“What about that time?” Askai leaned in, completely absorbed. As if he could ever forget.

  He had thought he’d seen the worst when the fever ravaged the alleys of the West, creeping into homes with a quiet certainty of death. But what followed had been something else entirely.

  An invisible force from the East descended upon the West. For raiding a few medicine stocks, they branded Moraine a terrorist. The raid itself had been violent—but calculated. Nothing as meaningless or monstrous as the East portrayed it to be.

  The East, however, showed no mercy.

  It tore open the West’s chest, street by street, body by body, trying to unearth the mystery of Moraine’s disappearance. Sanctions were nothing new, but this felt different. Like vengeance. A personal vendetta wrapped neatly in the black-and-white ink of official letters.

  The West fought back.

  Or Moraine did.

  He was God in the West for a reason.

  Evidence surfaced where it shouldn’t have. Whispers moved faster than soldiers. Moraine redirected the East’s fury with surgical precision, turning it on rivals and enemies alike.

  Askai had led the charge in those days.

  He had walked the streets for Moraine, measuring loyalties, reading fear like a second language. Small gangs folded easily, intoxicated by Moraine’s legend. The dock cartels were harder. Askai had risked everything to infiltrate them, to place them squarely in the East’s line of fire.

  When the East was finished, Moraine returned to collect what remained.

  Very little did.

  Askai had stood at the centre of that storm—the one that shattered the cartels. And more often than not, he felt it: the sense that someone was watching from the shadows. Someone who saw the naked truth beneath the lies they crafted to draw blood.

  Someone who saw it all—and did not care.

  In those days, whispers ran through the Eastern ranks. A name spoken softly. Black Maverick.

  Askai had assumed it was a commander. Or the codename of the operation.

  There was little about that time he did not know.

  Which was why the next words out of Brendon’s mouth shattered his certainty.

  “The whole incident was a machination by the East—to gain access to the docks.”

  “That can’t be,” Askai said at once. The idea was absurd. The kind of rambling that came from paranoia or madness.

  “Think about it,” Brendon pressed quietly. “The dock cartels were a problem even then. Piracy, murders, theft—they were choking the waters around Nolan. You know that. The East wanted them broken, but they couldn’t reach them through the layers of smaller gangs guarding the West’s borders.” He paused. “Do you know who Patrice Regale handed the reins to at that time?”

  Askai’s breath hitched. He already knew the answer—but dreaded it anyway.

  “Vance Regale,” Brendon said. “He was the Black Maverick.”

  The words landed without force, yet they struck harder than any blow.

  “He used the fever as a ploy,” Brendon went on. “Pestilence wasn’t new to the West. We’ve survived worse. But he dangled the cure in front of us, waited for someone to take the bait. If not Moraine, someone else would have done it. And the Eastern Media didn’t exaggerate what happened at that pharmaceutical godown.” His voice dropped. “The East Guard slaughtered their own men, burned the place down, and pinned it all on the West.”

  Askai didn’t move. His gaze remained steady, unblinking. The gibberish was starting to make sense and the room suddenly felt too small, too suffocating...

  “Hard to believe, right?” Brendon said softly. “The East worships their own.” Then, leaning closer, almost whispering, he added, “Eric believes Vance isn’t a pure Eastern Elite. So has fewer scruples about cutting down those he despises in the East. If that’s true…” He trailed off.

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  “I believe Eric should be next.” Brendon added with a chuckle.

  Soon he fell silent, watching Askai. But Askai only shook his head, burying his face in his hands. He looked—strangely—heartbroken.

  The implications spiraled into places Brendon didn’t want to follow.

  “Have you told anyone?” Askai asked hoarsely. “Moraine?”

  “I don’t know,” Brendon admitted. “There’s more—and I don’t know if I should tell him at all.”

  Askai lifted his head, eyes hollow. “What else could there be?”

  “Eric gloated that night, saying Vance miscalculated,” Brendon continued. “He never intended to give the West a hero. But once the plan began, he had no choice but to follow through. The East took a hit to its image—even though they achieved their objective. Patrice didn’t forgive that. Vance was sent abroad.”

  A beat.

  “But he came back.”

  Their eyes met. The truth slid into place without needing words.

  “No,” Askai breathed. “It can’t be.”

  “He was the one behind the wheel when Moraine was forced to step down. He was the one who propped up Uncle Tommie and kept him under his boot.” Brendon’s voice sharpened despite himself. “Askai—you’re seeing someone who terrified that man.”

  “It’s a lie,” Askai snapped. “You can’t trust the words of a drunk boy who clearly hates him. How come someone turned our lives upside down and we didn’t even know his name?!”

  “That’s one reason I haven’t told Moraine,” Brendon said evenly. “Maybe he knows about him. Maybe he doesn’t. But the logic fits. Vance returns just as Moraine reaches for the Crown. And if even a fragment of this is true—Jordan is in danger.” His jaw tightened. “He’s the last leverage left. Moraine won’t give him up. And using Vance to get him back—”

  He shook his head.

  “That’s not a rescue,” Brendon finished quietly. “That’s leading a sheep straight to the wolf.”

  

  Askai’s hands fisted at his sides before he could stop them. He slammed his palm into the laminated wooden table, hard enough to make its legs groan in protest. He welcomed the sound. He needed it—needed something loud enough to drown out the voices in his head, the fragments of sentences that kept circling back like vultures.

  “…Patrice Regale and I share the same dream…”

  “…I want to see the West burn…”

  “…Those rats deserve nothing…”

  He had always known Vance despised the West. He knew he was behind the recent raids. Askai had accepted that much with a grim kind of resignation. Hatred, after all, was common currency between East and West. But this—this—went far beyond hatred.

  

  Even in his worst imaginings, he had never pictured Vance as this.

  Lucifer to their hell. The architect of the fire that had consumed them for years.

  Bren had only heard stories, half-whispered accounts traded in fear and awe. Askai had lived it. He had walked through the aftermath with blood soaking into his boots and smoke clawing at his lungs. He had seen what was left behind once the East was done making its point.

  The docks.

  They were the West’s lungs, its arteries, its only reason it had not choked to death long ago. Nothing grew in that land. There were no mines, no factories worth the name. No honest merchant crossed the border expecting contracts to be honored, no respectable man sought services there unless desperation had already stripped him bare.

  The West survived on what it smuggled.

  Flesh. Weapons. Drugs.

  Medicine. Food. Fuel.

  Everything that kept the slums breathing came through the docks, and the docks belonged to the cartels.

  Magi had been their undisputed king. He held the West’s lifeline in his hands and knew it. Power had swollen his ego until it spilled over into recklessness, until he began to believe himself untouchable—even by the East. Askai had never known what exactly triggered the conflict. Only that something had gone terribly, irreversibly wrong.

  And if the docks had been the true target all along, then Magi’s mistake must have been unforgivable.

  It wasn’t the massacres themselves that haunted Askai most. Death was familiar. Violence was expected. It was how it had been done.

  Each cartel was made an example of before it was erased. Pain was not incidental—it was curated. Bodies were broken slowly, methodically, like lessons written in flesh. Some were mutilated and left alive long enough to understand what had been taken from them. Others were boiled alive, screams swallowed by steam, like vermin dropped into pots. Stakes lined the routes into the docks, corpses left to rot where everyone could see them. Even years later, Askai swore the air still remembered the smell.

  Fear had been the real weapon.

  And now the question clawed its way up from his gut, ugly and unwanted.

  Was his Vance capable of that?

  What had they done to him to make him this way?

  Askai found no answers—only more questions piling atop one another, threatening to bury him. But clarity came in one sharp, undeniable form.

  If war was coming again, he would not let his brothers be crushed beneath it.

  He would bargain with the devil himself if he had to.

  Which meant he needed to know exactly who the devil was.

  “You said Vance is the heir to the East Guards,” Askai said at last, his voice tight, controlled. “So who’s leading them now? Kevin?”

  From everything he had overheard, Patrice Regale was no longer at the helm. Power had shifted—quietly, decisively.

  Brendon clicked his tongue. “Kevin was Patrice’s first choice. Golden son. Obvious successor.” He snorted. “But apparently they had a falling out. No one knows the details. We should be thanking whatever gods still bother with us—Kevin’s too volatile. Give him command and he’d have turned half the West into glass.”

  Brendon looked up at Askai then, his expression sobering.

  “It’s Salvor Regale,” he said. “Kevin’s older brother.”

  The name settled heavily in the room.

  Another Regale. Another shadow behind the throne.

  Askai leaned back slowly, the weight of it pressing down on his chest. One devil, or many—it hardly mattered anymore. The board was bigger than he had imagined, the pieces sharper.

  And Jordan was somewhere in the middle of it.