Rise of the Street King

Chapter 75 — Darkening the Heart

Jayden left Mama Nuru’s stall with her words still searing in his skull, each one a thorn digging deeper into his chest. You think I’m the mastermind? You have no idea who signs the checks. He couldn’t shake it. The night air felt thicker than usual, pressing down on him as though the city itself wanted to suffocate him.

Back at the den, his crew gathered around him, waiting for his verdict. Malikah stood near the door, arms crossed, jaw tight. The Burned Boy sat forward on a crate, eyes burning with the hunger for blood. Amara lingered at the edge, her arms folded, her expression unreadable.

They looked to him as though he carried the weight of their survival on his shoulders and maybe he did. But the betrayal had warped something inside him. Where once he had seen strategy, now he saw only threats. Where once he had tempered rage with patience, now the rage devoured everything.

“She’s been playing us,” Jayden said at last, his voice low but vibrating with menace. “Mama Nuru has been feeding Razor. Feeding the city men. All this time, she’s been dealing from both sides.”

A ripple of shock passed through the room.

“Then she dies,” the Burned Boy spat, already half rising.

Jayden’s glare cut him down before he could move further. “Not yet. If she’s played both sides, that means she knows the lines better than anyone. She’s been drawing maps in her head for years, knowing where to push, where to fold. She’s useful alive. But let everyone know we won’t forgive snakes anymore.”

The Burned Boy nodded reluctantly, his fury barely contained. Malikah’s gaze flicked to Amara, and for a moment Jayden caught something between them doubt. A silent question neither dared voice in front of him.

He ignored it. He couldn’t afford hesitation now.

The next day, the purge began.

Word went out that Jayden Cole was done playing games. The first to fall were the runners caught whispering Razor’s name in the gambling dens. They were dragged into the streets at dawn, tied to poles, and left for the people to see. By midday, they were corpses, their blood staining the dirt, the message clear: betrayal would not be tolerated.

By nightfall, three more crews that had toyed with shifting allegiances were stripped bare. Their weapons seized, their leaders paraded through the markets with chains around their necks. Some begged. Some spat in Jayden’s face. All met the same fate swift, public, merciless.

The slums trembled. Fear spread like a sickness.

And Jayden once seen as the boy who had risen against the odds, the fighter who carried the streets’ hope was now whispered about in the same breath as Razor. Ruthless. Unforgiving. A tyrant born in the same dirt he once vowed to cleanse.

Even Amara’s eyes, when they met his across the den, had changed. They no longer carried that flicker of admiration, the unspoken bond they’d shared in the shadows. Instead, there was hesitation, the faintest trace of sorrow, as though she saw a man slipping further into something she couldn’t follow.

One night she spoke, quiet but firm, when the others had left.

“You’re losing yourself,” she said.

Jayden sat at the table, a pistol in front of him, its barrel catching the weak lamplight. His hands were stained with dried blood from the day’s work. He didn’t look up.

“I’m holding us together,” he said.

“At what cost?” Her voice cracked slightly, though she tried to keep it steady. “You’re turning into them. Into Razor. Into the very people we swore to fight.”

His jaw tightened. “And what good is swearing if all it earns us is graves? You saw what Mama Nuru did. How many more are like her? Playing both sides, smiling to our faces while handing our names to our enemies?”

She stepped closer, her shadow falling across him. “Then find the truth. Cut out the rot. But don’t burn everything. Don’t burn yourself.”

For a heartbeat, her words reached him. For a moment he saw himself as she did: not a leader, not a fighter, but a boy walking into a darkness that might never let him back out.

But then he remembered the faces of the men he’d executed, the fear in the Council’s eyes, the silence in the streets after his purge. That silence meant control. That silence meant survival.

He pushed her voice away.

Days turned into weeks, the purge continuing, each act more brutal than the last. Word of Jayden’s ruthlessness spread beyond the slums, reaching even the ears of the city men who had once dismissed him as a minor nuisance. Now, they treated him with caution, wary of a boy who had become a storm.

But storms left wreckage.

One night, as Jayden sat alone in the warehouse, a cassette tape arrived, slipped under the door in a plain envelope. No mark, no messenger. Just the tape, heavy in his palm.

He slid it into the recorder, the machine whirring as the tape caught. At first, only static. Then voices, faint but growing clearer.

“…the deal stands. Jayden won’t suspect. He trusts me. Razor will have his opening.”

Jayden’s blood ran cold.

The voice it wasn’t Mama Nuru’s. It wasn’t one of Razor’s lieutenants. It was a voice he knew. A voice from his circle.

Someone close.

The tape clicked off, leaving the room in silence but for Jayden’s heartbeat hammering in his ears. He rewound it, played it again, straining to catch every syllable, every cadence. There was no mistake.

Someone he trusted had promised Razor access months ago.

His hands trembled as he pulled the tape out and set it on the table, staring at it as though it were a bomb ready to detonate.

The purge had been built on the idea that he could smell betrayal, could carve it out before it spread. And yet the rot was closer than he’d ever imagined.

Closer than he dared to admit.

The tape sat there, silent, but its weight pressed heavier than any corpse he had left in the streets.

And for the first time in weeks, Jayden felt something sharper than rage clawing at his chest.

It was doubt.