Chapter 16 – Cyril
The gym smells like blood, leather, and sweat.
It’s tucked beneath one of my buildings in lower Manhattan, no signs or memberships, just bare concrete walls and steel beams thick enough to hold the weight of every sin I’ve ever tried to punch out of myself. It’s the only place I can move without eyes. Without questions.
Terry counts from the corner, voice low and even.
“One, two, reset. One, two, three—pause. That’s it! Let it out.”
I don’t need to let it out; I need to burn it down.
The bag swings back at me like it wants a fight. Good. My knuckles slam into the leather again, no gloves this time—just taped hands and anger.
Thud. Thud. Crack.
Every strike rattles through my body, feeding the growing ache in my arms. Sweat runs down my back like it's trying to peel me apart. I focus on the sound. The rhythm. It’s the only thing keeping me grounded.
Because when I stop? My mind drifts. And I can’t afford that.
Enya.
Fucking hell.
Her voice from last night still echoes in my skull. Soft moans, half-choked pleas. I wanted her so much…. I wanted to fill her and make her scream my name, but I controlled myself. Barely.
I can still smell her scent, vanilla and fresh linen.
And it hits me so hard I miss the rhythm….
A punch lands wrong, and pain blooms across my abdomen. Sharp. Crippling. Fuck.
I stumble a step back, hiss through my teeth, and brace a forearm against the bag.
Terry straightens from the stool, his brow cocked, a small, knowing smirk playing at the edge of his mouth.
“Distracted?” he asks, casual like he’s commenting on the weather, but I hear the edge beneath it. The curiosity. The challenge.
I shoot him a look. One that should answer that question loud enough.
He raises both hands. “Alright, alright.”
I wave him off, breath still ragged. “Out.”
“Boss—”
“Out.”
The steel door creaks open behind me.
I know that creak. The sound of the familiar heavy boots on concrete.
Alvise. And someone else.
I grab the towel draped over the bench and drag it across my face, wrapping it around the back of my neck like it might anchor me.
Then, I turn, and Alvise nods toward the man standing next to him.
He draws every ounce of heat in the room and turns it into ice.
Galen Viero.
The bastard moves like he owns the shadows, just like they report to him. He’s tall and wiry, with a face carved out of stone and eyes that can’t possibly belong to a man. The kind of eyes that blink only to appear more human.
He’s dressed like a fucking phantom, black wool coat draped clean down to his knees, matte leather gloves, and a suit so sinister it drinks the light.
His face doesn’t move when he speaks. Just his mouth.
“I prefer conversations in air-conditioned rooms,” he says, voice low, precise, and not without a trace of amusement as he glances around the sweat-stained mats and concrete. “But this…works too.”
His tone says he’s seen worse. Probably while stepping over bodies.
Galen Viero isn’t just a name. He’s a myth in syndicate circles. Ex-FBI. Maybe CIA. Maybe both, depending on which whispered story you hear in unlit rooms. Doesn’t matter. The point is, he’s the guy governments used to call before they started pretending he didn’t exist.
Now, he works for the highest bidder.
And he’s fucking expensive.
He better be worth every goddamn cent, because that kind of money can pay for a year’s rent in the Upper West Side. I only pay that amount to bury enemies before they know they’re at war.
He studies me like a surgeon would a patient he hasn’t decided whether to save or dissect. No fear or anxiety. There’s calculation behind every blink of his gaze.
Good.
This job isn’t for someone I can intimidate because it calls for someone who can dig six feet deeper than the rest.
I wipe my face with the towel and drop it.
“You have something?” I ask.
“I have everything,” he replies.
He opens the leather satchel slung over his shoulder and pulls out a folder. Thick. Worn. Marked with tabs and scrawled notes like some ancient relic.
Alvise and I exchange a look, one of those deadpan, are-you-seeing-this-shit glances.
A fucking satchel? Handwritten notes? Physical evidence?
What is this—the 1980s?
Alvise quirks a brow like he’s about to say it, but I beat him to it with a grunt that sounds too close to a laugh.
“Jesus,” I mutter. “You planning to show me photos developed in a darkroom next?”
Galen’s expression doesn’t change. Of course, it doesn’t. He just hands me the folder like he’s passing down a fucking holy manuscript.
I wait before opening it. “Give me the headlines.”
Galen’s mouth twitches, and I see a hint of satisfaction that tells me he enjoys this, theater and all.
“Crane. Born Kaiander Crane. Raised in Naples. Educated in Milan. Started working with shell corps and holding companies by twenty. Three major financial fronts in Manhattan, all tied back to Fiore, clean money. Your wife died four years ago, and he popped up in real estate three and a half.”
“Sora,” I say quietly.
Galen nods once.
“They were lovers. Early college. The real deal. No arrangement. No PR stunt. Her father ended it the minute he arranged her marriage to you.”
I swallow down the taste of bile. It doesn’t go away.
“She never told me.”
“Maybe she thought it was buried,” Galen says. “Or maybe she didn’t want you to know.”
I stare at the concrete wall behind him. My fists clench at my sides.
It’s not the betrayal that burns.
It’s the blind spot.
The fact that I didn’t know. That he was there. Watching. Climbing.
The photo Enya found—that laugh in Sora’s eyes I hadn’t seen in years. It wasn’t posed. It was real.
How have I never suspected this? Why didn’t I predict it?
Such a rookie fucking mistake.
Alvise watches me, tense. Waiting.
“He’s been playing the long game,” Galen continues. “The Fiores helped him polish the edges, gave him resources. He wanted his own empire, but first? He wanted yours. All of this started with her.”
“And now, it ends with him,” I growl.
Galen doesn’t stop. Doesn’t falter. His fingers move through that ancient leather satchel, unfazed. He lays out more documents, more photographs, more evidence, like he’s peeling back skin. A body’s worth of betrayal, bleeding out on the bench between us.
Photos. Contracts. City planning documents. Zoning maps. Fucking blueprints.
“Visual context,” Galen says flatly. “Because words don’t always hit hard enough.”
Alvise leans in. I stay where I am, arms tense at my sides, my breath just slightly off from the way I feel with every new piece of paper dropped in front of me.
The first map shows our territory, Crimson Dockworks. Brooklyn—Red Hook, specifically. One of our older logistics hubs. There’s a thick red circle around the building.
“This,” Galen says, tapping the corner, “was quietly rezoned six months ago. Emergency services no longer route through the area. Shipping limits were adjusted through a city council vote no one noticed because it was buried under flood damage relief. You lost nighttime access windows and didn’t even clock it.”
“Because we weren’t supposed to,” I growl, eyes locked on the page. “He wanted it to feel like rot. Slow and fucking quiet.”
Galen’s face flashes in agreement. “Exactly.”
He lays out three more overlays. Property acquisitions. Construction site delays. Tax penalties from mysteriously failed inspections.
“All of these,” he continues, “are tied to shell companies. Delaware LLCs, front-facing real estate ventures, energy renovation grants. It’s clean. But they all trace back—financially, anyway—to Fiore front capital.”
“Fiore’s laundering money through zoning changes?” Alvise mutters, tone low and sharp.
Galen nods. “And Kai Crane was the architect. Not in title. But in precision.”
Then, he flips over a high-res photo—Kai in a designer coat, shaking hands with a smug city official at some rooftop cocktail fundraiser.
Smiling.
That same disarming, politician’s fucking smile.
“He didn’t just want to beat you,” Galen says. “He wanted to undo you. Quietly and cleanly.”
My hands curl into fists so hard my knuckles strain against the tape.
“He used her to get in the door,” I say, voice rough and flat.
Galen meets my eyes without flinching. “He used you to kill what was left of her.”
For a second, there’s no sound in the room but the buzz of the overhead lights and my pulse screaming in my ears.
Then, slowly, Galen slides a smaller photograph across the bench like a final card played in a losing hand.
I stare at it.
It’s Sora.
Not the woman I buried—but the girl untouched by family, politics, legacy. She’s laughing, sun on her face, hair windblown. Kai Crane’s lips pressed to her cheek. His grin is boyish, infatuated. And then I notice it. The matching leather bracelets.
The leather bracelet I buried Sora with.
I stare so hard that it starts to blur. My stomach turns.
“He still wears his,” Galen says quietly. “Tucked under his watch cuff. Every day.”
I don’t speak.
The vein in my temple throbs. A part of me wants to tear that bracelet off his wrist with my teeth and wrap it around his throat. But the other part, the part that rules over blood and loyalty and legacy, knows revenge is a meal best plated well thought-out.
“This isn’t revenge,” I murmur. “It’s obsession.”
Galen tilts his head slightly. “An obsession that never ended.”
“A ghost I never knew I was living with,” I add.
There’s no satisfaction in saying it. Just the bitter sting of truth.
Galen gathers up the loose documents and tucks them back into the folder with the kind of careful neatness that pisses me off more than it should.
He zips the leather closed.
Then, he stands. “There’s good news and bad news.”
“Bad first,” I say without hesitation.
“He knows you’re looking into him.”
Alvise stiffens beside me. “How?”
“Doesn’t matter,” I say, standing straighter. “Let him watch me coming.”
Galen’s eyes gleam faintly. “That’s what I figured.”
“Digitize these files and send them to me,” I interject. I’m not about to carry folders and satchels with me like a madman.
“I don’t do digitized files. They can be traced back to me, and I refuse to take risks,” Galen replies. “You can keep these files.”
I groan and glare at Alvise, who’s snickering like a schoolboy.
Galen doesn’t linger and starts walking towards the exit.
I call out, “What was the good news?”
Galen turns around and smirks. “That you have me on your side.”
This bastard.
He walks away like his job is done and the funeral’s already planned.
I look down at my hands, still wrapped, bloodied, and burned from every strike I threw earlier, but the pain is nothing compared to what I feel inside me.
The photo of Sora and Kai sits alone on the bench now. I pick it up and look at it one last time.
That smile. That innocence. That goddamn bracelet.
I crumple it and toss it onto the gym mat like trash.
Then, I step over it like it’s already a grave.
“You touched my son’s world,” I murmur. “You touched her memory.”
My fists flex.
“Now, I’ll burn yours to the fucking ground.”
Alvise lingers near the bench, arms crossed, brow furrowed in that way that says he’s thinking twelve steps ahead and still doesn’t like what he sees.
The folder sits on the bench, still zipped.
I stare at the photo on the mat, Sora’s face frozen in light, in trust, in a version of the past that doesn’t belong to me. My pulse thrums in my ears like distant war drums.
“Jesus,” Alvise mutters. He drags a hand over his chin. “You ever think maybe this whole fucking thing started before you were even in the picture?”
I can’t look at him. My eyes are still on the mat. “It did.”
He shifts his stance, his boots scraping softly against the concrete. “Then, we’re not dealing with strategy. We’re dealing with a man who’s not going to give up until he gets what he wants.”
I finally meet his eyes.
He’s not wrong. But it’s more than that.
This isn’t just Kai Crane trying to dismantle me; this is him trying to rewrite the goddamn past.
“What about Enya?” Alvise asks carefully.
That lands.
Enya.
Fuck.
Last night flashes behind my eyes, her breathy moans, the way she curled into me after, her fingers dragging across my chest like she was writing her name in scars. It wasn’t supposed to mean anything. But I knew it would, the moment she stepped into my study. It does.
Kai didn’t just pick her at random.
He picked someone warm, someone who could get close to Ren and wedge herself into the one part of my life I’d never let the world touch.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
“Enya’s off limits,” I say, dead serious. “Whatever happens next, she’s protected. That’s not negotiable.”
Alvise nods, slow but tight. “And the team?”
“No one knows what we’re working with. Not yet. Not until I say.”
Alvise raises a brow. “Even Roman?”
“Especially Roman. You know how fast shit flies when he gets nervous.”
He grunts. “Copy that. You want me to keep Galen in rotation?”
I nod. “Keep him close, but off the books. We didn’t hire him. He doesn’t exist. We need him to start digging deeper, anyone Kai’s been in contact with. Political donors. Judges. City planners. Anyone who looked the other way while he built this thing.”
“On it.”
Alvise turns, but I stop him.
“One more thing.”
He looks back.
“If this leaks…if anyone on our side starts asking the wrong questions, I want to know immediately. Doesn’t matter who. One wrong move, and Kai will smell blood.”
Alvise’s face hardens. “Understood.”
He disappears through the door with that quiet, watchful step of his. Gone before the dust even settles.
I’m alone again.
Just me, the echo of my own thoughts, and the ghost of a war I didn’t start, but I sure as hell plan to finish.
Kai Crane wants to rewrite history.
But I’m the one holding the fucking pen now.