Chapter 15 #2
Viking snorted. “Alive? You can try. I’m ripping his fucking throat out.”
Lucien’s mouth twitched in grim agreement. “You’ll have to get in line.”
Roman’s voice pulled us all back to focus. “We hit his compound tomorrow night. Dockyard District, Warehouse Forty-Nine. Draugr, you and Viking will take the east approach. Lucien, you and I will take west. Volken…”
“I’m not sitting this one out,” I snapped.
He met my gaze head-on, unflinching. “No one’s asking you to. You take the front with me. But you follow command.”
I hesitated, then gave a curt nod. “Fine.”
Roman looked around the table, his tone final. “We move at sundown. No mercy. No hesitation.”
The brothers nodded, silent but united.
And for a moment, just one, the world stilled again. Not with peace, but with purpose because the Dragic bloodline was preparing to bleed for what was theirs, and as I stood there, surrounded by my brothers, the rage that had been burning inside me since the attack sharpened into something lethal.
I could almost hear Caesar’s laughter echoing in my mind, see his smug, treacherous face.
But tomorrow, that laughter would end. Tomorrow, I’d make sure of it.
***
At dusk the house moved in efficient silence with men sharpening edges, checking mags, loading trucks, voices clipped and businesslike. There was no swagger, no pretence of casual bravado. We were soldiers dressing for war.
I dressed slow, every motion measured. Black tactical trousers, heavy boots, the long coat that hid the lines and scars beneath.
Colt and the others came to me for final checks; weapons balanced, communications synced, entry charges and flash rounds packed.
Gideon ran the perimeter last-minute and reported clean.
Draugr glared at a schematic one more time.
Lucien and Roman moved like two shadows of the same animal, entirely in step.
“Remember the plan,” Roman said once, voice low and final.
“Split approach. No lone runs. No pride plays. We take him, or we take what he’s left.
” He looked at each of us in turn, then stopped on me.
“Volken, you’ll cover our flank. You see anything off, you call.
We move to the secondary extraction.” His stare was iron.
“You’re not a bull in a china shop tonight. ”
I swallowed that particular part of my pride and nodded. I’d done worse things than hold back for the family.
The convoy rolled out, engines low and disciplined.
We took the back roads, the old dock district, where salt and rust mixed with the sour tang the city carried like a secret.
Warehouse Forty-Nine sat like a jagged tooth against the water, corrugated iron black and impossible.
We parked two blocks out, slipped through shadows in small teams. Draugr’s boys took the east approach; Roman and Lucien fanned wide on the west. My team moved like a living wall, Colt and Jericho watching the rear, Troy at the front.
Radio chatter was a whisper; the night swallowed our words.
We hit the compound hard and fast. Metal cried under ours boots, the main gate a paper thing defeated by a charge in less than a breath.
Inside, we moved like a storm. We are precise, practiced, and downright brutal.
Rooms cleared. Cells opened. Men found and made to talk before they could think.
We were thorough; we were merciless. For every second the warehouse held breath, our anger fed the silence.
But when we reached the inner sanctum the room where the intel and the leader were supposed to be, it was empty.
A cold, clinical void. Chairs overturned, papers scattered like the memory of a life, chains burned and snapped.
Nothing. A few hastily extinguished candles, the faint smell of sulphur still lingering in the corners.
Someone had left in a hurry, or had been warned.
The screens in the security room were smashed, the log wiped.
There was a single thing left behind, and it burned straight through me: a scrap of fabric with Caesar’s sigil stitched in crude thread, laid over the table like a mocking invitation.
My blood went hot with a rage so clean it hurt.
We scoured the place until the night whispered away.
The air grew heavier with every step, filled with the stench of blood, oil, and sulphur.
The deeper we searched, the clearer it became that this wasn’t just an empty warehouse, it was a stage that had already seen its show and been cleared before the audience even arrived.
We found two scrawny henchmen cowering in a drainage trench behind the main loading bay, their trembling hands raised before anyone even spoke. They smelled of sweat and demon ash.
Lucien questioned them first, voice low and surgical, words cutting cleaner than any blade.
One broke almost immediately, babbling about a drop at the pier, something about crates that were never meant to arrive, a misdirection meant to pull us off Caesar’s scent.
The other tried to lie, and Draugr made sure he didn’t try again.
Then there was the courier. A rat-faced man with a broken nose and a half-collapsed jaw, sitting in a pool of his own blood. He talked fast, too fast, words tumbling over each other in terror. “Pier… drop point… Caesar moved…last night! He knew you’d come! He knew!”
Roman’s hand shot out, without even touching the man he dragged him up so fast his feet barely touched the ground.
Roman didn’t usually use his powers unless he was starting to lose his shit.
That is not something any of us want to see.
“How?” His voice was calm, but it was the kind of calm that meant danger. “Who told him?”
The man’s eyes darted everywhere but at Roman’s face. “I…I don’t know! I swear! He said he had a whisper, that the brothers were coming. He laughed when he said it, said he wanted to see how fast you’d run after his shadow.”
Roman’s started to close his hand into a fist which has the courier choking out a wet gasp. “A whisper from who?”
“Didn’t say!” the man croaked. “Didn’t say! Just said your blood is full of holes, someone close would always bleed for him!”
That was all it took for the temperature to plummet. Lucien’s jaw locked. Draugr’s eyes narrowed into slits. Viking snarled low in his throat. And me? I felt something inside my chest snap.
Because he was right. Someone had warned Caesar. Someone had betrayed us.
We moved through the rest of the warehouse like wolves on a scent, every sense flaring, every breath fuelled by rage.
There was proof of a cleanup, there was burned papers, footprints wiped, a few devices smashed and left smoking.
But even through the mess, we found the unmistakable traces of demon work:
The residue of blackened silver…the kind used to bind changeling blood in ritual.
A small sigil carved into the concrete floor, still slick with something dark that wasn’t entirely human. And the faint, bitter burn of ritual oil in the air, the signature stench of demon handlers who had been here, only hours before.
Caesar had slipped the net. But not alone.
Roman was silent as we stood in the centre of that empty room, the air still vibrating faintly with what had once been power.
He stared down at the sigil, his jaw a hard line. When he finally spoke, it was low and deadly.
“He knew.”
“Yes,” I said, voice raw. “He knew everything.”
Roman turned, his eyes sharp as glass. “We planned this strike less than twelve hours ago. No one outside the family and our direct teams knew. That means…”
“There’s a leak, and it’s from someone close.” I finished for him.
His silence was answer enough.
Lucien stepped out of the shadows, wiping a streak of ash off his blade with clinical calm. “Someone fed him our timeline. The demons cleaned the trail, but not fast enough to cover the scent of fear. Whoever warned him wasn’t just guessing, they knew our entry points, our timing, our men.”
Viking’s fist slammed into the nearest crate, splintering it clean in half. “That bastard’s got a ghost in our ranks. I’ll gut every contact until I find them.”
Roman didn’t look up. “You’ll do nothing until we have proof.”
I clenched my jaw, forcing down the growl building in my throat. “Proof? You saw what we walked into…an empty den, blood still drying, his little flag left for us like a fucking joke. That’s all the proof I need.”
Roman’s eyes snapped to mine, sharp and cutting. “You think I’m not furious too? You think I don’t want his head nailed to the gates? But rage without reason will get more of us killed. We do this smart, or not at all.”
I stepped closer, my voice low. “He’s making a mockery of us, Roman. Of our name.”
Roman exhaled slowly, his hand flexing once at his side. “Then we take that name back. But we do it our way. We find the leak, and we use it.”
Draugr’s rumbling voice broke in then. “You think it’s Caesar’s men?”
Roman’s gaze flicked toward him. “No. Caesar’s too careful. He knows we’ll kill any of his rats. If he’s still breathing, it’s because someone he trusts, or someone we trust is feeding him. And that means this betrayal isn’t from the outside.”
A chill crawled up my spine. “It’s someone inside our network.”
Lucien nodded grimly. “Inside, or close enough to act like they are.” The room went still. Even Viking stopped moving.
Roman’s eyes lifted to the broken sigil on the floor, his tone flat and final. “Find out who. I don’t care how deep you have to dig, how many necks you have to break, or how much blood it takes. I want the name before the next sunset.”
We left the warehouse in silence, the sound of boots crunching through shattered glass the only rhythm between us. As the engines started and the convoy rolled back toward the estate, I could feel the fury radiating from every man in those vehicles.