Blood Debts

CHAPTER 2A — THE FALLOUT

Valemont City didn’t sleep, it prowled. Neon bled across the rain-slick streets, reflecting on puddles that looked like fragments of a shattered mirror.

In that reflection, the name Fredricks Mayford was beginning to resurface, whispered in alleys, muttered in boardrooms, cursed in cigar smoke.

Victor D’Lorne’s penthouse smelled of rage and expensive whiskey. A single crystal tumbler trembled in his hand as his assistant, a thin man with terrified eyes, stammered through a report.

“He just walked out, sir. No security detail, no backup. Left the watch on the table like, like it was a signature.”

Victor hurled the glass against the wall. It shattered, a spray of amber and shards.

“Find him,” he hissed. “Find every ghost that helped him crawl back here. I want him erased before sunrise.”

“Sir, if he’s really the Mayford boy”

“Then we burn him again!”

He paced the marble floor, fury boiling beneath the silk of his control. But beneath the anger, something colder stirred, fear.

He remembered that look in the man’s eyes, the calm of someone who’d already decided how the story ends.

Across the city, Fredricks stood at the edge of the Mayford Plaza,  once his family’s headquarters, now a glass monument owned by D’Lorne Industries.

His reflection stared back at him from the building’s façade. The last time he’d been here, he’d been fifteen, barefoot, covered in soot, clutching that cracked pocket watch.

A voice broke through his memory. “You’re early,” Silas Crowe said, stepping from the shadows. He was older now, grey streaking through the black hair, a faint limp that spoke of old wars.

“I don’t like waiting,” Fredricks replied.

“You never did. How’d it go?”

“He looked me in the eye,” Fredricks said quietly, “and didn’t recognize the cost of what he did. That’s the problem with men like him, they forget the faces of the dead.”

Silas studied him. “You ready to start the clock?”

Fredricks pulled the cracked watch from his pocket. The second hand twitched once, and for the first time in years, it moved. “It started the moment I walked into that club.”

Silas smirked. “Then let’s give the city something to talk about.”

An hour later, chaos rippled through Valemont’s corporate underbelly. Three of D’Lorne’s shell companies, quietly running money through offshore accounts, were exposed in a sudden digital breach.

Anonymous files flooded the web: financial crimes, political bribes, offshore assassinations.

No one knew who leaked it. But those who looked closely noticed the watermark burned into every file:

“M”  stylized like the Mayford crest.

In a dim room, Fredricks watched the news feed flicker. Cassandra Vale appeared on-screen, calm and composed, the public face of the D’Lorne empire.

“We at D’Lorne Industries are cooperating fully with the authorities,” she said.

“This attack will not shake our foundations.”

Fredricks leaned forward, studying her eyes. Cold, confident,  but there was something else there. A flicker of curiosity.

He remembered her from years ago, at her father’s garden party, she had laughed at him once, not cruelly, just innocently unaware of who he was.

Now she stood on the other side of a war she didn’t even know had begun. “She’ll be trouble,” Silas muttered behind him.

“Or the key,” Fredricks said. “Depends on which way she looks when the truth hits.”

By dawn, retaliation came swift and brutal. Fredricks’s safe house in Old Quarter was hit,  gunfire shredding the windows, smoke pouring into the street.

But he wasn’t inside. He watched from a rooftop across the street as D’Lorne’s men torched the place. Silas stood beside him, unfazed. “You expected that,” Silas said.

“He’s predictable,” Fredricks replied. “Men who think they own everything don’t realize when they’re being led.”

“Led where?”

“To their own ruin.”

He turned away, phone in hand, pressing a single encrypted command. Across the city, an elevator in D’Lorne

Tower malfunctioned, locking its CEO inside for forty-seven minutes, the same number on the pocket watch. Fredricks smiled faintly. “Now he’ll start to wonder who’s pulling his strings.”

Later that night, Victor returned to his office. On his desk sat a parcel, unmarked. Inside: a photo of his original crew from the night of the Mayford murders. One face was crossed out in red ink.

A note lay beneath it. “The next name is yours. Time’s up.” — M.

Victor’s hands shook. For the first time in decades, his pulse quickened not from power, but from fear. He slammed the note down and reached for the phone. “Cassandra. Come to the tower. Now.”

By the time she stepped into his office, the city lights were bleeding through the floor-to-ceiling windows, painting her silhouette in gold and shadow. “What happened?” she asked.

“A ghost came knocking.”

“You mean that man from the club? I thought you said he was no threat.”

“He’s not a threat,” Victor said coldly. “He’s a declaration.”

Cassandra frowned. “Then what’s the move?”

Victor turned to her, eyes gleaming. “We bait him. And you, my dear, are the bait.”

Her heart stuttered, but she didn’t look away. “If you want him caught, you’ll need to tell me who he really is.”

Victor’s jaw tightened. “He’s a relic. The last Mayford.”

Cassandra’s eyes widened. “You mean, he’s”

“Dead,” Victor interrupted. “Or he will be.”

She nodded slowly, but something in her expression changed, a quiet intrigue, almost fascination.

Across the city, Fredricks watched from a camera feed inside Victor’s tower, eyes narrowing as he saw Cassandra’s face appear beside Victor’s. “He’s using her,” Silas said.

“Good,” Fredricks murmured.

“Good?”

“Because I intend to use her first.”

He leaned closer to the screen. “Set up a meeting. Anonymous investor. Tomorrow morning. I want Cassandra Vale to shake the devil’s hand, and not know it.”

Silas sighed. “And when she finds out?”

Fredricks’s tone was calm, almost soft.

“Then the real game begins.”