Chapter 72*[Elara]*The war room beneath the Roman safehouse smelled exactly as it had a decade ago—like cold ozone, hot servers, and impending bloodshed. I stood at the head of the obsidian table, staring at the shattered remains of the stealth drone. Viper Nine’s strike team had tracked its return vector, intercepting the extraction team on the coast and recovering the wreckage. "No serial numbers. No manufacturer stamps," Matteo reported, standing with his arms crossed. The veteran Capo looked exhausted, the sudden breach of peace aging him five years in a single night. "The metallurgy is advanced composite. You can't buy this on the black market. This is classified, state-level hardware."Cassian paced the length of the room like a caged tiger. He wore a dark tactical shirt, the sleeves pushed up to expose the violent scars on his forearms. "You don't send a multi-million-dollar drone to shoot a wine glass," Cassian growled, his deep voice bouncing off the concrete walls. "It

Chapter 74[Cassian]The glass didn't shatter from an explosion. It shattered because Viper Nine had just thrown a Vanguard mercenary completely through it.The string quartet abruptly stopped playing. The billionaires and socialites erupted into panicked screams, scattering like terrified livestock as the bleeding mercenary rolled across the polished marble floor.Sterling stumbled backward, dropping his bourbon. "Kill them!" he shrieked, pointing a trembling finger at us.The twelve Vanguard guards in the ballroom drew their concealed weapons in unison.They were fast, but they were trained for corporate security. They had never fought the King and Queen of Rome.I didn't reach for my gun. I grabbed the heavy, six-foot-tall ice sculpture of a swan resting on the table beside me. With a guttural roar, I heaved the massive block of ice directly into the nearest cluster of guards. The sheer weight crushed two mercenaries to the floor, their weapons clattering uselessly away.Beside me,

Chapter 76*[Cassian]*Falling through a collapsing skyscraper is not a clean drop. It is a violent, chaotic tumble through a blender of jagged steel, exploding concrete, and razor-sharp rebar. I locked my arms around Elara, pulling her flush against my chest, twisting my body in mid-air to ensure my back took the brunt of the impact. The heavy Kevlar plating beneath my tuxedo absorbed a brutal strike from a falling concrete slab. My ribs screamed in protest, but I didn't loosen my grip. We crashed through the ceiling of the seventy-ninth floor. The Vanguard mercenaries waiting below had triggered the charges perfectly, blowing out the structural supports. The ceiling caved in, crushing the staging area they had prepared. We hit the floor hard, sliding across a thick layer of pulverized drywall and shattered glass. The impact knocked the wind out of me, a violent explosion of white light bursting behind my eyes. I rolled onto my back, instinctively shielding Elara as a massive se

Chapter 78*[Cassian]*Betrayal is a poison that doesn't just kill the victim; it rots the very foundation of the house they stand in. I stared at the black screen, the silence in the war room stretching so tight it threatened to snap the air in half. The remaining Capos of the Five Families were looking around the room, their eyes wide with sudden, terrifying suspicion. The men they had bled with, drank with, and sworn oaths with could be Pantheon sleepers. The enemy wasn't an armada sailing across the Atlantic. The enemy was standing right next to them, holding an assault rifle. "Clear the room," I growled, my voice a low, vibrating rumble of absolute menace. Nobody moved. The shock had paralyzed them. "I said clear the damn room!" I roared, slamming my fists onto the obsidian table. The impact cracked the glass holographic interface. The Capos didn't hesitate a second time. They scrambled toward the heavy steel doors, desperate to escape the wrath of the King. Matteo hesitate

Chapter 80*[Elara]*The Aegis compound was not designed to repel a mafia family. It was designed to repel a sovereign military. It sat in the center of a deep, naturally defensible valley in the Catskills. The perimeter was secured by a twelve-foot electrified fence, topped with razor wire and monitored by motion-tracking thermal cameras sweeping the tree line every thirty seconds. Beyond the fence lay fifty yards of cleared, open ground a kill box devoid of any cover leading up to the massive, brutalist concrete walls of the main fortress. I lay flat on my stomach in the freezing mud of the dense pine forest, a hundred yards from the perimeter. The icy rain of the American northeast soaked through my tactical gear, chilling my skin, but I didn't shiver. A shiver generated body heat. Body heat triggered thermal sensors. To my left and right, forty-two ghosts lay perfectly still, completely buried under thermal-dampening ghillie blankets. I looked through the optics of my localize