Rise of the Street King

Chapter 79 — Amara’s Test

The broadcast still played on repeat in the minds of everyone in the room. Jayden’s crew dispersed in tense silence, each hiding their thoughts behind stone faces. But the seed of doubt had been planted, and doubt was a poison that spread quicker than fear.

Jayden remained at the table long after the others left. The broken glass at his feet glimmered in the low light like jagged teeth, but he didn’t move to sweep it. His hands rested flat on the wood, veins pulsing, his mind gnawing at the one image he couldn’t drive away Amara’s face, unveiled beneath the hot press lights, standing beside Idris.

She hadn’t looked defeated. She hadn’t looked broken. She had looked calm, deliberate. That was what unsettled him most. If she had been tortured into it, forced by some trick, her eyes would have screamed it. But she had met that camera like she wanted him to see her. Like she had chosen it.

By midnight, word reached him that she had slipped back into the slums.

Jayden didn’t send Stone or Malikah to fetch her. He went himself.

He found her in the skeleton of an abandoned textile warehouse, where old bolts of rotted cloth lay piled like graves. She was waiting, leaning against a cracked wall, her hood drawn low. When he entered, she straightened but didn’t flinch.

“You’ve brought fire to my house,” Jayden said, voice flat.

Amara’s lips curved faintly, not in mockery but in exhaustion. “You saw what they wanted you to see. Idris needed a name that would make noise. He pushed me forward because he knew it would cut deepest.”

“You stood beside him,” Jayden countered, taking slow steps closer. His shadow stretched long across the floor. “You let him put your name in his mouth. You let the city hear it.”

“I let him because it keeps his eyes on me instead of on you,” she said. Her voice was calm, but her fingers tightened around the edge of her sleeve. “Do you think I would hand you to him? I’ve bled to keep you standing, Jayden. Every move I made was to dig deeper into their web. Those meetings with aides they weren’t betrayals. They were openings. Doors into the city’s heart. I was trying to bring you something bigger than coins and whispers.”

Jayden stopped a few feet away, searching her face. He wanted to believe her. He always had. Amara had been the one who pulled him from the fire when no one else had reached a hand. The one who warned him when knives circled his back. But the more power he claimed, the less he could afford blind trust.

“You could’ve told me,” he said finally. “Instead, you let Idris parade you.”

Amara’s expression tightened, pain flickering like lightning in her eyes. “If I had told you, you would have tried to stop me. You’ve become so used to war on the street that you don’t see how the city above plays their game. These aides they’re not small fish. They answer to men whose names never leave the chamber walls. I thought… if I could get close enough, I could learn who’s truly pulling the strings.”

Her words rang with conviction, but conviction wasn’t proof. Jayden knew too well how lies could wear sincerity like armor.

“Why come back here, then?” he asked, voice low. “If you’ve sold me out, why return to the lion’s den?”

Amara stepped forward, closing the gap between them. Her eyes locked on his. “Because if you doubt me now, I’d rather die by your hand than theirs.”

Silence stretched. The only sound was the faint drip of water leaking through the warehouse roof. Jayden’s chest rose and fell with slow, measured breaths. He studied her for a long time, searching for cracks, for the tell-tale twitch of deception. But all he saw was fire and defiance.

He turned away first.

“You’ll prove it,” he said.

Amara’s jaw tightened. “How?”

“Go off-grid. Dig into those aides, into Idris’s network. Bring me something real, something I can put on the table to silence the Council and choke Razor’s laughter before it starts. Until then, you stay away from me. From the crew. From everything.”

Her face flickered with something hurt, maybe, though she buried it quickly. “And if I don’t come back?”

Jayden’s voice was steel. “Then you’ve already chosen your side.”

The space between them felt like a canyon then, deeper than any distance. Amara looked at him for one heartbeat longer, something unspoken trembling at the edge of her lips, then turned and walked away. Her footsteps echoed through the hollow warehouse until only silence remained.

Jayden didn’t follow. He stood rooted to the ground, every instinct inside him torn between pulling her back and letting her go.

Days passed.

Jayden doubled his efforts against Idris, feeding false trails, sacrificing pawns, anything to buy time. The Council simmered in unease, some whispering that Amara’s “testimony” proved Jayden was slipping, others waiting for blood. Razor’s men prowled the edges of his turf, hungry for cracks to widen.

Malikah never said it aloud, but her eyes questioned him: Why didn’t you cut Amara loose? Why risk it? Stone said nothing, though his loyalty was clear in the way he crushed dissenters who muttered her name.

But doubt seeped into the streets. Whispers multiplied. If Amara had stood beside the inspector once, what stopped her from standing again?

Jayden tried to shut it out, to bury himself in planning, in tightening his grip. But at night, when the fire burned low and the noise of the slums quieted, her absence gnawed at him. He told himself it was strategy, that he was waiting for her proof. But deep inside, a different truth pressed against his ribs: he wanted her to return not as a soldier but as Amara, the one who had seen him before the crown of iron weighed him down.

On the seventh night, a message arrived. A single scrap of paper delivered by a boy too young to understand the danger of carrying it. No name, just a mark Amara used before: a crescent scratched in charcoal. A meeting place scrawled below.

Relief flared, sharp and sudden. He prepared to go himself, but instinct kept him still. He sent watchers instead two shadows to confirm.

They waited.

Hours passed.

No Amara.

The boy who carried the note swore he had received it from a veiled woman near the market, but beyond that, nothing.

Jayden paced the length of his safehouse, fury and dread twisting inside him. Had she been taken? Had Idris intercepted her? Or worse—had she chosen not to return at all?

By dawn, only silence answered. No sign of Amara, no proof, no betrayal revealed. Only her absence, heavy as a wound.

Jayden stood at the window, staring at the waking city, and for the first time since his rise, he felt something colder than fear, darker than rage.

Uncertainty.

And it was tearing him apart.