2025-11-20 23:14:54The explosion didn’t sound like fire.
It sounded like the world ripping open.
Adrian’s eyes snapped open to a sky split by flames. Smoke clawed at his lungs. The ground beneath him trembled as another section of the compound collapsed in a roar of metal and debris.
For a few seconds, he didn’t move.
Not because he couldn’t…
But because he didn’t know who he was supposed to be right now.
He pushed himself up slowly, hands slipping on blood and soot. The air tasted like iron. Something warm ran down the side of his neck—blood, his or someone else’s.
A concrete pillar lay shattered beside him like it had been struck by a god. The once-untouchable Revaro Mafia estate had been reduced to a burning graveyard.
How long was I out?
Adrian looked around, searching his fractured memory.
He remembered stepping through the main gate.
He remembered showing the guard his ID.
He remembered the faint smell of gasoline.
Then a flash—white, blinding—
And nothing.
His heartbeat thickened. Not fast. Heavy. Controlled. Almost too calm.
He stood, dusting off shattered bricks from his clothes. Bodies lay scattered around him—guards, enforcers, even the mansion’s personal butler. Men he had spoken to minutes ago.
Or… had it been more?
His head pounded. Something wasn’t right.
A soft, cold sensation slid down his spine.
At first, he thought it was fear.
Then he realized it wasn’t.
It was a warning.
A pull in his gut. A spike of pressure behind his eyes. Something inside him whispering—
Left.
He stepped aside without thinking.
A bullet tore past his skull.
His eyes snapped toward the flames.
Movement. Shadows. Footsteps crunching glass.
Then voices:
“He’s alive!”
“—no witnesses!”
“Shoot until he drops!”
Adrian didn’t wait. Instinct—raw and animal—snatched control. He rolled behind a fallen slab of concrete as gunfire erupted, rounds chewing through rubble.
Dust exploded skyward. Sparks flickered off metal shards.
They weren’t Revaro men.
Their gear was too clean. Too uniform. Too professional.
Assassins.
Sent for one job.
Kill the survivor.
Another whisper from inside him—sharp, urgent.
Behind you.
Adrian dropped to one knee just as a silhouette lunged from the smoke with a switchblade. The blade grazed his cheek. Adrian seized the attacker’s wrist, twisted hard—
crack.
The man screamed, but Adrian slammed a fist into his throat before the sound could escape. The body hit the ground.
His breathing stayed calm. Too calm.
How am I doing this?
He didn’t know. But his body knew.
Instinct guided his movements with frightening clarity.
Another volley of bullets rained in, forcing him deeper into the ruins. The firelight danced along his jaw, carving his expression into something hard and unreadable.
Adrian spotted a broken metal rod, grabbed it, and hurled it like a spear. It whistled through the smoke—
—and impaled one of the gunmen clean through the shoulder.
The man screamed, dropped his rifle, and fell to the ground.
Adrian didn’t pause to watch.
He ran.
Not blindly. His instincts tugged him between broken walls and burning vehicles like an invisible hand steering him away from each bullet, each ambush, each death.
“Lock him in the east yard!”
“Don’t let him reach the exit!”
“Take the shot!”
More attackers circled from the left.
Then—another whisper.
Jump. Now.
Adrian didn’t think. He vaulted just as something whined beneath him.
A hidden trip mine detonated.
The shockwave threw him across the ruins. He hit a wall so hard the air ripped from his lungs. Pain shot through his ribs.
He groaned, forcing himself upright.
Who the hell rigged the estate? Who ordered the hit? Why kill everyone? Why kill me?
He couldn’t remember.
And that terrified him more than the gunmen.
His hands shook—not from fear but from something deeper. Something he didn’t have a name for.
When he tried to remember the minute before the explosion, the pain behind his eyes sharpened—like needles stabbing his mind.
He gasped.
A memory flickered.
A silhouette.
A voice.
A gloved hand grabbing his shoulder—
“If this goes wrong, run.”
His vision blurred. The memory vanished.
Gunfire snapped him back.
Adrian sprinted toward the breached wall, weaving between burning rubble. Four men blocked his escape route.
His instinct surged again.
Go right. Duck. Strike. Break. Run.
Adrian moved like he’d been trained his whole life—fast, brutal, precise. His fist smashed into the first gunman’s jaw. He ripped the second man’s weapon away and fired two clean shots into the third and fourth.
They dropped instantly.
Breathing hard, Adrian stepped over them and reached the broken gate.
For the first time, he saw the street beyond.
Empty.
Silent.
Waiting.
His ears still rang from the explosion. His skin still burned from the flames. His memory still throbbed with that agonizing blank space.
But one thing was clear—
Whatever happened tonight wasn’t a random attack.
And someone wanted him dead before he remembered it.
A chime echoed from inside his pocket.
Adrian froze.
His phone screen lit up with an unknown number.
One message.
“If you want to live, don’t go home.”
Another message followed instantly:
“We need to talk… heir.”
Adrian’s blood went cold.
He stared at the burning estate behind him, then
at the mysterious message.
Whoever destroyed the compound…
Whoever tried to kill him…
Whoever sent the warning…
They all knew something about him that he didn’t.
And they weren’t done yet.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter 146 — Silent Expansion
The city did not know it was being claimed.That was the point.At exactly 02:00 across three major metropolitan zones—Helix Prime, Marrowfall, and the lower rings of Corinth Reach—systems flickered, doors opened, routes shifted, and power changed hands without a single broadcast, explosion, or declaration.No banners were raised.No territory was marked.No leader stepped forward.Yet by dawn, the underworld in all three cities felt the same pressure in their lungs—the sense that something vast had moved while everyone was asleep.Deep beneath the surface, in a chamber without insignia or name, Adrian stood before a living map.It wasn’t a hologram in the traditional sense. It was predictive—probability layered over geography, intent bleeding into motion. Streets glowed faintly as data streamed in, nodes activating one by one like quiet stars.Green.Amber.Then steady black.Cells.Not armies. Not gangs. Cells.Each one small. Disposable if necessary. Each one operating without know
Ch. 145 — First Counterstrike
The safehouse was meant to be invisible.No flags. No signatures. No patterns the Imperium could read. A hollowed logistics node buried beneath a shuttered desalination plant, its heat masked, its signal footprint drowned in industrial noise. The Black Hand had used it twice—never long enough to matter.Which was exactly why Adrian had chosen it.The attack came just before dawn.Not with chaos, not with bravado—but with discipline.Power cut first. Clean. Surgical. The kind of blackout that slid in quietly, like a held breath. Backup generators kicked on a half-second later, exactly as designed. Motion sensors woke. Doors sealed. The safehouse went from sleep to alert in a single, fluid transition.Three seconds after that, the outer wall folded inward.Not exploded. Folded.Shaped charges—precise, minimal, professional—peeled steel away from concrete without collapsing the structure. Smoke rolled in low and fast, engineered to confuse optics, not lungs. Figures moved through it with
Chapter 144 — Ten Families Take Notice
They did not meet in one place. That alone told the story.Ten families—some older than the Imperium itself, others born in its shadow—linked their council through mirrored rooms and encrypted glass. Each patriarch, matriarch, or appointed mouthpiece sat alone at a long table that did not exist, staring into a projection that rendered the others as silhouettes trimmed in faint gold.No names were spoken. No banners displayed. Tradition stripped bare by fear.The first voice broke the silence, gravelly with age and smoke.“This is no longer coincidence.”A data-stream unfolded in the air between them—loss reports cascading like falling ash.Drug corridors erased.Casino networks silenced.Arms shipments vanishing without breach or theft.Each incident, isolated, could have been blamed on rivals or bad luck. Together, they formed a pattern so precise it felt intentional in a way crime rarely was.A campaign.Another figure leaned forward, rings glinting. “We’ve survived purges. We’ve su
Ch. 143 — Weapon Ghosts
The first truck arrived at dawn.It rolled through the eastern checkpoint like it always did—dust-stained, engine coughing, seals unbroken. The driver handed over his papers with shaking hands, not because he was scared, but because he was confused. He had driven the route a hundred times. Same roads. Same fuel stops. Same radio chatter buzzing in his ear like a heartbeat.Nothing had gone wrong.That was the problem.The gate lifted. The truck crawled into the depot. Men with rifles fanned out, alert but bored, their boots crunching gravel. One of them slapped the container door, listening for the hollow reassurance of steel packed tight.“Open it,” the foreman said.The seals were intact. Serial numbers matched the manifest. No scratches. No tampering.They cut it open anyway.The doors swung wide.Silence followed.Inside the container, rows of foam cradles stared back at them—perfectly molded, perfectly empty. No rifles. No crates. No ammunition cases. Just clean, gray foam, shape
Ch. 142 — Casino Silence
The blackout hit at exactly 02:17.Not a second earlier. Not a second late.Three cities, three casinos, three towers of glass and velvet that had never known true darkness—until the lights died like a held breath finally released.In Virelli Bay, the roulette wheels froze mid-spin. The ball clicked once, softly, then stopped as if confused. Slot machines went silent in a chorus of dead screens. The chandeliers above the main floor flickered, dimmed, and vanished, leaving the room lit only by emergency strips along the carpeted aisles.In North Meridian, a high-stakes poker room full of men who believed money made them untouchable stared at their own reflections in blackened screens. Cards lay face-down, forgotten. One man laughed nervously. Another checked his phone. No signal.In the inland capital, the third casino—older, uglier, more dangerous—lost power so completely the river outside seemed to swallow the building whole. Even the neon sign died without a flicker.Security rushed
Ch. 141 — The Drug Route Burn
The corridor had a name on maps that never existed.The Spine.It ran like a dark artery through ports, highways, storage depots, and river crossings—feeding five cities, dozens of syndicates, and a thousand smaller dealers who never knew where the poison truly came from. Cash flowed one way. Destruction flowed the other.Adrian stood over a projected map in the mobile underground base as the Spine pulsed in red. Every node glowed. Every route branched. Every weakness had already been measured.“Time,” he said.No speeches. No countdowns. Just a word.Across three time zones, the Black Hand moved.At the eastern port, night cranes froze mid-swing as power died in precise sections—never the whole grid, never enough to trigger emergency alarms. Containers were opened not with explosives, but with keys copied weeks earlier. Inside were sealed drums and vacuum-packed bricks stamped with chemical codes instead of names.Black Hand operatives worked in silence. Masks. Gloves. Neutralizing a
You may also like
The Return of the War Legate
Celestial Clouds708.5K viewsRising from the Ashes
Only For You2.1M viewsRevenge Of The Rejected Heir
Beautypete96.3K viewsRise Of The Student Billionaire
Dragon Sly212.2K viewsTHE HEIR VS FEMALE CEO
Pen Lord319 viewsThe Incredible Charlie Maxwell
Steven Mankind521 viewsTHE ANOMALY: RISE OF A BILLIONAIRE
Wednesday Adaire346 viewsEmpire of the Unexpected Heir
Papichilow251 views