Chapter forty-seven
Riven
The gunfire exploded through the tunnel so loud it nearly ruptured my eardrums. I fired back on pure instinct alone.
One of Naoya’s soldiers dropped instantly, his body slamming against the SUV behind him, but the others moved with terrifying precision.
Militarily and organized. Nothing like the sloppy violence Stonebridge gangs were used to. Dion grabbed my jacket hard.
“Move!” He wailed.
Bullets tore through concrete where my head had been half a second earlier. We bolted deeper into the tunnels as Naoya’s men opened fire behind us. Sparks burst from the rail tracks. Metal screamed. Red emergency lights painted the entire underground facility in violent flashes of crimson.
Naoya never moved. That was the part I couldn’t stop seeing.
Even while bullets flew around him, he just stood there watching us disappear deeper into the tunnels like this was all part of the fucking plan.
Like we were exactly where he wanted us.
My chest burned with rage so intense it felt poisonous.
Him. It was him. Not Hades, but connected. High enough to know. High enough to command. And somehow that made me even angrier. Because Nadia was halfway dead because of him. The Hattoris
and Kingsmen weren’t just another gang in Stonebridge. They were part of the machine.
“This way!” Dion shouted.
We cut sharply through a side tunnel just as another wave of operatives flooded the main passage behind us.
The underground station became chaos instantly.
Alarms, gunfire, and shouting. Olympus was evacuating, destroying evidence.
One soldier sprinted across the loading station carrying stacks of files toward a furnace room farther down the corridor.
I shot him in the spine. The files scattered across the floor. Photographs, medical records. Children. I saw Nadia’s face again among them before Dion physically dragged me away.
“Riven!”
I stumbled after him through another tunnel branch while bullets ripped apart the walls behind us.
The deeper we ran, the older the tunnels became.
Concrete gave way to rough stone again. Mining supports groaned overhead while water rushed beneath rusted grates in the floor.
Dion was breathing hard now. Not from exhaustion, but from panic.
Good. Because I was fuming. My thoughts kept replaying Naoya’s words over and over again.
You were always a distraction. Not an insult, but a fact. Olympus didn’t care about me. I was collateral. An inconvenience. Something standing between them and Nadia. Which meant every terrible thing she’d feared was true. The tunnel forked ahead. Dion stopped abruptly.
“Fuck.”
“What?” He swept his flashlight across both directions.
“No idea where these lead.” Behind us, shouting echoed closer. There was no time. I pointed left.
“Go.” We sprinted again.
The tunnel narrowed sharply before opening into another chamber deeper underground.
And suddenly? The smell hit me. Rot, human rot.
My stomach twisted instantly. Rows of cages lined the walls.
Empty now, mostly. Chains hung from the ceilings.
Mattresses rotted on concrete floors. Medical restraints bolted into walls. Dion froze beside me.
“What the fuck…”
Human trafficking. Not transport, storage.
Olympus had been keeping people down here.
Children and teenagers, maybe for years.
One wall held carved tally marks scratched into the stone.
Thousands of them. I suddenly wanted to burn Stonebridge to the fucking ground.
Dion moved farther into the room slowly, then stopped.
“Riven….” I turned.
His flashlight illuminated another wall covered in photographs. Not missing people this time. Candidates. Teenagers, children, adults. Some circled in red, others crossed out entirely. And at the center of the wall-
Nadia.
Dozens of photos. Her racing, her fighting. Her walking through town, standing outside the diner, leaving the LBC garage. They’d been watching her constantly, for fucking years. My pulse became deafening. Beneath the photos sat typed notes.
Behavioral volatility.
Aggression markers.
Resistance conditioning.
Lineage confirmed.
My blood ran cold. Not metaphor, but lineage.
They really believed this shit. No, it was worse.
They built their entire organization around it.
Olympus wasn’t just trafficking people. They were breeding successors.
Heirs. The realization slammed into me so violently I nearly staggered. That’s what transition meant.
The old leadership replacing themselves. Using bloodlines, conditioning, selection. And Nadia? Nadia was never supposed to escape them. Dion stared at another file nearby, his face drained of color. I stepped closer. The folder bore his name.
REJECTED SUCCESSION POSSIBILITY
DION HATTORI
“What the fuck does that mean?” His jaw tightened instantly.
I didn’t answer. Because I saw the next line underneath. Emotional instability. Lack of obedience. Insufficient psychological compliance. Rejected. Not a son, but a candidate. My stomach dropped. Naoya
wasn’t raising a family. He was evaluating replacements. Dion looked sick now. Viscerally sick.
“He knew.”
Yeah, he did. Probably his entire life. The tunnel lights suddenly flickered overhead.
Then died completely. Darkness swallowed us whole.
A second later, emergency generators kicked in somewhere deeper underground, flooding the chamber with dim red lighting again.
Then came Naoya’s voice over the intercom. Calm, controlled, everywhere.
“Dion.” The sound of his father’s voice made Dion physically stiffen beside me.
“You are making this unnecessarily difficult.” I tightened my grip on the gun. Naoya continued.
“The girl is already dead.” Rage detonated inside me instantly.
“She’s alive.” I snarled.
“For now.” Dion looked toward the speakers mounted high in the corners.
“Fuck you.” Silence answered him briefly.
“You were not meant for this burden.” Burden , like Olympus was some noble responsibility instead of a fucking nightmare operation built on blood and suffering. I stepped toward the intercom.
“You nearly killed her because she wouldn’t obey you?” Another pause.
“She was given every opportunity.”
My vision went red. Not because of what he said, but because of how he said it. Cold and
dismissive, like Nadia’s entire life amounted to a failed investment. Dion suddenly grabbed my arm.
“Riven.” I turned.
Headlights were moving through the tunnel toward us.
More SUVs. More operatives. We were out of time.
Dion looked shaken now in a way I’d never seen before.
Not scared of dying, but scared of understanding.
Because now he knew the truth too. The Kingsmen weren’t a family legacy.
They were infrastructure. And Naoya Hattori?
He wasn’t just some gang leader sitting on the North side throne with eyes on the South side.
He was part of something much older. The SUVs accelerated toward the chamber.
I raised my gun. Beside me, Dion did the same. And somewhere above us, Nadia lay unconscious while the town built to cage her finally started collapsing in on itself.