"I'm getting there." Silent turned, pointed a lazy finger at the boot-man. "Trigger here picked him up outside his own warehouse. Didn't even put up a fight — thought it was a business thing, thought he could talk his way out." He pointed to the knife-wielder next. "Blade's the one who worked the hands first. Fingers, one at a time, so Feliks had plenty of time between each one to think about the next. I mean, we were quite nice with him." Darius's jaw clenched as he listened, but he said nothing. "After the hands, we let him sit with it a while. Couple hours. Let the shock wear thin, let the pain settle in proper, because pain that's fresh doesn't teach a man anything — it's the pain that lingers that does the work." Silent's tone hadn't shifted, hadn't so much as dipped into cruelty; he might have been describing how to season a stew. "Then Blade opened him up along the ribs. Not too deep. Just enough that breathing became a decision inste

Darius said nothing, jaw tight, refusing to let the story land the way Roberto clearly wanted it to. "Or take Marisol," Roberto continued, still very slowly and richly. "Smartest accountant I've ever met. Worked three jobs just to stay afloat before she came to me. Now she manages more money than most banks in this state, and no one — not the police, not the IRS, not a single soul outside these walls — has ever traced a cent of it back to either of us." "She didn't lose herself working for me, Mr. Cross. She built herself, brick by brick, with resources she never would have had otherwise." "And I'm sure you have a hundred more stories just like it," Darius said. "Actually, I have thousands," Roberto said simply. "Loyalty isn't something I demand, Mr. Cross. It's something I earn, by making the people around me more than they were before they met me." "I don't collect soldiers. I collect men and women who would've stayed small their whole lives w

Darius didn't flinch. "I don't respond well to threats. I told you that already." He looked past the barrel, straight into Lucifer's eyes. "You can shoot me, or you can let me try to save him. You don't get both. And if you keep wasting time like this? He's going to die!" "Put the gun down!" Silent lunged forward and wrenched it from Lucifer's grip before he could argue, tossing it aside and turning back to Darius with something close to begging in his eyes. "Please. Please, just help him." The room parted for him after that, every hardened, dangerous man in it stepping back to make way for who they just had been treating like shit. "I need a firm surface, not the floor — clear the desk," Darius said, already moving. "Something I can use to elevate his legs. And find me anything with epinephrine in it, a first aid kit, anything." They scrambled. Every request Darius made was met with immediate, frantic obedience, men who had spent

Darius sat alone at a narrow desk facing the panel, Charlie waiting somewhere outside because students weren't permitted to bring anyone into the room with them. And for the first time all week, the exhaustion of the last forty-eight hours felt like it belonged to someone else entirely. Right now there was only this — three faculty members seated behind a long table, folders open in front of them, and the particular, suffocating dread of watching people decide his future without much interest in hearing his side of it first. Dean Holloway sat in the center, reading glasses perched low on his nose, flanked by Professor Shinene on his left and a stern-faced woman Darius didn't recognize on his right, her nameplate reading Professor Bush. "Mr. Cross," Dean Holloway said, not looking up from the folder in front of him. "You understand why you're here, correct." "I understand what I've been accused of," Darius said evenly. "What I do not seem to unders

The prison looked different in daylight than Rhea had imagined it all these months — less like the cold, punishing place she'd pictured lying awake at night, and more like something oddly civil. Almost administrative, with its manicured hedges lining the visitor's path and guards who nodded politely instead of barking orders. At the checkpoint, the officer scanned her ID for barely a second before stepping aside to let her through, surprisingly courteously. "Ms. Kane. Your father's out on the east lawn, waiting on you." "The lawn?" The word caught her off guard, and she found herself repeating it, as though saying it twice might make it make more sense. "He's allowed outside?" "Since the new arrangement went through, yeah." The guard shrugged, like this was simply how things were now and questioning it wasn't his job. Rhea's brows lifted, somewhere between disbelief and dry amusement. "That's not what I was told." When she was informed