Vengeance in His Bed

The five purple, distinct bruises formatting around the leader’s throat were still swelling, turning a sickening shade of violet against his pale skin as he stood trembling before the desk. He no longer wore his black mask; it had been tossed onto the floor along with the shattered remains of two rifles. The remaining twelve men stood in a rigid, terrified line behind him, their chests still heaving awkwardly as their lungs desperately tried to purge the lingering, phantom trace of Dorrent Grefo’s suffocating winter-frost pheromones.

Bellero Boren didn’t even have his glass of bourbon in hand this time. His hands were curled into tight, shaking fists right on top of his ledgers, his golden eyes burning with a monstrous, cold fire as he stared down the men he had funded with millions of credits.

"You shouldn’t have even bothered coming back to this estate to report your pathetic existence to me if you failed the primary objective," Bellero delivered. He slowly leaned his torso across the desk, his white hair gleaming under the single lamp. "Tell me... what exactly does it require for fifteen mercenaries to snatch one single, fragile slum woman away from two solitary men in an open graveyard? Tell me!"

The leader swallowed hard, his vocal cords clicking painfully against his bruised larynx. "Sir... the tycoon—"

"You are nothing but miserable, spineless failures!" Bellero roared, his fist slamming against the table with a resounding crack that echoed sharply off the walls. "Every single one of you! I gave you a perfect window while the Grefos were distracted by a peasant’s burial! And what did you achieve? You didn’t just drop the prize—you managed to alert Dorrent Grefo that the girl is wanted by an outside faction! You fools!"

He paced behind his chair. "The directive was clear! You were supposed to execute this extraction discreetly! No noise, no alarms, no footprints! Now, that S-tier monster knows exactly what we are hunting!"

"Sir, with all due respect, that graveyard was the only physical window we had to lay our hands on her!" the leader wheezed out defensively, his hands trembling as he gestured wildly toward the floor. "We cannot enter the primary Grefo estate lines! Their private security infrastructure is entirely unbreachable from the outside, and their internal automated turrets would have slaughtered us before we even cleared the perimeter gate! We had to strike when she was out in the open!"

"And you still failed!" Bellero shrieked, his face turning an angry shade of crimson as he reached toward the drawer of his desk, his fingers itching for his firearm to clean out the room.

"Stop it, Father."

Damian’s calm voice sliced through the old man’s raging heat like an icy scalpel.

Damian was standing near the velvet drapes, his arms crossed tightly against his chest. His handsome features were entirely devoid of emotion, though a troubled shadow lurked within his eyes as he watched the team’s pathetic state. He took a slow step forward, his shoes clicking quietly against the Persian carpet as he drew all the attention toward himself.

"I told you just last week that dealing with Dorrent Grefo is not an easy task," Damian stated flatly, his eyes locking onto his father’s furious gaze. "The man is a biological anomaly. He possesses an S-tier primal core that completely defies standard tactical metrics. These men... they are standard Alphas and Betas. They never stood a single chance of outmatching him in a physical territory dispute, especially not when his possessive instincts are triggered."

Damian stopped right next to the line of mercenaries, his eyes tracing the marks on their gear. "He walked right through their rifle fire without even flinching. Your brute-force methods were completely useless from the very beginning, Father."

Bellero spun around to face his son, his jaw locked tight. "So you are standing there defending these useless dogs, Damian?! You are validating their failure?!"

"No, I am stating a scientific fact," Damian hissed back, his voice rising into a sharp, venomous frequency as he stepped closer to the desk, his own A-tier pheromones flaring slightly in frustration. "And more importantly, I am stating the reality of the damage you have just caused. Look at what your impatience has achieved, Bellero! Now, you have successfully alerted Dorrent. And because he already suspects my interest in Jannah, he isn’t going to go looking for these faceless mercenaries. He is going to come looking for war directly from me!"

Damian slammed his palm against the edge of the desk, his face just inches from his father’s. "He is going to bring the entire weight of the Grefo to my hospital door, and right to this sanctum! You have put a massive target directly on my back!"

Bellero let out a short, mocking laugh that sounded completely hollow, his wrinkled features twisting into a look of chilling condescension as he looked at his son’s panicked state. "And what if he does come for war, Damian? Aren’t you an Alpha male of the Boren line? Aren’t you a man? If he comes looking for blood, you should stand your ground and deal with him like a true sovereign instead of whining to me like a frightened child!"

"Deal with him?!" Damian shouted back, his control completely snapping as he threw his hands up in the air. "He is an S-tier beast who just took ten bullets to the torso and still managed to squeeze a man’s neck until his bones cracked! You want me to play a physical game with a monster like that?!"

Damian took a deep, stabilizing breath, his fists clenching within the pockets of his coat as he forced his voice to drop into a hard, freezing line of finality. "You need to stay out of this matter entirely from now on, Father. Leave Jannah Nenth alone. You have used your ruthless, old-school mafia means twice now—first with her grandfather, and now with this graveyard circus—and you have achieved absolutely nothing but chaos. Your methods are obsolete. Stay out of it."

Bellero went entirely still. The mocking laugh died on his lips, replaced by a chilling stillness. He slowly straightened his spine, pulling his vest down with terrifying precision as his golden eyes narrowed into two predatory slits.

"Stay out of it?" Bellero whispered, his voice vibrating with malice. He waved his hand dismissively toward the terrified mercenaries. "All of you, get out of my sight before I change my mind and bury you in that same graveyard."

The leader and his men didn’t wait for another word. They scrambled backward out of the primary study, opening the doors and disappearing into the corridor within three seconds, slamming the wood shut behind them.

Once the room fell into silence, Bellero slowly walked around the desk, his eyes locked dead onto Damian’s rigid form.

"Let me make something clear to your small, medical brain, Damian," Bellero delivered, his voice cold, and devoid of human empathy. "If things continue getting out of hand this way... if the Grefos continue to tighten their hold on her biology, and if it turns out that you truly cannot have Jannah Nenth... then nobody else in this city can have her either."

Damian’s brow furrowed in sudden astonishment, a cold dread instantly pooling in the center of his stomach as he tracked his father’s unhinged expression. "What... what the hell do you mean by that?"

"It is as literal as it sounds, my boy," Bellero sneered, a horrific, calm smile touching the corners of his mouth as he adjusted his heavy gold ring.

The pieces instantly clicked together inside Damian’s brilliant mind, sending a shockwave of intense horror and emotional conflict straight through his veins. The realization that his own father was willing to destroy her completely made his blood run blisteringly cold.

"I hope to God you are not planning to end her life, Father," Damian whispered, his voice trembling with a mixture of fury and rising dread as he stepped directly into the old man’s path. "I hope you aren’t planning to murder her... just like I suspect you ended Frost’s life in that slum fire."

Bellero stopped walking. He looked up at his son, and instead of denying the horrific accusation, his smile simply widened into a chilling, psychopathic grin that reached his golden eyes.

"The game has to end only when the main prize is completely eliminated, Damian," Bellero stated with absolute, terrifying nonchalance, his voice smooth as silk. "If the prize cannot be claimed by the rightful owner, then it must be wiped off the board entirely. That way, there won’t be any more games for the Grefos to win. It simplifies the entire corporate ledger."

"She is an innocent girl!" Damian roared, lunging forward and grabbing his father by the lapels of his expensive silk vest, his face turning pale with absolute disgust. "I will not allow you to end her life, Bellero! I won’t stand by and watch you execute her just because of your sick, psychotic obsession with breeding Enigma grandchildren for your empire! She has nothing to do with your historical wars!"

Bellero didn’t even flinch under his son’s aggressive grip. He slowly reached up, his old, surprisingly strong fingers wrapping around Damian’s wrists and peeling them off his vest with an unbending strength. He patted Damian’s cheek with a mocking, patronizing tenderness.

"You shouldn’t worry your pretty little head so much, my brilliant doctor," Bellero murmured. "Things will be perfectly okay. Everything is moving exactly according to the secondary layout."

The old Mafia lord turned back toward the large glass window overlooking the sprawling sectors of the city, his hands resting behind his back as a dark, triumphant chuckle vibrated from his chest.

"That old, coward Duro... he actually killed himself because his fragile, senile mind couldn’t handle the crushing pressure of watching his precious granddaughter be fought over by the sharks of this city," Bellero delivered with a chilling, remorseless smirk, his eyes reflecting the distant city lights. "He took his own pathetic exit out of this world because he knew he was completely helpless against me. And now that the old man is safely in the dirt... there is nobody left alive to stand in my way to do whatever I want with that girl."