The morning sun didn't rise over the Falco estate; it bled through the grey mist, casting long, sickly shadows across the marble halls. The atmosphere was suffocating. The guards moved like ghosts, their eyes darting toward the master study, their whispers dying the moment they sensed the heavy, electric tension radiating from the top floor. The news had spread like a virus: Elina Valmont was gone. And Orion Falco had let her go.
In the center of the storm sat Orion.
He was standing by the floor to ceiling windows, a glass of black coffee forgotten on the table beside him. He didn't look like a man who had lost a prisoner; he looked like a king waiting for a coup. His broad shoulders were tense, his silhouette sharp against the dim morning light. He was a statue of controlled fury.
The heavy oak doors creaked open. A man in a dark tactical mask stepped in, his movements hesitant, his boots scuffing the floor with a sound that felt like a sacrilege in the silence. He stopped several feet away, his gaze fixed on the floor. He knew better than to look Orion Falco in the eye when the air felt this sharp.
"Speak," Orion commanded. The word wasn't loud, but it carried the weight of a death sentence.
The masked man swallowed, the sound audible in the stillness. "Boss... we tracked the movement near the old docks. The scouts... they saw them."
Orion didn't turn. "And?"
"You were right, boss," the man whispered, his voice trembling with a sudden, terrifying realization. "Ares... he wasn't just surviving. He's with the Black Serpent Syndicate. He's been working with them since the night of the massacre."
The glass in Orion's hand didn't shatter that would have been too simple. Instead, Orion simply froze. The world seemed to tilt on its axis. The silence that followed was deafening, a vacuum that sucked the very breath from the room.
Ares.
The name felt like a jagged piece of glass in his mind. Every memory of the night the Valmonts burned the chaos, the blood, the strategic way the guards had been neutralized suddenly reconfigured itself into a grotesque new shape. Ares hadn't been a victim of the chaos. He had been the architect of it. He had used Orion's rage, Orion's thirst for vengeance, as a weapon to wipe his own family off the map.
Orion turned slowly. His face was a mask of devastating, cold fury, but for a split second, his blue eyes looked shattered, as if a crack had appeared in the very foundation of his soul.
"He used me," Orion murmured, his voice a low, lethal growl that sounded more like a beast than a man. "He let me play the monster so he could play the survivor."
His grip tightened on the edge of the table, his knuckles turning white. Then, a dark, terrifying realization dawned in his eyes. The anger shifted, morphing into something much more dangerous: a singular, burning purpose.
"And Elina?" Orion's voice dropped to a whisper that promised carnage. "Where is she?"
"She's with them, boss. She thinks he's her savior."
A dark, humorless laugh escaped Orion's lips a sound that made the masked man flinch. He stepped toward the window, his gaze piercing through the mist toward the city.
"Then the game is over," Orion said, his voice vibrating with a terrifying, quiet power. "Ares thinks he's won. But he forgot one thing..." He turned, his eyes burning with a predatory light. "...you don't keep a bird in a cage of lies and expect it not to bleed when the cage breaks. Tell the men to gear up. We aren't just hunting a girl anymore. We are hunting a Traitor."