He stopped walking."In thirty years, nobody —" he let the word sit alone for a moment — "nobody has been man enough, has been good enough, has had the combination of courage and capability and complete disregard for their own life that it would take to come to one of our locations and commit nuisance. Nobody has walked into our space and tried to stop our business from the inside. Nobody has stood in front of our men and said the things you just said." His jaw tightened slightly. "Not in thirty years. Not once."The warehouse was completely still around him. The men in the lab coats had not moved. Matthew was still on the floor, still shaking in that small, barely visible way, his eyes going between Brother James and Michael with the expression of a man watching something he could not look away from even though part of him very much wanted to."And you want to know why?" Brother James continued, and now his voice had taken on a different quality — not louder, but denser, like the wor

He looked around the warehouse himself for a moment, and there was something in the way he did it something almost proprietary, almost like a man looking at something he had helped build and still found worth looking at.“But inside.” He brought his eyes back to Michael. “Inside is something else entirely. The structure of this place the walls, the systems, the layout this is not a local operation running out of a condemned building. This is engineered. This is built. The people who designed what happens inside these walls are not local thugs, not street-level operators making it up as they go. This is an empire, and empires do not look like empires from the outside because empires that look like empires from the outside do not last thirty years.”He took a slow breath.“And the door.” He said it quietly, and his eyes went to the door on the floor for just a moment just a flicker, controlled, giving nothing away before coming back. “This place is iron. The walls, the reinforcemen

Brother James was still waiting for the reaction.And yet Michael still had not broken.That, more than anything else, was beginning to irritate him.Most men would have shown something by now. Even the braver ones. A crack in the jaw. A change in breathing. A flicker in the eyes. Anger, panic, defiance, calculation—something. Something that proved the words had landed somewhere inside them.But Michael stood there like none of it had touched him.It was then that Brother James's gaze drifted downward.His eyes landed on Michael's wrist.At first, it was the watch that caught his attention—just for a second, nothing more than a passing glance. But what held his gaze was not the watch itself. It was the blood.There were dark stains across the wristwatch and a smear of blood reaching onto Michael's hand, dry enough at the edges to show it had been there for at least a little while, fresh enough in the center to suggest it had not been long.Brother James's expression changed almost imp

His breathing turned heavier.There was only one person he knew who could produce that kind of strength with a single slap.Only one, Chris.The second Red Hand mantle boss Giovanni.That monster, that was the only man Brother James had ever seen strike with this kind of terrifying force, where one casual-looking blow did not just hurt a man but wrecked him completely. A single slap from Chris could break a fighter's spirit before the next move even came. Brother James had seen it once, and the memory of it had stayed with him ever since.And now, standing there with blood running from his nose and mouth, with his head roaring and his body still shaken from that impact, he was looking at Michael and feeling that same kind of dread crawl into his chest.His eyes narrowed slightly, but there was no confidence left in them now.Only realization.Because if Michael could do this if he could close that distance without him catching the movement, if he could strike with that kind of force,

Brother James leaned into that support more than he would have liked, and that only made the truth of his condition more obvious.Matthew's face shifted, his shock deepened."What the hell is going on?" The question rose in him so strongly it almost came out of his mouth."How could Brother James still not shake off a slap?""Why?""What exactly was happening here?"Matthew could not understand it. He truly could not. It made no sense to him. Brother James was not some weak man who folded under one hit. This was a man Matthew had seen fight multiple opponents at once without breaking a sweat. A man who could handle ten men, even twenty men, and still walk away like nothing serious had happened."Yet now, just one slap had done this.""One slap."And Brother James was still feeling the effect of it even now.His body was unsteady. Blood was on his face. His head looked heavy. His posture was off. He had not recovered.That was the part Matthew could not get over.For a man like Brother