Chapter 40 Vince
Vince
Three Weeks Later
Kingston was home for a week. Finally, beside us instead of trapped in Harlan. We’d planned a night of drinking, gambling, drugs, and—for them—women. Let the boy breathe. Let my brothers forget he hadn’t come home with them from the Academy.
Nik and I never said it out loud to them. It guttered us when the four left for the Academy. But it ruined all of us, when Kingston, didn’t come home with them when they graduated. He had to return to Harlan. No amount of bargaining with Marcel would do.
Our cousin demanded his little brother in Harlan, learning the city from him.
Nik made it his personal fucking mission to make Marcel suffer for it. In ways that wouldn’t have us dragged in front of Damius.
Kingston wasn’t another cousin to us. Nik and I treated him like we treated our brothers, more like sons.
Regardless what we wanted tonight to be. Villain had other fucking ideas.
By the time the private lift doors shut, fury was already flooding me.
Rome scoffed, tapping his finger against the wall. “First night we get Kingston back in Villain… this is what we’re doing.”
Kingston only rolled his shoulders once. He watched the floor numbers drop like he wanted to fight each one. “Relax rocks you can buy me a beer after it.”
Rome shot him a dirty look at the nickname. “For that, you’re not getting my spare bed. You can sleep on the couch.”
“Fine I’ll stay with the twins.”
“Breaking Romes heart King. He dragged the guest bed into his room.” Bastion couldn’t help himself stirring Rome up.
“I told you. It was too much work to move the knife collection from the spare room.” Rome shoved Bastion shoulder. “Last time I am ever asking you to help me with anything.”
“Enough.” Nik said, before Bastion shoved Rome back. “After this, we celebrate King being home.”
I exhaled through my nose. “Let’s get this the fuck over with.”
“What’s the plan.” Luca leaned back, arms crossing.
“The same as always.” My hand went through my hair once. “They hit, we hit harder.”
The elevator hummed as we descended into the underground car park. The air changed before the doors opened, that electric charge a room gets right before a riot, when disrespect is about to get someone killed.
The doors slid open.
The entire lower level was packed with black syndicate vehicles. Parked in a way that wasn’t defensive. A display.
A semicircle of cars. A wider semicircle of bodies. Thirteen families, shoulder to shoulder, guns visible. Not one of them stepped back when they saw us.
My stomach dropped.
Nik’s gaze cut sideways, just once. We both read the same thing in the layout, the arrogance.
This wasn’t a meeting.
It was going to end bloody.
We stepped out as a unit—me, Nik, Bastion, Luca, Rome, Kingston—moving through the narrow gap that should’ve been cleared already and wasn’t.
Nikolai’s jaw flexed when he clocked the formation. He slid his jacket off in one smooth motion and left it on a rail as we passed. That alone made the air tighten. Nik didn’t take off his jacket unless he expected to use his hands.
Luca’s attention swept the ring, eyes moving quick over every angle. “Look at their spacing. Guns on the outer ring, muscle on the inside. They’re caging themselves.”
“Because they think numbers make them safe. They want a show.” Bastioned added.
“They’ll get one.” I took in the posture of the captains. Flexing my hands.
We reached the centre of their semicircle. The syndicate men shifted, closing, hungry for something they didn’t understand.
Nik edged closer to my shoulder, voice dropping for me alone. “Numbers first. They want to argue math before loyalty.”
“Let them. Math never saved anyone in Villain.”
Two captains stepped forward—the loudest kind. Men who stirred up chaos and still believed they’d never be the ones bleeding on the floor for it.
They were all silent for a moment.
“You have our time. Do not waste it.” Nikolai spoke.
“The current arrangement isn’t suitable for us.” The first captain stood forward. “You don’t get to hold the monopoly anymore. You control too much. Streets. Ports. Casinos. Tech lanes. Weapons. Drugs. Everything flows through you.”
The second swept his arm at the others, needing a crowd at his back. “It’s suffocating the city. We’re losing money because of your chokehold. Bad business. We’re done with it. Tonight we take a vote.”
One of my brows lifted. “A vote.”
“On Crow dominance. We’re thirteen families. You’re six men.”
Luca went still.
Bastion’s knuckles cracked lazily at his sides.
Kingston shifted half a step, just enough to be closer to Nik’s shoulder, measuring exits, angles, which bones to break first.
White heat started climbing my ribs.
A rebellion.
On the night my boy came home.
I looked at them—guns, vehicles, their carefully arranged little plan. Maybe we really had been too generous.
“Thirteen families.” My gaze swept the ring. “And not a single one is smart.”
The crowd murmured. The captains puffed up more, mistaking patience for weakness.
“They think you can run everything alone.” The second captain’s voice rose, playing to the ring. “You can’t. This city’s tired of bowing. We’re done. Tonight we decide if Crow law still stands in Villain—”
He was building to his moment when it happened. A hand moved in the crowd. A gun. The barrel came up and pressed against the side of Bastion’s head.
Everything inside my chest went very, very still.
Luca’s muscles locked, his whole body tightening with that mirrored panic only a twin could feel. Their formation never broke.
A gun at Bastion head was a gun at Lucas head. Something sick and deep twisted hard inside me. Failure.
I’d failed them. My boys. My sons. Because this should’ve never happened under my watch.
The syndicate man with the gun didn’t see brothers. He saw a tattooed Crow he thought he could put down and make a story out of.
I saw Bastion at five, both twins small and bone-thin, one on each side of me, curled tight into my chest that first week after we’d pulled them out of the cages.
Their fingers locked across my chest. Too exhausted to cry, too scared to sleep alone.
I saw myself at seventeen, arms around both of them, knuckles bleeding from breaking open locks with my bare hands, swearing I’d never let anyone cage them again.
Now someone had a gun to my boy’s head.
The air went quiet. The kind of silence all Crows recognised. Men at the edges shifted on their feet, instincts screaming even if their brains hadn’t caught up.
I stepped forward once.
“Lower the gun.”
The captain smirked and dug the barrel harder into Bastion’s skull.
Wrong answer.
The captain mouth was moving. Demands most likely. I didn’t hear anything. The car park seemed to shrink. Lights dimmed at the edges. Engines idled in the background. Men held their breath as something colder than simple violence slid into my bones and locked in.
“You raise a gun to my brother’s head,” I tilted my head, studying him like a specimen under glass, “in my city… in my fucking city?”
He never saw me move.
One heartbeat, the barrel was buried in Bastion’s hair.
The next, his wrist was in my hand. The bones gave under my grip with a bloody crack.
He screamed. The gun dropped to the floor. I twisted his arm until it bent the wrong way, then drove him down to the concrete. His head hit hard. Once. Twice. The third time there was a different sound, something deeper and final, and his body went slack.
I didn’t stop.
It wasn’t about him being dead now. That part was done.
This was about my hand being fucked up enough to remind me for weeks exactly when I’d failed to prevent a barrel touching Bastion’s skull.
I handled this. No one else. Cartilage tore.
Knuckles split. My own skin opened on bone.
I kept going until there was nothing left in him to break.
When I finally pushed up, my shoulders were heaving. Blood speckled my shirt, my wrists, the concrete.
I turned back to the circle.
“All captains. Step forward.” My wiped blood off the dripping blood from my cheek with my forearm.
They hesitated. Of course they did. Men like that only moved fast when they thought they were safe.
“I have means,” I went on, conversational, like we were discussing catering. “Money. Time. Soldiers with free nights and very creative imaginations. I can stretch a death weeks. Months. Years, if I’m bored enough.” My jaw ticked. “Or you can pick the short version. Either way, it’s coming.”
A ripple went through the line.
One captain stepped forward. Then another. Then the rest, like dominoes finally understanding gravity.
“Kneel.”
No one moved.
I took a single step toward them. “Last chance. Short death or long. On your knees.”
One dropped. The others followed, until all of them knelt in a row, heads forced down.
Behind me, Nik moved.
He rolled his sleeves higher, drew his gun, and walked down the line of captains. He stopped at the first neck. One clean shot.
Body dropped forward.
Next neck. Another shot.
He went captain by captain, while I turned my back on them and faced the vice-heads—the men who would live long enough to remember this properly.
I walked toward their line and let them hear every shot as I closed the distance.
“You know—” I flexed my hand, blood still covered on my knuckles “—I don’t enjoy chaos. Or shouting.”
Another gunshot behind me. A body thudded.
“I prefer order. Structure. Obedience.”
I stopped in front of the nearest vice-head. His pupils were blown wide. Sweat beaded at his hairline. He looked like a child who’d just learned monsters were real and wore suits.
“Tonight you forgot your place.”
The final gunshot rang out as Nikolai finished the line.
I stayed where I was, looking into the vice-head’s eyes with the same calm I used on a child right before I corrected him.
“We’re a dynasty. We don’t negotiate through fear. We collect it.”
He swallowed so hard I heard it.
I straightened, voice rising just enough to carry. “Step forward. All vice-heads.”
They shuffled into a line. Some stumbled, all of them careful not to step on the bodies at their feet.
“Look down.”
They looked.
At their captains. Men who’d been shouting minutes ago. Now meat on concrete.
“This is what happens when your families forget themselves.”
Nik came to stand at my shoulder, blood spatter freckling his sleeves.
“These are the new terms.” His gaze moved slowly along the line. “From tonight, every one of your families operates under Crow oversight. You follow Crow protocol. You sign all deals through us. No independent routes.”
Some men swallowed. Some stared at the corpses like they’d never seen death up close before.
“Failure to comply results in public execution.”
My attention slid back to the captain I’d dropped. His body lay twisted where I’d left it.
“Bring him here.”
Two Crow soldiers moved instantly, dragging the dead man across the concrete. They laid him at my feet. I pulled my knife out as I crouched, took his wrist in my hand, and in one sharp, practiced motion cut through the joint. The blade slid between bones.
His hand came away cleanly.
Always did, if you cut right.
I stood and walked the severed hand over to the vice-head of his family. The man’s eyes fixed on it. I pressed the hand into his chest until he took it.
“You’re going to take this to his father.”
His throat worked.
“You’ll tell him,” I went on, voice softening in the way that made men shake harder, “to cut off his own hand and send it to us. For failing to teach his son to respect Crow law.”
The vice-head’s eyes snapped up to mine, like maybe I was joking.
I wasn’t.
“If I don’t get his hand,” I added, “I’ll come and take both of his. And his wives’.” My head tipped, just slightly. “I don’t make threats. I give consequences. That is me being generous.”
He nodded, because there was nothing else he could do with a dead man’s hand pressed to his chest.
I turned back to the line of survivors, blood tracking lazily down my wrist.
“You’ll go home and erase the word rebellion from your men’s vocabulary. You’ll remind them that Crow law is the reason they’re rich enough to buy these cars, guns, suits.” I gestured to the bodies, “And if you don’t—”
My hand lifted, palm up, offering them the visual in front of them.
“Consider this your future. And the man that you call Vice, will be standing in your position.”
Most people think you remember the begging.
They think the pleas and apologies echo in your head later, when you close your eyes.
They don’t.
What sticks is the feel. The way his skull had sounded under my hands. The shift from man to lesson.