moved past.That silence was what unsettled Zara the most.She stood alone on an upper catwalk overlooking the operations floor, arms folded tight against her chest. Below, operators moved with quiet efficiency—analysts feeding data to tacticians, couriers slipping in and out, holographic maps flickering with red lines that slowly faded to black as routes were cut and money streams dried up.The Black Hand was working exactly as Adrian had designed it.Too exactly.Adrian stood at the center of it all, half-lit by the glow of the tactical table. He hadn’t slept. Zara could tell by the stillness of him, the way his eyes tracked information without blinking, the way his body barely shifted as hours pa

The first mistake the families made was believing the Black Hand needed bullets.The second was believing Adrian needed to be seen.The trap began a week before anyone realized a war had started.Ten families—old money, older grudges—sat at the top of the city’s criminal ecosystem. They didn’t meet together. They didn’t trust one another enough for that. Instead, they communicated through intermediaries, dead drops, encrypted couriers, and rituals so outdated they mistook tradition for security.Adrian studied all of it.He didn’t rush. He never did anymore.From the underground base, he watched patterns ripple across screens: shipping routes, laundering cycles, protection payments, encrypted chatter frequencies. His instincts no longer screamed warnings—they whispered certainties. If a family moved funds on a Tuesday, they panicked on a Friday. If they hired muscle from the south docks, they were hiding something inland. If they spoke about loyalty, betrayal was already in motion.He

The Imperium did not react the way lesser powers did.There were no panicked raids.No rushed assassinations.No public declarations.Instead, deep beneath a city that did not exist on any map, the Imperium observed.A circular chamber lit by cold white light hummed with restrained power. Three elevated seats—The Thrones—were occupied, not by kings in robes, but by figures wrapped in adaptive black armor that shifted subtly with every breath. Around them stood advisors, analysts, and silent operators whose very presence bent the air.At the center of the chamber, a holo-map of the world pulsed.Red zones blinked and vanished.Entire criminal families—collapsed.Supply routes—severed.Financial arteries—bled dry.At the core of the chaos was a single expanding shadow.THE BLACK HAND.The Choir Mother stood before the Thrones, hands folded behind her back, posture flawless. Her voice was calm, measured, almost reverent.“He has completed Phase One without ever revealing himself.”One of