Everyone said yes,he placed seven sacks on the table.
When he was done he stepped back and looked at what remained and let the silence hold for exactly as long as it needed to.
"I have to be honest with you," he said finally. "It would be an embarrassment. For men who held the rankings you held to continue in this world without their hands." He straightened his jacket. "That kind of pity does not suit anyone at this level." He looked at each of them in turn. "So you are all going to die."
The protests came all at once.
"Ten seconds," Jokull said.
He turned and walked toward the door of the tavern at the same unhurried pace he had entered it, pushed it open and stepped out into the night air without looking back.
Behind him the sounds came. Sharp. Definitive. Then the splatter of something against the tavern windows and the walls and the floor, and then nothing at all.
Otz appeared at his shoulder before the echo had settled.
"Clean the premises," Jokull said. "Claim possession of everything inside."
"Yes sir."
"The hands. Distribute them to the teams at each warehouse site. They will need them for the palm locks. Clear all personal belongings once access is secured."
"Yes sir." Otz was already on his phone.
It moved through the dark world the way only truly significant things did, fast and without warning and with the particular electricity that accompanied a shift in power that nobody had seen coming.
A black motorcycle led the procession down the road, seven black vans following in close formation behind it, unhurried and absolute.
By the time it appeared on Blackgram the speculation had already begun, threads multiplying across the underground network as the confirmation spread from one corner of the dark world to the other. The third through tenth ranking mafiosos, purged in a single evening. One name attached to all of it. One name that most of them had never heard before tonight.
For some the news arrived with dread.
For others, the ones who had spent years watching the rankings from just below, it arrived like a door being opened from the inside.
Their positions were moving upward.
The board had changed.
The motorcycle slowed and Cosmina was already at the door before he had fully stopped.
"Brother! Brother!"
He climbed off and directed the vans toward the warehouse with a single gesture before turning to her. He lifted her the same way he always had, like no time had passed at all, and carried her inside.
Oriana appeared in the hallway, composed as always, a dish towel folded over her arm. "I have served your food. Come and eat."
"I am not hungry."
A pause. "Did you stop somewhere for dinner?"
"Cosmina." He looked down at the small face peering up at him. "Go to your room. I have a surprise waiting for you."
Her eyes went wide. "Yes!" She was gone before the word had finished leaving her mouth.
The hallway went quiet.
Jokull set his jacket over the banister and looked at Oriana with the particular expression of someone who had decided on the drive home that there was no longer any reason to be careful with his words.
"Stop performing," he said. "The caring mother act. It does not suit you and I am not interested in it." He kept his voice even, which somehow made it worse than if he had raised it. "All you ever did was pour your time and energy into Ravi. Propping him up. Telling everyone he was the rightful heir with your stories and your justifications."
Ravi had not always been an enemy.
He had been trained within the Ozz organisation, brought up inside its structure, groomed for a position that should have meant loyalty. Instead he had turned, and when he turned he had done it completely, striking the company from the inside in a way that sent a blow through its foundations that had never fully healed.
"You have all felt that blow," Jokull said. "Every single one of you in this house has felt what that choice cost."
Oriana's expression shifted into something more fragile than she intended to show. "You do not understand. I wanted what was best. For all of you."
"I am not sitting here tonight for a lecture," Jokull said flatly. "We are done with this conversation."
He turned and walked down the hallway toward Cosmina's room, leaving Oriana standing alone in the silence he had made.
The morning routine was mechanical now. Wash. Dress. Sit.
Aine sat on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap and her face telling the walls nothing. The room looked exactly the same as it had every morning since she arrived. Same walls. Same locked door. Same window with its wooden sash frame running along the top.
She looked at the window.
The idea arrived quietly and without announcement and before she had fully decided anything her feet were already moving. She crossed the room and pushed the window open, leaning out to look down.
The ground was a long way below. She was on the top floor of the building, the street below small and distant and completely indifferent to whether she survived or not.
"This is already a matter of life and death," she said quietly to herself. "Either I survive the fall or I do not."
She climbed onto the windowsill.
The door burst open behind her.
She heard the sharp mechanical clatter of the taggy shutters slamming down somewhere below, the sound of a maid's feet hitting the stairs at a run. She did not look back.
Ravi was already moving toward the exit when the voice cut through the house.
He stopped.
"It had better be worth screaming my name," he said without turning around.
Jin-Ju's breath came in short and fast. "Sir. The girl is trying to jump."
Something moved across his face that he did not give a name to. "Aine." He said it once, sharply, and turned to his men with a single look that sent them moving toward her room immediately.