“Lisa now is the right time for you to do what is right. You cannot keep going on like this.” Lisa rolled her eyes and leaned back in her office chair. “What exactly do you mean by that Kyler?” Kyler looked at her directly. “All of this Lisa. Everything that has been going on. Stealing Nelson’s company. Causing problem after problem. Running around with Karlus like everything is fine.” He shook his head. “You really want to tell me you do not see what all of this looks like from the outside?” Lisa slowly put the pen she was holding down on the desk. “Kyler nothing we did was wrong. Karlus took back what belonged to him and I did what I had to do to make sure you and Mum had everything you needed. That is all this ever was.” Kyler answered her before she had even fully finished. “I never asked you for any of that Lisa. I would have been perfectly happy to have a sister who was not caught up in all of this. That would have been more than enough for me.” He searched her face fo

Karlus stood by the window and took in every word the man behind him was saying. He looked out at the city from up there, the lights of cars and trucks moving down below catching the glass and reflecting faintly across his face. The cigar in his hand felt heavier with every passing second. He looked at it once more, took a last pull from it, then dropped it into the small plate beside him where it kept burning, sending a thin trail of smoke up into the cold evening air. His hands stayed folded behind his back. His posture did not give anything away. But the fact that he had not turned around yet said plenty. “How sure are you about this?” His voice came out rough like sand dragging over stone. The man did not let the question hang for too long before answering. He bent slightly as he spoke. “Sir I am one hundred percent sure of what I heard. Kyler was on a call and he talked about making a move against you. Soon.” A smirk crossed Karlus’s lips. He turned slowly from the window

The whole cafeteria erupted. Inmates moved in every direction at once, pushing away from the centre of the room, nobody wanting to be close enough to catch a stray anything in the chaos that had just broken out. The noise was immediate and full, filling every corner of the space. Scorpion’s men had already started finding ways out. Slipping through the crowd, heads down, moving fast and quietly, the way people move when they know they have just been part of something that is going to have consequences and they want as much distance between themselves and it as possible. The one who had done the stabbing was gone before most people had even processed what had happened. Nathan raised his head slowly. He was breathing. He could feel that. Lungs working, air moving, everything functioning the way it was supposed to. But something felt wrong and it was not coming from his body. It was coming from somewhere beside him. He looked down. One of his own men had his hand pressed hard agai

The morning light hit the Reeds' mansion but it did not land the way it used to. It came down dull and flat across the building, the kind of light that does not warm anything it touches. The mansion stood there under it looking like a place that had forgotten what it was supposed to be. The flowers along the entrance that Nelson’s father had planted years ago were overgrown and untended. The windows that used to catch the morning sun and throw it back across the grounds in warm gold were grey and unremarkable now. Since Nelson left that building everything that made it feel alive had left with him. The smiling faces of the staff who had spent years learning every corner of that house were gone. The small sounds of the morning that used to fill the grounds, birds in the trees, the distant movement of workers starting their day, all of it replaced by the heavy presence of military-trained security men who moved through the property with their hands ready and their eyes on everything

Kyler sat in the living room and let every word Lisa was saying find its way in. He was listening. All of it was registering. But underneath the surface of the conversation, his mind was running on a completely different track. Whatever Karlus was travelling to that state to do it was not purely about Edmund and Kyler knew that with a certainty that sat heavy in his chest. Lisa had not stopped talking. “So while he is away I will be the one overseeing everything at the company. He trusts me with it completely and I am not going to let him down.” She said it with a specific kind of satisfaction. Mrs Park was pressed into the corner armchair the way she always was at this hour. Her small frame fitted that chair like the two of them had reached an agreement over the years. Her eyes were softer than they used to be, the sharpness that had been in them when Kyler and Lisa were growing up had gentled with age, but they still caught things. She smiled at Lisa’s words and it was a gen