Prologue
War changes men.
Some slowly, like rust working its way through steel. Others all at once, in a single strike that shatters everything they thought they knew.
For us, it had been both.
The war with the demons had been brewing long before Roman brought Layla into our lives, but she was the spark that turned it into an inferno. The moment he claimed her, the game shifted. The Irish mafia moved against us, thinking they could take a piece of what was ours. The demons, led by Malakai, slipped in through the chaos, testing our borders, testing our patience.
They made a mistake.
They had the audacity and touched her. Hurt her. Roman nearly burned the city to ash that night, and we all stood with him. Demons died and the streets ran black with vengeance until their leaders hid in the shadows.
I played my role, as I always do, three steps ahead, seeing the angles before anyone else. We shut down demon nests and choked the Irish’s supply lines. Took back territory and made them pay for every inch they’d tried to take from us.
But war isn’t just bullets and blades. It’s the spaces in between, the quiet moments where you think it might finally be over… until it isn’t.
Roman got his victory. He took Connor Flannery’s head for daring to threaten his mate. Layla gave him a son, the next generation of our bloodline. And for the first time in a long time, I thought maybe we could breathe.
But there’s one thing you learn when you’ve lived in the shadows as long as we have, and that is that enemies don’t vanish. They wait. They hide like the cowards they are, and they rebuild.
And sometimes, you don’t find the war. The war finds you.
Chapter 1
The warehouse sat like a carcass on the edge of the docks, its corrugated steel siding rusted through in places, windows blacked out with grime. One of the Irish’s forgotten strongholds, at least that’s what they wanted people to think.
From the outside, it looked abandoned, another casualty of the port’s slow decay. Inside, it was something else entirely.
The front offices were stripped bare, desks overturned, old paperwork curling yellow on the floor. Beyond that, the main floor stretched into shadows, there were rows of empty crates stacked high, the kind that looked like they hadn’t been touched in years. A perfect cover.
Our intel had been clear; the Irish were using the lower levels for storage. Volken was beside me, silent, his knife already loose in his grip. We weren’t here for business. We were here for blood, for payback.
Roman’s war with the Irish had cracked their operations wide open, and it was my job to slip into the fractures and tear them apart from the inside. Tonight was one of those tears.
That’s when it hit me, the stench of rot. Not just death, death I could stomach, but something older, deeper. A sour, tainted undercurrent that clung to the air like it had been soaking into the walls for decades. It was the smell of fear left toolong, of flesh rotting where it shouldn’t, of something unnatural festering in the dark.
I stepped over the body of the first guard I’d dropped, my boot grinding into the slick patch of blood pooling beneath him. The crunch of his windpipe breaking still echoed in my ears, a satisfying sound.
Volken moved ahead without a word, his long blade swinging low at his side, dripping a thin, steady line of crimson onto the filthy concrete. He didn’t need to look at me; we moved like shadows cut from the same cloth, each knowing exactly what the other would do.
The top level was already cleared, there was nothing left but Irish scum cooling in their own blood, their bodies tossed against the walls like broken dolls. The reek of demon blood was mixed in with theirs, thick and metallic, making my teeth ache. The two breeds had been working together, their filth blending seamlessly. It told me everything I needed to know about the state of this war.
Troy’s voice cracked over my comms, the sound sharp in my ear.
“Lower levels locked down. There are heavy chains, looks like someone didn’t want what’s inside getting out.”
His tone told me enough; it wasn’t weapons they were hiding or money.
I slowed, my hand resting loosely on the hilt of my dagger. My mind was already piecing together the obvious. The Irish didn’t use heavy chains for cargo. Chains were for something alive. And if they were keeping something alive in a place like this, it wasn’t because they wanted it to stay that way.
“Prisoners,” I said flatly into the comms, my voice low. “Bargaining chips.”
And in my gut, I knew that whoever was behind that door wasn’t just leverage. Not anymore. They were broken things the Irish thought they could sell.
We descended the stairwell in silence, the air growing colder and heavier the deeper we went, until it felt like the walls themselves were pressing in. The concrete was damp underfoot, streaked with rust-coloured stains that weren’t all from water.
At the bottom, the corridor opened into a wide service area lit by flickering overhead bulbs. Seven of my men stood waiting in a loose semicircle in front of the heavy steel door Troy had mentioned. They weren’t just soldiers, they were my soldiers, the best I had.
