The crucible of inaction was the most refined torture the Corvini family could have designed. I was trapped in a small, windowless room, a tomb of silence and grey concrete, while the world outside roared and bled. The entire evaluation phase reached me only in fragments. Arpika's elegant failure. Gautham's collapse. Sanvi's reckless violence. Asuma's invisible, total control. None of it was shown to me. It leaked in through sound alone.
I was not allowed to witness the chaos. I was forced to hear it. Forced to think. Forced to sit with the suffocating weight of my own uselessness.
The hallway became the soundtrack to my descent.
First came Kevin's voice. Sharp. Brittle. Shouting in fury after Gautham's failure. His rage was loud and frantic, the sound of a cornered animal trying to protect its territory. To me, it sounded weak. Desperate. Exposed.
Then Arpika.
She wasn't shouting. She was being dragged. I heard the whisper of expensive fabric against concrete, followed by the dull thud of her body hitting the floor. She wasn't hurt, not physically. The sound was worse than injury. It was the sound of something polished breaking beyond repair. I didn't need to see her to know her humiliation was complete.
The worst sounds were the footsteps.
Boots moving too fast. Too uneven. Corvini soldiers limping past, wounded from Sanvi's assault. Every grunt of pain, every wet cough, carried judgment. Not just of her recklessness, but of my absence. Proof that while others bled, I contributed nothing.
Sanvi came next. Her rage was intact. Raw. Untouched by the near death she had caused. I heard her pacing above me, heavy steps striking the floor like a caged animal slamming into steel. She had discovered that her most trusted weapon meant nothing against better planning.
Then Gautham.
No shouting. No anger. Just crying. Thin, broken sounds that came and went without rhythm. Panic stripped bare. The realization that intelligence offered no protection against men like Kevin.
Finally, Asrit.
Measured footsteps. Controlled. Followed by a report delivered with clinical detachment. The rival leader was dead. The door was open. No gunfire. No chaos. Just poison, patience, and a corpse.
Control.
I sat alone. The noise was relentless, but the silence inside me was louder.
Days passed.
I stopped pacing. I stopped testing the lock. I sat on the floor with my back against the wall and let the humiliation settle in. Let the echoes define how small I was meant to feel.
Something changed.
The panic burned out first. Disbelief followed. What remained was clarity.
I had not been allowed to fail. I had been erased.
The rage didn't explode. It sharpened. It focused. I understood my mistake. I had chased the wrong kind of structure. I wanted to build. I wanted to organize. The Corvini family respected something else entirely. The art of dismantling. The quiet removal of old power.
I wasn't breaking like the others. I wasn't screaming. I wasn't crying.
I was waiting.
John Corvini's lesson finally clicked. The fire hadn't destroyed me. It had stripped away illusion. New blood wasn't chosen for loyalty or competence. We were chosen for opportunism. For betrayal. And the greatest opportunity was the family itself, already fractured and at war beneath the surface.
I didn't need a mission.
I needed information. I needed fractures. I needed time.
I pressed my fists against the concrete floor. Not in defeat. In commitment.
The stillness on my face was real. The kind that comes before something irreversible.
They had forced me into silence.
Now I would use that silence to listen.