August 6th, 2026
Brockley Boulevard, Cremont City
10:56 PM
Back at the Brockley Boulevard...
Brockley Boulevard glimmered beneath the veil of night, a long stretch of gold and glass, where the air reeked of perfume, expensive cigars, and old money. Sleek black cars lined the curbs, their chauffeurs idling in silence as the wealthy dined behind high windows. It was the kind of place where laughter was hollow, and every smile came with a hidden price.
The office smelled of stale coffee, nicotine, and paper, the comforting, bitter perfume of a life spent watching other people's secrets. Outside, Brockley Boulevard's velvet night thrummed with music and the distant clack of heels, but inside Maria Brandt's small room the world narrowed to a desk lamp, a corkboard full of pinned photographs, and two people who had been pulled into the same orbit by a name: Janus Castellan.
Maria sat behind her desk with the ease of a woman who'd learned to use time as a weapon. She offered him a cup and a cigarette the way some people offer condolences: necessary, perfunctory, inevitable. Rio accepted both. The coffee was black and too strong; the smoke tasted like every long, sleepless hours she'd kept watch.
He watched the way she lit her cigarette, a practiced flick, a quiet inhale, and felt an odd, small relief in watching someone older keep doing the small things unchanged while the rest of his life had turned to ash.
"So you're Janus's son," Maria said, blunt, not as question but as an observation dressed as fact. She exhaled and the curl of smoke made a little halo between them. "And Isabela's. The Castellan bloodline. That means you're part of what people around here call the Gothic.." She shrugged, as if the name didn't matter. "...Mafia, whether you like it or not."
"No," Rio said quickly, flat. "I'm not a part of that. I just came back from Vortania. I'm a Major in the army."
Maria's eyes glittered, amused and wary. "Army, huh. Well, that can't be good." She tapped ash into a grimy tray. "Army doesn't do you any favors here. Soldiers aren't popular in Cremont."
He frowned. "Why?"
She laughed, but it had no warmth. "You really don't know?" She pulled a file toward her, fingers tracing the edge of a photograph as she spoke. "Five years ago, a group of soldiers from Vortania attacked and raped the former mayor's daughter. The trial was public. The city erupted. The mayor, rightfully, wanted justice, so he pushed for a law that restricted soldiers' presence here. The politics were messy. People turned on soldiers. And criminals, well, criminals are opportunists; they quieted the law into something that fits their needs. Now, men in uniform are a target. Don't look at me like that," she said when he opened his mouth. "I'm not excusing what those men did. But you need to understand context. The streets remember."
Rio's hand trembled faintly as he held his cup. Those men… could've been his own. A part of him pitied them. Another part thought they deserved it.
He suddenly remembered General Evanoff's furious order five years ago.
Hunt the men who went AWOL. Six of them.
Rio had been part of the internal manhunt, the failed manhunt. They never found the soldiers.
Now, hearing Maria's words, his stomach twisted.
Those men... they must've been the same ones. The rapists.
His jaw tightened.
Evanoff wanted them brought in alive for court-martial. Looks like Cremont gave them a different kind of justice.
Rio's jaw tightened. The image of men in uniform doing unspeakable things sat in the pit of his stomach like a stone. "What happened to the soldiers?" he asked.
Maria's voice dropped. "Rumor says they disappeared. Never returned to base. Some say they vanished into the 9th District and never left. Other stories are worse." She stopped, watching him. "You asked for the truth. Some people think those men paid for what they did in the worst ways. No one will say it openly here and no court line will read that without a body of evidence. But this city has methods of its own. Methods that don't need the law."
He did not let the question hang longer. "So, this is why soldiers here are hated?"
Maria shrugged. "It's complicated, Major. This place is a beast with old wounds. You left one life and came back to another. Both are no longer innocent."
Silence collapsed into the room for a heartbeat, heavy and necessary. Rio blew smoke and let it rise. He was here for Janus , for the father who had smiled tiredly the last time they'd spoken, the man Bernard remembered holding on to the edges of life. He had come for answers about death and a mysterious man, not for history lessons.
Maria broke the silence. "Anyway, you didn't come here to learn about Cremont's filth. You came for your father's death. And maybe about your mother's… mysterious lover."
Rio's gaze lifted.
Maria hesitated, then sighed. "Sorry. I've got nothing for you. I tried, but those secrets are buried deep beneath this city's vault of corruption."
Maria rubbed her temple with one cigarette-stained finger. She had the exhaustion of someone who had watched time eat its own edges. "I really wish I could give you a tidy trail," she said. "But things in Cremont are layered. Lies stack over evidence like rugs. I was hired by Janus years ago, before the divorce hearing. He suspected Isabela, but he wanted proof. He didn't want headlines. He wanted leverage, something to hold in his hand when the time came. He paid me to follow her. To watch." Her voice hardened around the name. "He was careful. He paid well."
The Maria suddenl laughed..
Her laugh was quick and raw. "Like can you imagine? To try to tell a husband that his wife gives herself away to wealthy men and that she kills when the price isn't right? Think about Janus's position. The evidence I collected, at first, showed infidelity. Photos of dinners, hotel rooms, hands on shoulders. But then it changed. She wasn't merely being courted; she was stepping into a pattern." Maria's hand hovered above the board behind her, over maps and a mosaic of pinned pictures. "She was being introduced. Elevated. Funded. And then..." She paused, the memory taut in her face. "She began to kill."
Rio felt the world tilt inside his chest. "Kill?" he asked because his voice needed the spelling.
"Once," Maria said, "I followed her and her affair partner into a wealthy man's townhouse. She'd been presented, humiliated, offered as some kind of carne to secure influence. When I was about to take a picture, the scene changed. The man who'd been made to feel powerful was suddenly defenseless. She took the blade, simple, clean, and drove it into his neck. He died on the floor like the rest of them did, quiet, surprised. The companion, affair partner, cleaned it up and they left." Maria's eyes were stone. "Not romance. Not revenge. Calculation. She became the one who ordered death when it paid."
Rio had to set his cup down. The details were blunt, not cinematic: a death registered, a file closed. But the idea ate at him, his mother with blood on her hands; his father kept in the dark, buying proof and not the strength to act. "Why didn't you show him?" he demanded. "Why only evidence of adultery?"
Maria shifter her expression into melancholy and guilty. "Because.....I can't. I thought about returning with more, with the story that would damn her in the court, but I wasn't brave. So I left what I had, evidence enough to suggest infidelity, not murder. Janus used it in the divorce. The judge-" she spat the last word like a curse, "-the judge was on a leash. Paid, bribed, whatever you want to call it. The case closed on paper but was hollow."
He looked at her hard. "This man, this affair partner, who is he really? Is he the reason Janus lost everything?"
Maria's lips thinned. She dragged at her cigarette and watched the ash fall. "That's the thing. The longer I investigate them, the less I could pin him down. He seems to move like a shadow. Strangers, false names. The work he did made people open their wallets; he introduced Isabela to men who have money and influence, and she repaid the price. Sometimes with a favor, sometimes with a body. The man is not in the photos but he's always there at the edge, voice, presence, a hand on the shoulder. People don't even give him a real name. He is a ghost used by a woman to get what she wanted."
Rio's hand curled until he felt the sting in his knuckles. "So my mother slept with men for power and then killed them if she needed to?"
Maria's yes was hard and not without the bitterness of her own regret. "She was pragmatic. She weaponized her sexuality when it secured access, then she turned the game into something much darker. She learned to remove the inconvenient players."
Rio was silent. Couldn't imagine his mother could be this type of....monster.
"After their divorce I left because I feared for my life," Maria said plainly. "And yes, I made a coward's choice. I wish I had been braver. I regret it now, every damn day. I wish I helped your father more." She slid a photograph across his desk. It showed Isabela laughing, arm around a man, a mask of feminine ease. "Those pictures are the skeleton. They don't tell the violence. There are other things, but the deeper you dig in Cremont the more you get pulled into a vortex that doesn't like being disturbed."
"Is this how she really got powerful?" Rio demanded. "We were poor. Father, he was honest. How did she climb to this?"
Maria's eyes softened for the briefest beat. "Your family changed because Isabela was hungry. She wanted more and she had the ruthlessness, and then fortune, to feed it. She learned the rules of power: give the right men what they desire, take more than she gave, and when necessary, end the people who saw too much." She pointed to the board behind her. "She collected friends with eyes and ears. She bought favors in velvet bags. She used wealth as a mirror so people saw in her what they wanted to see."
He laughed, a brittle sound that had no humor. "So my mother sold herself to rich men to climb? She sold her body for influence?"
Maria's nod was slow. "In a manner of speaking. She used what she had as currency. And when the currency wasn't enough, she made others pay in blood." She looked at him, watching him process the cruelty of it. "Do you understand why Janus looked broken? Imagine a man who thought he was building a family, only to find that the woman at the center of it started an affair to make a throne."
"How did my sisters fit in?" Rio asked.
"Alessandra, Marcella, Selene… your sisters learned how to operate in the economy your mother created." Maria tapped three pins on the board that led like little tributaries from Isabela. "They were introduced, presented, sold into situations that made them useful. Money, lovers, influence - it's the same web. Some of it was willingly embraced; some coerced. People in positions of power shape the people around them into tools. Your sisters were taught to be precise."
The room grew very small. Rio could feel every stray rumor of his childhood folding into a new shape, one that cut and ached as it took form. "And my father?" he asked quietly. "He....did he ever suspect their growing power?"
Maria's gaze was gentle toward the idea of Janus. "He suspected. But before he could hire me again, I was already gone. And the last time we spoke, he just thanked me with a weary and broken smile for what I did for him. After that, we didn't speak anymore."
"He was a proud man who wanted proof. He wanted to do things by the book. But his book had pages ripped from it. He was outmaneuvered. The law in Cremont can be bought, bent, or broken by someone with enough reach. Your father paid a heavy price for not seeing how deep those roots went. I'm sorry," she said, the word heavy as any confession.
Rio blew smoke past his lips and watched it curl toward the lamp. "So what now?" he asked. "You have these photos, this knowledge. What can I do with them? How do I make this mean anything?"
Maria pinned a small, new photograph to the board, a grainy shot of a man's shoulder, a hat, the edge of a face half-hidden by shadow. "You start where the light is weakest," she said. "You follow the threads. But know this, people die for curiosity. And here, curiosity becomes currency, and currency has a way of buying silence."
He swallowed. The image folded into his bones. In the corner of the office, a small clock clicked with impartial cruelty. Maria stared at him across the lamp glow. "If you truly want to dig, you'll need allies and resources. You'll make enemies, and you'll probably make peace with the possibility you might have to live with the answer. Are you ready for that?"
Rio thought of Janus's weary smile, of Bernard's hands, of the apartment door he'd left behind. He thought of the handcuffs still cold against his skin. "Yes. Whatever it takes," he said. The word was a knife that cut the last of hesitation away.
Maria reached across the desk and pushed a small stack of paperwork toward him - names, addresses, times. "Then, start here," she said. "But Major, be careful. Cremont eats men who think they're brave and leaves none of them to be remembered kindly."