2026-02-10 17:48:52Jack Hardy lounged in a street corner cafe with his thumb swiping lazily across his phone.
He stopped at a global news headline. "The Jaguar Cartel Wiped Out Overnight. No Survivors."
In a fortified compound deep in South America, every man in the world's deadliest cartel had been found dead. Nine hundred and six of them.
The article called it the most baffling massacre in modern criminal history, one that could only have been carried out by a platoon-sized military force.
An empire had fallen, and nobody had claimed it. Analysts pointed instead to the underworld's mysterious god of war, the Dark Prince.
Two men at the next table had the same headline open between them.
"They say the Dark Prince doesn't exist. Tell that to the cartels and terrorist groups he has wiped out in the last five years."
Jack frowned. He locked the screen and set it face down on the table.
He had walked away from the underworld a month ago, right after he killed every man in the Jaguar Cartel for ambushing his people during peace talks.
Since then, Jack had vanished off the grid and blended into civilian life.
A waitress brought his coffee. She was about twenty, with auburn hair in a loose ponytail, and she gave him a flirty smile.
"Black coffee, no sugar," she said. "I hope it's to your liking."
Jack glanced up and nodded. "Thanks."
She didn't leave. She tilted her head so a strand of hair fell across her blushing cheek. "Do you come here often? A guy like you shouldn't have to drink coffee by himself."
He responded with a polite half-smile. "Don't mind me. I like the quiet."
Rich men walk into this cafe every day and leave their numbers under their cups. This one has not looked at me twice.
Her smile slipped. "I get off work at four every day…"
She let the offer hang, then walked away with her hips swaying a little more than before.
Jack's phone buzzed on the table. That was strange, because it was a burner he'd bought eleven hours ago.
He groaned quietly, accepted the call, and put it to his ear. "Hi, Dad."
Victor Cromwell was his father, Marshal Commander of the Springfield Military Alliance, the most powerful private army on the planet.
"Don't DAD me!" Victor boomed. "Do you have any idea how long we've been looking for you?"
"I'm done fighting wars," Jack said. "They never end."
"Done with them?" Victor's voice sharpened. "Have you forgotten you're the sole heir to Springfield? Armies that dwarf every nation on Earth await your command."
"And you wiped out the Jaguar Cartel by yourself," he added. "Did you think I wouldn't notice?"
"I'm tired of counting the dead, Dad. Nine of my best men walked into those peace talks unarmed because I told them to, and died for it. I'm out."
Victor had no answer to that. He cursed, then went quiet, and a moment later a softer voice took the line.
"Jack? Sweetheart? You know the Cromwell family defends the world against evil, and you're its next leader. Please come back."
It was his mother, Ashley Cromwell, the one person in the world he truly cared about. He hadn't heard her voice in a month.
But he needed a fast, clean exit, or his parents would hound him until he returned to Springfield.
"Do you remember what you promised me, Mom?" he said quietly.
"What promise?" Ashley asked, sounding guarded.
"You said if I ever settled down and got married, you'd let me leave Springfield. Well, I'm waiting for my date right now, and she'll be here any minute. I'm going to marry this woman."
"Really? Are you serious?" Ashley cried out.
Jack had never let a woman past his shell, no matter how beautiful or perfect she was, and his mother knew it. This was groundbreaking news.
Victor grabbed the phone back. "You're getting married? To whom? When did this happen—"
"I've gotta go," Jack cut in. "I'll invite you to the wedding. Love you both."
He hung up before either of them could get another word in. He kept his hand on the phone a little longer than he needed to.
Jack hadn't lied to his parents. He really wanted a wife and to forget about his bottomless inheritance and violent past.
He took a sip of his coffee and opened the dating app.
His perfect match was Clara Ford, a simple, pretty brunette with dimples and warm eyes. She was exactly the kind of partner a man settled down with to start a family.
The cafe door chimed. A young woman walked in, and every head in the room turned.
She was tall, elegant and poised, with long dark hair falling in perfect waves over an expensive cream coat. Everything about her said money and glamor.
A man at the window table set his cup down and forgot to pick it up again.
Twelve men in identical black suits filed in behind her. They wore earpieces, and their eyes swept the room like Secret Service agents as they fanned out to the exits and windows.
Jack was the only person in the room who had not looked up.
The young woman swept her gaze over the tables without interest until her eyes landed on him. She walked straight toward him and stopped at his table.
"Are you Jack Hardy?" She said it like an accusation.
Jack looked up slowly and raised an eyebrow. There was no way this woman was his date, Clara Ford.
She was beautiful in an overwhelming way. High cheekbones, full lips, hazel-green eyes, and a body that could put international supermodels out of work.
For a second, Jack couldn't look away. Then he checked the app again and looked back at her.
"You aren't Clara, are you?"
"No. Obviously not," she said haughtily, and Jack breathed out in relief.
Beautiful or not, I can never marry someone this rude and bossy.
"The Clara Ford account on the dating app was fake," she added. "I don't put my real name or my real face on public apps."
Jack leaned back, surprised. "So, who are you, really?"
She met his eyes without blinking. "Show some respect. I'm Juliet Forbes, heiress to the Forbes empire. And I'm your blind date."
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098 Virgil and Jack
"Victor's son is dead!" Morgana roared. "I will squeeze out of you who you really are, imposter, one bone at a time!"Her two remaining arms kept swelling as they flew at Jack. They stretched taller than the streetlamps, and gray fingers burst out along them, twisted and knotted, each one tipped with a black claw.They curved down around him from every side and blotted out the sky.It was as if he were standing in the middle of a forest, and every tree had leaned in at once to engulf him.The stink of rot pressed so close Jack could taste it. Where the gray flesh brushed his arm, his skin hissed and blistered. It was the same eating fire from the factory lot, the nanite and thanatos in her veins, and his strength flickered under it."Nowhere to run now, boy! I will crush you until your eyes pop out of your skull!"A claw ripped across his back and tore the last of his coat away with a strip of skin. Jack gritted his teeth. Another slammed into the asphalt at his heels and gouged a tre
097 A Thousand Legacies
Teeth ground against Jack's neck and snapped on his skin as if it were steel.The flood of dead bodies rolled him down the street, over and over, a thousand gray hands clawing at his face.Starfall had torn out of his grip when the horde hit him. It stood somewhere behind him in the broken asphalt."Eat him, my children!" Morgana shrieked from the roof. "Tear Victor Cromwell's errand boy to pieces!"The zombies couldn't scratch him. They could only carry him. So Jack let them.The switch he had flipped on the avenue slipped, and everything he had locked away flooded back.His father lay scattered across a factory lot. His mother had flown to the North Pole with a plasma bomb in her arms and probably burned with it. His sister slept in that palace without knowing he was her brother.And Juliet, the woman he loved, had watched him walk away, and she probably didn't love him anymore.He had saved strangers all his life, and he couldn't save one of his own.Jack let his power sink, little
096 The Gods Were Angry
Valentina's voice shook in his earpiece. "My lord, Vandrake told us about Lord Victor. We're all devastated. I can't even imagine how you—""What about Jill?" Jack cut in. "Is she okay?"He stood alone on the broad avenue half a mile from the Obsidian Palace, his father's blood dried dark on his shirt. Hail hammered the asphalt around his boots and bounced like white gravel.Thunder rolled over Sparta City without a pause, and lightning split the sky again and again.It was the wrong season for a storm like this. It was as if the gods themselves were angry.The Queen of Spades dropped her voice to a whisper."She's asleep, my lord. I'm right beside her, watching from the window. Morgana hasn't come inside. She's standing over the mansion. I can see her shadow over the courtyard."Lightning flashed, and Jack saw her.Morgana stood on the palace roof between the black spires. She had grown at least twenty feet tall. Her wings hung half open, her broken arms dangled at her sides, and her
095 Springfield's Future
Jack cut across the lot in three long bounds and landed between Morgana and the broken door.He didn't wait for her to reach him. He threw punch after punch into the air, and blast after blast slammed into her chest and drove her back a step, then another.Morgana stopped.Her whole body shook. The growl in her chest rose into a scream of pure rage that rattled the crystal walls of the dome."You dare get in my way, errand boy!"The gray hide on her back split open with a wet tearing sound.Two more arms burst out behind her shoulders. They were longer than the first pair, and black ooze dripped from their claws. They shot over her head and hurtled at Jack from both sides.He smashed the first one away with an air blast. The second one wrapped around his chest.Then the first swung back and seized his legs.The instant they touched him, his strength started to drain away.It poured out of him like water out of a cracked bucket. His skin burned wherever the gray flesh pressed against i
094 Dark Alchemy
"Run, little rabbit! Run!"Morgana's shriek split the night as the second rain of thorns hammered down.Jack threw himself sideways. Black spears punched into the dirt one after another along his trail, and every one of them left a glowing pit of molten rock behind it.He landed in a crouch by the dome's wall, his boot smoking where the heat had caught it.Ashley's apparition was already beside him. The thorns had passed straight through her misty shape.Overhead, Morgana folded her wings and dropped out of the sky. She hit the ground at the far end of the lot with a thud that cracked the earth under her claws, and her black eyes fixed on him. She stood too far off to catch a low voice over the hiss of the molten pits.Jack rose slowly and dusted off his coat."Now I understand why they call her the Black Witch," he said. "She has performed some kind of dark alchemy inside her own body."His gaze ran over the gray hump of her back and the wings twitching behind it."But the bigger que
093 Born Yesterday
Morgana's black robe split down her back with a sound like tearing canvas.Gray flesh bulged through the rip, mottled like a corpse. Her spine cracked and stretched until she hunched taller than the doorway she had just smashed, and her eyes swelled black from lid to lid above the veil.Both her arms shot out across the dome.They grew longer and longer, bones popping as they lengthened, and twisted around each other into one huge spiral of gray flesh and black claws. It drilled through the air toward the platform, straight at Jack and Victor behind him."I will rip you both to pieces!"On the highway, Jack had caught that hand and been shoved down the road. This time he had no intention of catching anything.He planted his feet and threw a single punch.His fist stopped a hand's width short of the claws, and the air in front of it exploded.The blast smashed the spiral back down its own length. The gray arms crumpled like a stamped-on garden hose, and the force kept going, straight i
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