Karl’s POVTwo of the men who had failed me knelt on the concrete floor, heads down, wrists bound in front of them. The rest of the crew stood in a loose circle, silent but watching. I walked slowly between the two failures, letting the silence stretch until it became uncomfortable.“You had one job,” I said, voice calm. “Four of you. One target. Bats and the element of surprise. And somehow Sinclair and his friend walked away without a scratch while you two crawled back here looking like amateurs.”One of them, the younger one, swallowed hard. “Master Karl, the other man—”I cut him off with a sharp slap sent him tumbling over. “I don’t want excuses. I want results. Results you didn’t deliver.”I nodded to the enforcer standing nearest. He stepped forward and drove a fist into the younger man’s ribs. The sound was wet and heavy. The man folded with a choked gasp. I watched without expression, then turned to the second one.“You were supposed to be the experienced one. What happened

Ace’s POVSweat poured down my back as I moved through the new sequence Jacobi had just shown me. The mats in the guest house felt smaller with the extra equipment Ryu had brought in, but I didn’t care. My body was finally starting to listen. My strikes landed cleaner and the footwork felt less forced. For the first time since this whole mess started, I wasn’t just surviving the training, I was improving fast.Jacobi watched from the side with his arms crossed, a rare look of approval on his face. “Again, and be faster on the transition.”I reset, exhaled, and ran the combination once more. Block, pivot, counter, low sweep. This time the movement flowed. When I finished, Jacobi gave a short nod.“That’s the leap I’ve been waiting for,” he said. “You’re not thinking through every step anymore. Your body is starting to know what to do.”I grabbed a towel and wiped my face, breathing hard. “Feels different. Like something finally clicked.”“It did. Now we build on it.” He stepped onto t

Tamara’s POVClara’s office smelled like expensive perfume and stress like it always did. She stood by the window with her arms crossed, staring down at the city. I closed the door behind me and dropped into the chair across from her desk.“You’re late,” she said without turning around.“I was making sure the last set of posts landed in the right inboxes. You’re welcome.”She finally looked at me. The usual polish was still there, but I knew her too well, underneath it I could see the cracks. Ace was slipping further out of her control every day, and she hated it.“We need to tighten the pregnancy angle,” Clara said, sitting down. “He’s not responding to the soft approach anymore. Public sympathy isn’t enough if he keeps ignoring it.”I crossed my legs and watched her. “Then we stop being soft. Leak something more specific. Make it look like he’s already walking away from doctor appointments. Or that he’s refusing to discuss names and nurseries. People eat that kind of detail up. It

Lena’s POVThe USB stick felt heavier than it should have in my jacket pocket. I sat across from Natasha in the back of a nearly empty diner, heart still beating too fast from the last hour. She turned the small drive over in her fingers like it might disappear.“You’re sure this is clean?” she asked.“As clean as it gets,” I said. “I pulled it off a secondary laptop he keeps in the study. Financial transfers, coded messages, two voice files where he talks about using the hospital bills as leverage. It’s the strongest thing we’ve gotten so far.”Natasha looked up at me. “Lena. This is big. If we can verify even half of it, we finally have something that doesn’t just look like a messy relationship. It looks like coercion.”I wrapped both hands around the coffee cup to keep them steady. “Alright so we move carefully. Because if he realizes this is gone, I don’t know what he’ll do.”She nodded, already sliding the drive into a protected folder on her tablet. “I’ll start mirroring everyt

Clara’s POVI stared at the frozen frame on my laptop screen and felt the familiar heat of frustration climb the back of my neck. The clip was already circulating, the clip of me at the charity luncheon, hand on my stomach, voice soft as I answered a reporter’s question about “the challenges of pregnancy during a difficult marriage.” It had played well in the room. Online, the comments were splitting exactly the way I had expected: sympathy for me, quiet judgment for Ace.It should have felt like a win. Instead it felt thin.Tamara closed the office door behind her and dropped into the chair across from my desk. “You went further than we discussed.”I didn’t look away from the screen. “He isn’t responding to subtle anymore. Soft pressure wasn’t moving him. Public pressure might.”“Public pressure also paints a target on you if it backfires,” she said. “You basically told a room full of people and a camera that your marriage is failing while you’re pregnant. That’s not a scalpel, Cla