Jordan’s fingers tightened around the trigger but then a hand locked around his waist. The force came out of nowhere. Jordan was yanked backward so hard the world tilted, his footing vanishing as he collapsed between the two seats, breath knocked clean out of his lungs.

  The gunshot thundered a heartbeat later. He felt it before he understood it.

  A sudden warmth. A wet splatter across his shoulders, his neck, his cheek.

  It was blood.

  Moraine’s blood.

  “No—no, no,” Jordan breathed, scrambling upright as the car fishtailed, tires shrieking as Moraine fought the wheel and missed the divider by inches. Jordan’s hands shook as they landed on him, gripping fabric, skin, anything solid.

  “You’re shot,” he whispered, the words barely forming. His eyes locked onto the wound—blood pumping steadily from Moraine’s arm, soaking dark into his sleeve. The round seemed to have gone through the muscle.

  But Moraine barely noticed.

  His jaw was clenched, breath sharp, eyes unfocused—not from pain, but from something far worse. Shock. The kind that came when you looked straight at a future where someone you couldn’t afford to lose was suddenly gone.

  For years, he had tried to hate Jordan with all his being. Cut him out clean, like rot from flesh. Convince himself the boy was just a liability, a weakness he should have buried long ago. Hell, he had promised himself that the next time he faced the boy, he would make him pay for what he had done.

  And yet—

  Jordan was the last thread tying him to a time when life hadn’t been all blood and orders and burn lines on a map. When there had been people. When there had been something that resembled a home.

  The last tether to his sanity.

  If he ever lost him—

  “Keep the windows up!” Moraine barked, pain finally bleeding into his voice as he forced his focus back onto the road. His hand slammed down on the radio switch.

  “Burn. them. all,” he growled in a low ominous tone that caused a heavy feeling to descend in Jordan’s gut.

  The announcement wasn’t loud or dramatic. It was just final.

  Jordan looked up in time to see the men gearing up behind them. The armored vehicles were still in pursuit—but at the intersection, two cars peeled out hard, engines screaming as they cut in with predatory precision. The roofs slid back in perfect unison.

  Neil rose from one of them. Jordan didn’t recognize the other man—but he recognized the weapons.

  Anti -tank rocket launchers.

  Both aimed straight at the armoured vehicles. They were military and this act of retaliation would be deemed terrorism against the state.

  Neil braced the launcher against the reinforced frame, waited for the vehicles to run parallel—then fired. The recoil jolted the cars, streaking forward in twin arcs of fire. The impact was catastrophic. Metal folded. The armored vehicle lifted off the road like a toy, engulfed mid-air as flame swallowed steel. The explosion hit seconds later, a violent shockwave that rattled windows and sent debris raining across the asphalt.

  The pursuit died in fire.

  Jordan exhaled, a shaky breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding as more cars surged up around them—sleek, controlled and unmistakably Moraine’s. A moving wall of protection snapping into place.

  This was disaster.

  Jordan turned to Moraine—and froze.

  Moraine was already looking at him. Just staring. Like he needed to see him breathing. Intact. Still there.

  Jordan swallowed hard, the weight of that look pressing into his chest heavier than any bullet ever could.

  “I am sorry…” He began, the words tumbling out thin and useless. “I didn’t know it would happen. I swear I didn’t mean for it to— I am—”

  He faltered. There was nothing left to offer Moraine that wouldn’t sound like an excuse, nothing that could soften the quiet accusation in his eyes.

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  Whenever he was near Moraine, this happened. Something in him slipped loose. The careful, sharp-edged control he had built over the years dissolved, and in its place surfaced that mule-headed, reckless boy who had once believed himself indestructible simply because Moraine had been there to catch him when he fell. Around him, Jordan forgot himself. He became impulsive and childlike.

  As though time bent backward and refused to let him grow….taking him back to when he had been eleven. When they first met.

  The fever had come without warning—burning hot and unnatural - leaving him shaking so violently the bedframe rattled. He remembered staring at the ceiling, certain he would not see morning. Askai had gone out for work at dawn, promising he would return by evening, but the hours had dragged on and on, he didn’t return.

  By nightfall, he had stopped calling for help and started bargaining with whatever listened to dying children. His body jerked with shivers so sharp they felt like breaking, breath tearing out of his chest in thin, panicked gasps.

  Someone must have carried word to Moraine because suddenly there were voices, hurried and low, cutting through the haze. Footsteps. A door thrown open.

  Moraine had finally come.

  He barely recognized the woman with him at first—only later did he learn she was Kael’s mother. But he remembered Moraine clearly. That dark, unyielding gaze fixed on him every time his eyes fluttered open. Watching. Anchoring him.

  In and out of consciousness, drifting like a leaf caught between worlds, Jordan remembered a hand closing around his—steady, warm, unshaking. He remembered someone leaning close, murmuring words he couldn’t make sense of, repeating them every time he whimpered Askai’s name.

  He’s coming. Stay with me. Just stay.

  And then—finally—Askai had returned.

  ****

  That night had been much like tonight.

  Moraine had marched into the East with his men, advancing openly—deliberately—into territory that had never been challenged before. The target had been a pharmaceutical company owned by an Elite, one of the quiet hoarders who had begun stockpiling the drug the moment whispers of the fever reached his ears. Insurance, in case the sickness ever touched the East.

  Moraine had torn that certainty apart.

  He had emptied their godown down to the last crate, loading the medicine into West-bound trucks while alarms screamed themselves hoarse. The men who tried to stop him were cut down without ceremony. There had been no speeches or warnings that night. Just action and blood.

  That night marked the beginning of an era.

  It was the first time the West had laid hands on an Elite. And the insult had been made unbearable by who led it—a nineteen-year-old street lord, barely grown but still stood unbowed in the heart of the East and walked out with their resources and their pride in pieces.

  The East never acknowledged it publicly. They couldn’t. To do so would have been to admit that their walls were permeable and their men fallible. Their power was just not as absolute as they claimed. Silence became their chosen weapon. But silence did not mean stillness.

  Beneath the surface, the undercurrents shifted violently.

  Overnight, Moraine Valez became more than a name. He became a hero to the West, a miracle. A Messiah scraped out of their own filth, yet standing above it all with bloodied hands and an unbowed spine.

  That night, he earned the loyalty from people who had no hearts left to hold it.

  The East learned its lesson just as swiftly.

  For the first time, it understood that the West would not always remain contained, obedient, or silent.

  Moraine was declared a terrorist before dawn, his face circulated through TV channels, Radios for crimes known only to the West.

  For three years, they hunted him through the streets they despised—streets they had never bothered to understand. They sent men who believed in ranks and rules into alleys that obeyed neither.

  But Moraine was the true son of the West.

  It hid him in its bosom like a phantom - he was everywhere and nowhere at once—heard in rumors, felt in losses, traced only in aftermaths. Every failed operation fed the myth.

  Moraine’s networks spread like a living thing, threading through the entire West. Old street gangs swore fealty overnight, not out of admiration but survival. Aligning with Moraine meant relevance and power. Those who refused were silently eradicated overnight.

  Karla and Qurais watched it all with clenched jaws and sharpened smiles. They loathed him—his rise, his audacity, the way the streets bent toward him despite themselves. Yet even they kept their claws sheathed.

  The simmering discontent of the West had finally boiled over, and Moraine was the only force that did not fear the flood. The fever had ravaged families, emptied homes, and left grief rotting in alleyways. Moraine had brought the cure to their poison. He had turned the reapers from their doors and, for a time, made death look elsewhere.

  It was in that thick of blood and hope that Askai became Moraine’s most trusted sentry. For three years, Moraine ruled from the shadows while Askai took the stage—his voice, his blade, his warning to the restless and the cruel. The West learned to breathe again, cautiously, as one does after surviving a long illness.

  Jordan was fourteen when Moraine finally returned.

  They knew peace then, one that rang in shared meals, unguarded laughter, mornings that did not begin with dread. Happiness settled over them so gently that Jordan never thought to count it. If he had known how numbered those moments were, he would have lived every waking second inside them, memorized them the way one memorizes last words.

  The car rolled into a fancy parking lot. He had not realized when the roars of the engines had merged into the mechanical din of the West. Jordan was out the door instantly, reaching out for Moraine. Neil was faster. He caught Moraine first, steady and practiced.

  “Diana’s waiting with a surgeon,” Neil said.

  Moraine grunted in reply. He didn’t look back. He walked away as though there was nothing at all he was leaving behind.

  Jordan watched him disappear into the huge mansion, into the light and shadow that seemed to belong to him more than anywhere else.

  Maybe he wasn’t leaving anything behind, Jordan thought.