Chapter 3 - Blood Doesn't Lie
The penthouse occupied the top three floors of the Olympus Tower on 57th Street. It was a fortress of reinforced glass, steel, and private biometric elevators—a monument to the empire I had built with blood, leverage, and sheer will. For five years, it had been a mausoleum where Victor and I lived like two ghosts surrounded by modern art and silence.
Tonight, it became a trauma bay.
Dr. Charles Cole, a silver-haired trauma specialist who had patched up my men in back-alley safe houses long before he became Chief of Surgery at Columbia Presbyterian, dropped his leather medical bag onto the white marble floor of the master suite.
He took one look at the two boys lying side-by-side on the king-sized bed, their filthy clothes cut away, wrapped in heated goose-down blankets, and his breath caught in his throat.
“Devin...” Cole whispered, his hand hovering over his stethoscope. “What is this? Who are they?”
“Do the swabs, Charles,” I said, standing at the foot of the bed with a glass of neat bourbon that I hadn't touched. “Run the rapid DNA profile. I don't need you to ask questions. I need you to confirm what my soul already knows.”
Cole swallowed hard, nodded, and went to work. For the next hour, the only sounds in the vast room were the rhythmic beep of a portable vitals monitor, the hiss of supplemental oxygen, and the low, steady murmur of Victor sitting in the corner, reading a picture book aloud to brothers who couldn't hear him.
Cole drew blood, swabbed cheeks, treated the deep lacerations on their feet from walking barefoot over broken asphalt, and administered IV fluids for severe dehydration and malnutrition.
“They’re severely underweight,” Cole said softly, stepping into my study an hour later and sliding the glass door shut. His face was grim. “Deficiencies in Vitamin D, iron, calcium. They haven't had a proper meal in weeks, maybe months. But Devin... that’s not the worst of it.”
My jaw tightened until the bone ached. “Speak.”
Cole pulled out a digital tablet, flicking through high-resolution scans he had taken with a portable ultrasound device. “Look at the lateral aspect of their left thighs. Both of them.”
On the screen, beneath the skin, rested a faint, cylindrical shadow no larger than a grain of rice.
“Subcutaneous microchips,” Cole said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Not pets, Devin. Medical-grade RFID tracking implants. The kind used in high-security biometric trials or... black-market clinical custody. Whoever had these boys wasn't just hiding them. They were monitoring their vitals remotely. Tracking their geographical coordinates.”
The crystal glass in my hand shattered.
Bourbon and blood dripped onto the Persian rug as shards of heavy glass bit into my palm. I didn't blink. I didn't feel it.
“Are the chips active?” I asked, my voice terrifyingly calm.
“No,” Cole said quickly. “The power sources were burned out. Someone fried them with an localized electromagnetic pulse. Probably a handheld cattle prod or a homebrew stun gun. It left small burn scars on their skin. Whoever took them... wanted off the grid in a hurry.”
“Maya,” I muttered.
Before Cole could answer, the portable desktop analyzer on my desk let out three sharp chimes. A green progress bar reached one hundred percent.
Cole turned to the monitor. He stared at the screen for a long, agonizing minute. When he turned back to me, the color had drained completely from his face.
“Nine-point-nine-nine-nine percent paternal match,” Cole whispered, reading the data. “Full biological siblings to Victor Mallory. Devin... they’re your sons. Priya was their mother. They’re the triplets.”
Even though I had known the moment Aiden looked at me with those green-gold eyes, hearing the science say it felt like someone had cracked my chest open with a sledgehammer.
Triplets.
Five years ago, while I had wept over a closed mahogany casket in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, clutching a newborn Victor against my chest, my other two sons were being branded like livestock and handed over to shadows.
“Boss.” Dante appeared in the doorway, his phone pressed to his ear. His knuckles were white. “We found the vehicle Maya Thorne was driving. A stolen 2018 Honda Civic. Abandoned behind an industrial laundry plant in Long Island City.”
“And Maya?”
“Not in the car,” Dante said, stepping into the room. “Blood on the driver’s side door handle. Not a lot, but enough. Boss... the local precinct caught a 911 call forty minutes ago from an abandoned warehouse two blocks from the car. Gunfire reported. Silenced weapons. The caller said men in tactical gear were clearing the building floor by floor.”
“The people hunting the boys,” I said, the ice in my veins turning into boiling acid.
“Looks like it,” Dante said. “Maya didn't abandon those kids because she was cruel, Devin. She left them by that dumpster because she knew our patrol route. She knew your convoy took Tenth Avenue back from the Brooklyn shipyard every Tuesday night at ten. She used them as bait to save their lives—because she knew she was going to get caught.”
I looked through the open door toward the bedroom.
Aaron was awake.
He was sitting upright in the massive bed, clutching the blankets up to his chin. His hollow, bruised eyes were fixed on me. He had heard the words. He didn't understand the science, but he understood the violence vibrating through the penthouse walls.
I walked into the bedroom, knelt down beside the bed, and wrapped a clean linen towel around my bleeding hand so he wouldn't see it.
“You’re safe now, Aaron,” I said gently.
The boy stared at me, his lip trembling. “Are you going to shoot Maya Auntie?”
“No,” I told him, looking straight into his soul. “I’m going to save her. And then I’m going to kill every single person who ever made you sleep in the rain.”
For the first time, Aaron didn't pull away. He looked down at my bandaged hand, then reached out with one tiny, scarred finger and touched my knuckles.
“She hid us in the dark room with the white light,” Aaron whispered, tears finally leaking down his dirt-stained cheeks. “Men with masks took our blood every week. They told us if we cried, they’d throw Aiden in the furnace. Please... don't let the men with masks come here.”
A cold, absolute stillness settled over my soul. The kind of stillness that comes before an artillery barrage.
“Nobody is coming here, son,” I whispered, lifting my hand to gently brush a dark curl from his forehead. “The men with masks don't know it yet, but they’re already dead.”
I stood up, turned to Dante, and delivered the orders that would set New York ablaze.
May you like
“Call the family captains. Wake up every gun on our payroll. Tell them the war they’ve been waiting for just started.”
***
