“Surveillance scrubbed?”
“I pulled every trace.”
Luca gave a short nod. “Then we move.”
I turned toward the table, watching the city burn red and white across its surface.
Ports were mine.
Dockside contracts, customs bribes and container routes. Every ship that touched East Dock ran under my name.
Unions bent when I leaned. Inspectors signed before they read. If they resisted? They drowned quiet.
Ports weren’t just steel and water. They were arteries. And if you controlled arteries, you controlled the city’s pulse.
But it wasn’t just ports. It was everything bleeding out of them.
Clubs, drugs, territory enforcement, street loyalty and distribution. If it moved through Villain—powder, pills, bodies, or bullets—I ran it.
Now I had Vince’s civic contracts on top.
Construction. Real estate. Zoning boards. Shell developers. The concrete you poured to reinforce silence.
He’d mapped the city’s bones. And beneath them he’d buried the bodies. Torture sites. Clean teams. Punishment protocols. Vince hadn’t delegated that part. He’d handled it himself.
Now that weight shifted. Rome and I carried it.
Luca held the front-facing world.
Restaurants. Hotels. Casinos. Border logistics. Offshore laundries. Surveillance tech.
The casinos, Obsidian Crown, Black Vault, The Gilded Cage—looked like marble and gold, but they were encryption engines at the core. Syndicate-only floors under chandeliers.
He’d inherited Nikolai’s casino division and turned it into a digital empire. Offshore accounts. Encrypted betting. Quiet diplomacy with men twice his age who walked away convinced they’d done him the favor.
Where I broke bones, Luca broke systems. And he made it look effortless.
Rome was enforcement.
Vice. Clubs. Escort shells. Blackmail suites. Temptation on one side, punishment on the other. His clubs were sealed—masked access with coded tattoos. No cameras, no minors or trafficking. Those line was never crossed.
Now he had Vince’s old enforcement routes—gun runs, tactical rotations, warehouses. He moved men and bodies like chess pieces.
“We’re stretched,” Luca muttered, not looking up from the table. “Three-man weight for five-man war.”
Rome tapped his knife on the corner of the table. “Then we move men. Street-level enforcement’s bleeding too heavy.”
I nodded. “Split it. I’ll take East and the ports. You hold South and the tunnels.”
Rome’s mouth twitched. “That’s eighty percent of the city.”
“Exactly. Luca keeps the syndicate floors calm. We keep the streets quiet.”
“Calm won’t hold,” Luca pressed. “Syndicate’s circling already. Even the Sovereigns are watching. They’re all waiting for one mistake. They’ll use Vince’s absence as proof.”
“They can wait all they want,” Rome smirked, “They won’t like the answer.”
“Still,” Luca said, “we need to show a united front. I’ve got three meetings this week—Sable Room, The Archive, Black Vault. If I don’t walk in steady, they’ll start carving up the table without us.”
