Gentleman

Derek Cross spent five years in a cage like an animal for a crime he never committed — because the woman he loved begged him to take the fall. He believed it was an accident. He believed she was worth it. He was wrong on both counts. The moment he walks free, Vanessa is waiting — not to welcome him home, but to destroy him in front of a stranger's kiss. Nolan Frost, heir to the Iron Talon Gang, wraps his arm around her waist and delivers the final blow: "Baby." He grinned around the word. "So this is the idiot who went to jail for me." Nolan was driving that night. Vanessa set Derek up from the beginning, orchestrating every tear, every promise, every year stolen from him — all to bury him while she climbed toward everything she'd taken. They think they've broken him. They have no idea what actually walked out of that prison. Two old men had quietly watched Derek from the inside — a martial master who rebuilt his body into something lethal, and a gentleman who handed him the one thing no fortune could buy: the chairmanship of Olympus, the empire sitting above every throne in Crown City. Even Darius Carter — the phantom underground emperor the city fears, the man two-thirds of its syndicates kneel to — is nothing more than Derek's errand boy. Derek doesn't want blood. Not yet. He wants Vanessa and Nolan to watch, in real time, as everything they stole is returned tenfold — while they kneel in the wreckage of what they threw away. Beside him stands Monica Hayden, the woman his godfathers chose — cold, brilliant, and the only one who ever saw what Derek Cross truly was. Not a loser. A storm nobody saw coming.