2026-08-05 12:20:36The woman pressed her back against the alley wall, still trembling, watching the three men groan in a crumpled heap near the warehouse. Her torn dress was soaked through and her bare feet were bleeding from the wet concrete, but her eyes were locked entirely on Dante.
"How did you do that?" Her voice came out breathless, caught somewhere between terror and pure disbelief. "You kicked them like they weighed nothing."
Before Dante could respond, the scarred leader dragged himself out from under the pile. Blood dripped from a gash on his forehead and one of his arms hung at a wrong angle, but his eyes burned with unhinged fury.
"You think this is over?" He spat a mouthful of blood onto the pavement and reached for a phone in his back pocket with his good hand. "I have got twenty men within five minutes of here. Every single one of them is going to come down on you like a freight train. You just signed your own death warrant, you stupid fool."
Dante looked at him the way someone looks at a barking dog behind a fence. Mild interest. Zero concern.
Within minutes, footsteps echoed from both ends of the alley. More men poured in, some carrying pipes, some carrying blades, all of them moving with the aggressive confidence of hired muscle that had never met real resistance.
"There he is!" The leader pointed at Dante with his broken arm, wincing through the pain. "Put him in the ground! All of you, at once! Do not let him walk out of here alive!"
They rushed him from every direction.
Dante stepped forward.
What happened next did not qualify as a fight. It was closer to a man walking through a field of tall grass, bending every stalk as he passed. Each movement was precise, effortless, almost lazy. A knee driven into a stomach that folded a man in half. An elbow that cracked against a jaw and dropped its owner like a sack of wet sand. A palm thrust that sent two bodies tumbling backward into three more.
The God of War's combat instincts did not just give him strength. They gave him geometry. Every angle of attack was visible to him before it arrived, every opening glowing like a lit doorway in a dark hallway. He moved through the crowd the way water moves through rocks, flowing around resistance without ever being stopped by it.
In under a minute, every single one of them was on the ground. Some groaning. Some unconscious. The scarred leader lay face down in a puddle with his phone cracked in half beside him.
Silence returned to the alley.
The woman stared at Dante with her lips slightly parted, her chest rising and falling rapidly. Tears had cut clean lines through the dirt on her cheeks. She pushed herself off the wall and moved toward him on unsteady legs.
"Thank you." Her voice shook with raw emotion. "You saved my life. I do not even know your name, but you saved my life. If you had not been here, I would be dead right now, or worse. I owe you everything."
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CHAPTER 95
By the eighteenth morning, the garage smelled different. Not the usual stale cold and frozen metal. Something heavier. Something that settled in the back of the throat and refused to leave."They killed everyone." A woman from Building 2 stood near the garage ramp with a flashlight shaking in her hand, talking to three men who looked like they had not slept in days. "My cousin lived on the fourth floor of Building 3. She's gone. Her husband is gone. Their door was smashed off the hinges. There's blood on the hallway walls up to the fifth floor.""How many?" One of the men rubbed his face with both hands."I don't know. Twenty? Thirty? The ones who made it out of their apartments ran down here to the garage." She pointed her flashlight toward the far wall where a row of concrete pillars disappeared into the darkness. "They froze to death before morning. I counted six bodies curled up against the pillars. Still had their shoes on. Still had the look on their faces."Word spread through
CHAPTER 94
"Do not create problems with Vittorio Romano, Enzo." Massimo's deep voice carried warning. "That family is not someone we provoke carelessly.""He humiliated me!" Enzo slammed his fist against the leather seat. "Your own son! In front of three hundred people! Are you going to let some nameless beggar disrespect the Caradonna name and do nothing about it?"The line went silent for ten seconds. Then Massimo sighed."I will apply pressure. Quietly. But if this comes back on us, Enzo, you will answer for it personally."By the next morning, the damage had begun. A businessman who had promised Dante information about the Black Veil cancelled their meeting after his company accounts were frozen overnight. Another contact lost a major contract without explanation. A smaller company inside Vittorio's network received a surprise investigation from a regulatory agency that had never shown interest
CHAPTER 93
"Alessia, please tell me this is not what I think it is." Enzo's voice dripped with contempt so thick it could have been scooped with a spoon. "You actually brought a street sweeper to a billionaire's gathering? Where did you find him? Sleeping behind a dumpster? Begging for coins at a traffic light?""Walk away, Enzo." Alessia's voice turned to ice."I am serious." Enzo jabbed his finger toward Dante without taking his eyes off Alessia. "Look at this creature. No watch. No tie. No cufflinks. He is dressed like a janitor who wandered through the wrong door. The only reason anyone in this room even knows his name is because your father feels guilty about the alley incident. Remove Vittorio's charity, and this leech has absolutely nothing. He is a parasite feeding on your family's sympathy."Dante looked at Enzo the way a man looks at a fly buzzing near his plate. Mild irritation and absolutely nothing else."Nothing to say?" Enzo stepped closer, his confidence swelling. "Of course not.
CHAPTER 92
The charity gathering occupied the entire grand floor of the Palazzo Reale, a building so old its marble walls had witnessed three centuries of wealth changing hands. Crystal chandeliers threw soft golden light across hundreds of guests dressed in suits and gowns worth more than most apartments.Dante arrived through a side entrance and positioned himself near a stone pillar away from the main crowd. He had no interest in socializing. His mind was still burning with his father's warning, the words repeating inside his skull like a song he could not turn off.But his presence did not go unnoticed."Is that the man Vittorio introduced at the Palazzo banquet?" A woman in emerald jewelry leaned toward her husband, her eyes locked on Dante across the room."The same one who made Matteo Rinaldi eat dessert off his own suit." Her husband nodded slowly, his expression carrying cautious respect. "I heard Enzo Carducci personally requested a second meeting with him."Alessia found Dante within
CHAPTER 91
The next document explained everything."Father destroyed the records." Dante turned page after page, each one describing frantic, desperate actions taken in rapid succession. "He burned the genealogy files. He transferred the businesses. He changed our identities. He moved us three times in six months. He cut contact with every single person connected to the sanctuary. He did all of this because someone was coming for me."Dante set the papers down and pressed both palms flat against the stone surface. His arms trembled. Not from exhaustion.From the sheer, crushing weight of understanding that his entire childhood, every ordinary moment, every mundane memory of a simple life in a modest house with a father who worked regular jobs, had been a carefully constructed fortress designed to keep invisible monsters from finding him."You gave up everything." Dante's voice cracked for the first time since the night he had drowned. "Your name. Your wealth. Your connections. Your entire identi
CHAPTER 90
The underground archive was cold and silent. Dante had not moved from the stone surface where his father's documents lay spread before him since the previous night. The golden ring sat warm on his finger, its steady pulse the only companion he had in the darkness beneath the old bookstore.He picked up the warning page and read it again. Fifth time. Sixth time. Seventh."Never allow my son to awaken Mars.""There has to be another meaning." Dante turned the page over, searching for hidden text, coded messages, anything that might soften the brutal clarity of those seven words. "You were careful with language, Father. You never wrote anything you did not mean. So tell me what you actually meant, because right now all I am hearing is that my own father tried to keep me away from the one thing that saved my life."The archive offered no answer. The ancient walls hummed with faint energy, indifferent to his frustration.Dante set the page down and pulled the next stack of records toward h
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