CHAPTER 11
THE DIPLOMAT
I was forged in war before I had a choice.
I was never supposed to be anything but fire.
My father made sure of that. He was a bastard of a man – a cold-blooded, ruthless gangster who didn’t believe in second chances.
He saw the world as a battlefield, and claimed power isn’t given.
It’s taken. I wasn’t just raised by a violent man, I was shaped by the kind of brutality that shaped an era, and I wasn’t just the boy of a man clawing for power in the underworld, my father stood beside the Sullivan twins who ruled London’s crime scene with fear and force.
They ran protection rackets, controlled clubs, London was in their grip with a ruthlessness that turned them all into legends.
But when the Sullivans were taken down, London’s criminal world shifted.
Their empire collapsed overnight, leaving behind chaos, uncertainty, and power struggles.
And in that wreckage, my father made a choice.
Instead of clinging to old ways, instead of fighting for scraps of a dying era, he built something new.
A family. Me. Unfortunately, the lessons he’d learnt in the shadows of the Sullivans didn’t disappear.
He carried them into fatherhood, shaping me into not just his son, but as his legacy to continue the family name.
I was made to inherit his world whether I wanted to or not.
And, for a long time I did. I lived it. I became it.
Until she died. Then everything he had taught me, and the brutality, felt like poison in my blood.
So, I walked away. I let someone else shape me, and mould me into someone else.
For ten years I was quiet – I couldn’t be the man I was born to be.
Now, I’m wondering if that was the right decision.
I push through the warehouse, my heartbeat like a war drum. Every breath tastes like gasoline and sweat. I’m close. But when I step into the next room, my breath is stolen. Her body is slumped against a metal chair, restraints biting into her wrists, head hanging like a marionette.
‘Stella?’ I whisper, but the floor beneath her is slick, dark and pooling. The kind that tells me it’s too late. I take a step closer, and more light illuminates a massacre frozen in time. There are bodies lying crumpled, parts butchered among lifeless forms tangled in carnage.
The room reeks of iron, like someone had bottled fear and let it ferment.
The walls, once white, are now a patchwork of grime and splatter, streaked with new and old, dried blood in patterns that look like some form of modern drip art.
Fresh blood glistens in sharp, arterial crimson, still wet enough to catch the light like lacquered paint.
It runs in jagged rivulets, dripping down over older stains that have long since dried into a muddy maroon and rusted brown.
It reminds me of a Jackson Pollock canvas – if Pollock had traded paint for blood and rage, I wonder if he’d have been more famous.
What’s a little human suffering splashed across canvas worth these days?
My eyes widen, seeing the gaping wound where her arm hangs by a thread. As I cup her face, relief hits first. It’s sharp and sudden. It hits me like a tidal wave – first the shock, and then the confusion, and finally the guilt.
It’s not Stella. I’d braced myself for devastation, for the unbearable weight of seeing her sitting lifeless.
My chest is tight, my breath is shallow, and every step towards her felt like I was walking through wet cement.
But then…I saw her face. My mind couldn’t catch up with my eyes.
I blinked, my mind wondering if somehow I’ve missed the contours of her face.
But no – it is someone else. A stranger.
Relief surges through me, but it’s tangled with something darker.
I feel like I’ve trespassed onto a tragedy that isn’t mine.
For a fleeting second, my ribs loosen, my pulse stutters, and the worst-case scenario I thought fractures. But that relief dies fast. Because, if this isn’t Stella, who is it? And where is Stella? My fingers twitch, my jaw clenches, and I exhale slowly.
Where are you?