August 6th, 2026
Brockley Boulevard, Cremont City
8:56 PM
Brockley Boulevard, Cremont City's shimmering artery of wealth and decadence. The air was laced with the perfume of luxury: polished metal, expensive gasoline, and the faintest trace of imported cigars. Glass towers loomed on both sides of the boulevard like monoliths of gold and vanity. Neon lights shimmered against the smooth pavement, reflecting off the passing tide of black sedans and silver sports cars. Laughter echoed from fancy restaurants, their doors guarded by men in tuxedos. Couples in designer coats strolled past diamond-lit storefronts, their laughter dissolving into the cold, late-night air.
Brockley Boulevard was once the pride of Cremont City, a grand artery of culture and prosperity that shone without corruption. Built a century ago by visionary architects and honest investors, it was a place of art, elegance, and aspiration. Its wide streets were lined with golden lamps, marble-fronted hotels, and music-filled restaurants that welcomed both locals and travelers.
For years, no blood money touched its bricks, no crime family claimed its corners. The Cartels, Triads, and Yakuzas, the Slavic mobs had tried, but the Boulevard's founders held firm, refusing every bribe, every offer, every shadowed deal. It stood as the one untainted place in a city slowly sinking under corruption.
But that golden age ended the moment Isabela Castellan rose to power.
When she became the Queenpin of Cremont, her influence crept into Brockley Boulevard like a slow, elegant poison. At first, it was subtle, a few business acquisitions, silent partnerships, and discreet exchanges behind luxury doors. Then, it spread. The restaurants became fronts, the hotels became meeting grounds, the theaters became masks for laundering and influence.
Isabela didn't just buy Brockley Boulevard, she claimed its soul.
What was once the symbol of Cremont's purity became the silent heart of her empire.
And while she reigned from her domain, far under the city lights, the Boulevard was watched and managed in the shadows by her youngest daughter, Selene. Her quiet networks of spies, assassins, and fixers kept every deal unseen, every betrayal silenced.
Now, as Rio walks beneath its glowing signs, Brockley Boulevard no longer belongs to dreamers or honest men.
It belongs to the Castellans, a dynasty built on charm, power, and secrets.
And somewhere behind those lights, Selene's eyes are already watching.
Now, across from a narrow storefront that sat oddly out of place among velvet ropes and valet signs, Rio pulled the hood of his thrifted hoodie tighter and watched the office window. The sign above the door read
"MARIA BRANDT"
"BRANDT PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS"
It was written in neat serif type.
A hand-lettered CLOSED placard hung on the handle. Inside, through the slightly fogged glass, the office looked blacked out, a dark rectangle in a street that otherwise never slept.
He kept his hands in his pockets. The metal bite at his wrist against fabric was a private, cold thing, a tiny reminder of how ridiculous and mortal all plans were once you started acting on them. The handcuffs were hidden beneath the hoodie, a weight against his skin, an old shame turned practical: he had not felt safe removing them yet. They clinked muffled against keys, against the lining, when he moved. No one on the boulevard had any reason to notice the gesture of a man in a hood. That anonymity suited him.
He'd come because he was convicted to know the truth. He'd because the old laundry man had a thousand tiny ways of telling truth the city refused to hear. He'd come because of the hollowness in his chest that would not stop whispering his father's name. He'd come because he could not sit and let the world keep its polite lies.
The door was unlocked. That was the first thing that set his nerve on edge. A CLOSED sign and an unlocked latch were two things that didn't fit together. He pushed slowly and the bell over the door jingled like a polite warning.
The office was darker than he'd imagined. A desk lamp burned in the back room, its light slicing open a pocket of the gloom. On the outer side, the reception area smelled of book leather and cigarettes, dust and the tang of old coffee cups.
He could see a row of framed newspaper clippings on the wall, edges curled, the headlines yellowed. He remembered Bernard's hands fumbling the card into his palm like it was an act of treason. Maria Brandt's name had been a key handed to him in the laundry's back room, and he had taken it like a lifeline. Now that he stood in front of the threshold, the lifeline felt like a taut wire strung over a street.
Then he saw an opened door from the corner of the office.
He walked toward the open door. The light came from a narrow office, its door stood ajar and the lamp on the desk threw a cone of gold that cut the room into two halves: shadow and evidence. He could hear nothing, just the distant thump of a late-night radio from the boulevard and the steady pulse of his own blood.
He knocked. Once. He waited, even though he did not know what he expected, a startled hello, a threat, a polite "We're closed." Silence.
He knocked again, firmer this time. The sound vanished into stacks of paper and the rustle of maps tacked to cork. No answer. The kind of silence bred by focus; a person deep in their own work does not hear the city.
He eased the door open another inch and pushed into the office.
Maps covered one wall, pinned by red threads that ran like shallow veins between photos. They connected faces and places, restaurants, docks, a building in the 9th District, a spiderweb slashed across its map. Photographs were clipped to the thread intersections: a man's arm holding a cigarette, a woman laughing with a hand on another man's shoulder, the reflection of a hat and a smile captured just beyond a café window.
Newspaper clippings cut up like confessions. A legal pad lay open, notes in a cramped, utilitarian hand: dates, places, who was seen with whom. The light pooled over a chaos that nonetheless felt ordered in the way of someone who lived by discovery.
At the top, above everything, a picture was pinned larger than the rest. Isabela Castellan. She was more exquisite in the photo, hair kept in an elegant style, an unguarded tilt to the mouth that didn't match the woman who had ruled his childhood. Rio's hand moved before he could think, fingertips brushing the edge of the photograph as if touch could change what the image meant. The face that looked back at him was subtly wrong: the eyes weren't his mother's stormy-gray eyes but someone wearing her face, softer, perhaps kinder. It was a portrait that suggested a life kept private, a side that had been camera-captured without intention. He'd expected to find the Queenpin, the Queenpin he had seen ruling from a stage, and instead found a woman looking as if she could be loved or betrayed. He felt a strange ache at being an intruder in that intimacy.
Below Isabela, the threads fanned out, a tidy branching system. Three names were connected like limbs: Alessandra, Marcella, Selene, his sisters. Under Alessandra's name, pinned and slightly askew, was a photograph of a woman in armor, Ursula, her silhouette unmistakable even in a shaky print.
The investigator had not stopped at the obvious. Small pictures, faces he didn't know, addresses, blurry images of hands exchanging envelopes, it was intricate, systematic, possibly dangerous. Someone had taken the time to peel back the world of the Castellans.
He slid his fingers beneath Isabela's picture and eased it free from its tack. The sound was a pin withdrawing, a noise tiny enough that it felt sacrilegious. He held the photograph, studying the woman's expression the way you study a relic. The face on the paper was his mother and not his mother at the same time. A stranger's vulnerability layered over a sovereign's mask. For a long, burning second he could not tell whether what he saw hurt more or steadied him: evidence that his mother had been someone entire outside of the throne Isabela wore now.
A floorboard creaked behind his shoulder and instinct sharpened the world into edges. He turned.
The woman who stood in the doorway carried a gun as if it were an instrument she had learned to use with a lifetime of practice. She had the tired, sharp face of someone who had not slept in a long while but who refused to show it in any other way than a steady set jaw. Brown-blonde hair fell in a professional sweep to her shoulders. Her suit was plain, a muted gray that swallowed light. Her eyes, fierce, bright blue and rimmed with sleeplessness, fixed on him like someone interrogating a scene. She looked younger than Rio had expected, but the small lines at her eyes told of long hours.
For a breath, neither of them moved. The gun's black barrel carved the air between them. He raised his hands slowly, palms open, half as an apology, half as a signal. The handcuffs at his wrists were hidden, but the movement revealed the glint of metal at the seam of his sleeve; a sliver of steel flashed and the woman's eyes caught it like a hawk.
"Who the hell are you?" she said, voice low and rough, the syllables snapping like short ropes. She kept the gun aimed at his chest, but her fingers trembled with something beyond the mechanical, a brittle strain that suggested a life made of sudden alarms. "What are you doing here?"
He held his hands where she could see them and let the hood fall back. "Maria Brandt?" he asked, as if he were reading an address from a slip of paper and not willing fate. Saying her name made it legal in a small way; it was the name Bernard had pushed into his hand like an ugly coin that might buy a favor.
At the sound of it, something sharp in the woman's face snapped. It was as if the syllables pulled a thread in her spine and made a map of grief appear. She went still for a second, then her posture doubled into restlessness. The gun rose a fraction, more reflex than threat, and her voice threaded with a sudden, brittle edge.
"You know my fucking name?" she suddenly yelled. "Who sent you? Who the fuck told you about me?" The questions tumbled, loud and raw, as if she was someone used to talking to strangers who could kill her with one mistimed sentence.
Rio took a step back, his breathing steady.
"I need to talk to you. It's about a man, Janus Castellan."
The name hit her like a punch.
Her expression faltered. The gun trembled slightly in her hand.
Her voice came out broken, trembling with something between tired and restless.
"Why? Did you kill him?"
Rio's eyes softened.
"No," he said quietly. "I'm his son."
For a moment, neither moved.
The air turned heavy, like the world itself had stopped spinning. The hum of the refrigerator faded. Even the ticking clock seemed to pause.
Maria Brandt stared at him, this young man, hooded, tired, and haunted. Slowly, she lowered the gun. Her blue eyes glistened in the dim light, reflecting fragments of confusion, pain, and realization.
"You're… Janus's boy," she whispered. "He told me you'd never come back to this city."
Rio didn't answer. He just looked at her, eyes clouded with determination and grief.
Maria sighed, lowering the gun completely. She ran a pale hand through her hair, revealing the faint wrinkles beneath her eyes.
"Damn it," she muttered. "He was right. Cremont eats its sons alive."
Rio's gaze shifted to the photo board behind her, his family connected by red strings of lies and blood.
"Then help me," he said. "Tell me what you know about my father. And why he really died. And the man who stole Janus's wife."
Maria's expression hardened again. She looked at him for a long, tense momen, then finally spoke, voice low and tired:
"Lock the door. If you're really Janus's son, you're not safe here."
The lights flickered. Outside, a car engine roared past, echoing off the glass buildings.
The night had just begun.
Meanwhile, in Alessandra's domain.
Isabela stepped from the car as if the night had been waiting on her, a practiced queen returning to a private court. Moonlight carved the planes of her face into silver and shadow; the older lines bowed into nothing beneath the wash of light. Tonight her step wasn't the public stride of a city's ruler but the softer approach of a mother who wanted to be mistaken for tenderness. Her black coat fell open in a casual fold; beneath it, the gothic cut of linen and lace read more domestic than ceremonial. Her hair, long and silver, hung loose and relaxed as if she'd chosen the cloak of a woman at rest.
A pair of armed escorts melted into the hedgerow behind her like shadow servants. They framed her procession, silent and obedient. Alessandra's gothic mansion rose before them in austere silhouette, stone that breathed old power and corridors that remembered every footfall of the family that had warped it into a dynasty. A fountain murmured somewhere in the courtyard; the sound was small and domestic, at odds with the cold geometry of the place.
She entered without the formalities she usually kept. The doors opened at a touch and the dark swallowed her shoulders. "Alessandra," she called, voice shawled in a practiced maternal warmth, "my daughter...where are you?" The word was soft and full of import, a summons that expected a child in reply. The house offered back only the hush of its own fancy: carpets, portraits, the faint smell of someone's forgotten dinner.
No one answered. The silence felt wrapped and deliberate. Isabela's brows did not crease; the quiet was merely another thing to observe. For ten minutes she drifted through drawing rooms and corridors, through rooms that still held the breath of evenings gone, calling names with the casual insistence of someone who believed family should answer when spoken to. She found only rooms full of emptiness, chairs aligned with the geometry of order, glasses drained and placed with a servants' perfection. Light slivered through high windows and nothing stirred.
She moved through the house by habit more than by worry until a sound, small, ragged as a thread being pulled taut, brought her still. It was a single, muffled sob, coming from somewhere below the garden. The note cut the contrived stillness, fragile and human. Isabela paused. The mother in her listened; the queen in her recalculated odds.
The sound led her to an unremarkable stone stair hidden behind trailing ivy. One hand brushed aside leaves; the air that came up smelled of earth and iron. At the bottom of the steps a narrow door breathed; through its seam the sobbing came clearer and rawer. She crouched, breath held by long training, and eased the latch.
The room beyond the door was a wound beneath the house, low ceiling, plaster flaking, tiled floor dark with old stains. Light from a single bulb swung faintly; its yellow halo twisted the shadows. On a pallet at the center of the floor lay a woman: a gothic goon, once fierce and lithe, now a ruin. Her skin was smeared dark with blood and bruises; her breathing came in jagged pulls. Cuts mapped her jawline; her clothing was shredded and there were marks across her wrists where bonds had bitten deep. Her face was a ledger of cruelty, they had marked her and read from her flesh.
Isabela's eyes narrowed into business. She crossed the room with the economy of someone who had learned to take stock quickly: check the wounds, measure the story. The goon's pupils were flecked glass; she turned her head and managed a whisper, a word that suggested recognition even as her lips trembled.
"Queenpin," the woman rasped. The voice was brittle, a match struck in oil. "Help me."
Isabela's mouth softened into the mask of the mother. She crouched by the pallet as if drawn by habit to nursing a child; her fingertips hovered above a grazed cheek with all the paradox of tenderness and ownership. "Shh," she murmured, not yet soft but intentional. "Tell me what happened."
Isabela's expression was unreadable. Her gray eyes flicked across the wounds, the blood, the desperation. Then her tone came, smooth but cold.
"Where is my daughter?"
The woman coughed violently, spitting blood. "Please… I was... I was tortured… Just because....I didn't know what she asked...."
Isabela stepped closer, her heels clicking against the floor. "I asked you a question," she said, voice sharp now. "Where is Alessandra?"
"I… I don't know," the goon rasped. "I swear it…"
The woman's head tilted weakly. "Your...daughter. Just because...a man escape. She...tortured me." she muttered.
Isabela's eyes narrowed. "A man?"
Isabela's chest tightened with a sound she nearly passed off as a sigh. "Who is 'he'?" she asked. There was a note now in her voice, a slow tilt toward hunger.
The goon's eyes fought for air; she swallowed blood and tasted copper. "He is young," she said, voice shrinking with effort. "Brunette… eyes like..." Her throat closed. "I was to bring him to you. I..." She coughed again, fingers clawing at the blanket as if they could pull the memory into shape. "Ri-ri-"
Isabela waited because she would not be hurried when a possibility stirred. The goon gathered what strength she had left and clenched out the rest: "Rio."
The name hit Isabela with the force of a tide: a simple syllable that reshaped a thousand inner maps. Her pupils pinched. For a beat there was only her own heartbeat and the rustle of the cellar, the rhythm of things underfoot. Her face, which had been composed into gentle worry, flickered. Something else, an animal gladness, raw and unarticulated, rose to meet the space that the rest of the word promised.
"My son, you've come back to me?" she whispered to herself, the phrase so small she could have been the only hearer. That thought crashed into her, and with it a second blade: the sting of betrayal. He had not come to her when he returned. He had not fallen into her arms, had not chosen the her, had not sought the mother who wanted him as much as she wanted to rule. He had come, if the goon's words were true, to be pulled into her web by the hands of another, Alessandra.
Isabela's fingers tightened on the pallet edge until her knuckles went white. For a mother there was a rush that arrived like relief, the son within reach again. For a queen there was a jealous silent rage: why he had not come to me. Why he chose to come to Alessandra
The goon's voice trembled. "Please," she said. "Can you...help me now? I can tell you more....names, places."
Isabela's face tilted, maternal charm like a slow blade. "You will live," she said in a tone that might have been kindness. "But you will tell me everything you know. Then I will make you safe."
There was an instant, an animal, irreducible, when Isabela's hands closed at the woman's throat.
It happened so fast the word no barely formed in the goon's lips. Where Isabela's fingers pressed, there was no theatrics: a quiet, efficient constriction, the kind taught in rooms where decisiveness must be clean. The female goon's eyes bulged, life and plea compressed into a single image. Her lips formed a final syllable of her son's name and then nothing.
Isabela held the body until the breath stilled and the mouth fell slack. The room smelled of antiseptic and iron; the single bulb swung, and the cloth that had been a blanket lay damp and still. When she released her hands, her fingertips were dark with the residue of the end people wished had not been necessary.
She rose and straightened as if the act had been a paperweight set down. Her mouth curved into a smile that was not kind. It was the smile of someone who had removed an obstacle from a chessboard. The tenderness that had been her mask folded back into strategy.
"On second thought, you're useless to me now," she said aloud, and the sentence had the calm finality of a verdict. "You told me what I needed to know. That is all."
She wiped the blood from her fingertips with slow deliberation, as one who studies stains for patterns. There was no pity in her movements. She moved with the rhythm of a woman who has made many difficult choices and keeps no ledger of regret. The house above remained quiet; the moon slid in its pale orbit. Whatever the female goon had suffered, whatever debt had been paid, it had been used and discarded.
Isabela stepped into the stairwell, heels making no sound. Her mind worked fast, already assembling plans from the single truth the dying woman had offered: Rio was in Cremont. The idea of another person presenting her son to the family instead of the son finding his own way into her arms tasted like both victory and affront, expecially it was Alessandra. And she outrightly didn't call or let her know once she took Rio. That made her...uneasy and feel anger.
She straightened in the garden's shadow and allowed a small, private laugh: not of humor but of a thing that knew success. She would have him. She would bring him home. She would not let a stray warrior or a foreign hand make claims on what was hers. Already, in her head, the invitations and the traps took shape: a parlor staged as solace, a chain of favors softly requested, loyalty purchased and debts tallied.
And soon, Cremont would never be quiet again.