Page 37 of Shadow's Edge

We had to move fast. We weren’t waiting for Demingo to come to us, we were going to him. Jagger and Preacher weren’t happy with the plan. They wanted caution, wanted to regroup, wanted to play the long game. Too fucking bad. This wasn’t about comfort, this was about war, and war didn’t wait for the enemy to strike first.

Every second we sat back, Demingo fortified. Every hour that passed, he had more time to prepare, to disappear, to slip through our fingers like smoke. That wasn’t happening, not on my watch.

I could feel the heat of Jagger’s glare across the room, the unspoken challenge in his silence. Preacher had his arms crossed, jaw clenched, barely holding back his disagreement. I didn’t care.

War wasn’t won by hesitation. It was won by the ones willing to throw the first punch—and make damn sure it was the last.

We had intel on a property where Demingo’s men were stationed. He had a stronghold that he kept locked down and heavily guarded. It was a place they thought was untouchable. They were wrong.

We hit it hard. The breach was swift, brutal—no warning, no mercy. The first shots rang out like thunder, and by the time the dust settled, eleven bodies littered the ground. Blood soaked into the dirt, the air thick with the metallic scent of death and gunpowder.

As I stared down at the bodies, I noticed with satisfaction that two of them were key players in Demingo’s operation. Men whomade his empire run. Men he relied on heavily. Now they were nothing more than corpses cooling in the night air.

But we didn’t stop there. We stripped a phone off one of the bodies, fingers slick with blood as we scrolled through his contacts. And then we sent Demingo a message.

A picture of his men dead. Their bodies twisted, lifeless, scattered like garbage. His drugs and money—his precious empire—up in flames, burning bright against the darkness. Reduced to nothing but ash. We knew it would hit the mark, how could it not?

The Knights had already swept through, cleaning up the weapons. Anything worth keeping was ours. Anything that could be traced back was gone.

And the rest, all of the information and hard drives we found, it ended up in the hands of the authorities after we’d downloaded everything from them. Everything we handed to them was done anonymously, though, and was totally untraceable.

Luck had been on our side, and it’d all been perfectly orchestrated. Demingo thought he ran this city. Tonight, we reminded him who really held the power.

By morning, the news was already running with it. A short segment, barely two minutes long, but it was enough.

Apparently, a letter had "mysteriously" blown away from the crime scene, drifting lazily in the wind until it landed in a bush just far enough from the flames to remain untouched. A miraculous discovery, really. And inside that letter had been confession.

The men who had died weren’t just criminals. According to the letter, they had been part of a secret gay cult—led by none other than Jose Demingo himself.

The confession painted a vivid picture of debauchery and disgrace. It claimed that Demingo had shamed his family, had shamed the Lord himself, indulging in drug-fueled orgies, corrupting his followers, luring men into sin with promises of power and pleasure.

And in an act of repentance, they had ended themselves. The whole thing had been a cleansing, and a final attempt to wipe their sins away.

The story spread like wildfire. Not just because it was salacious, not just because it had all the makings of a scandal, but because we had made sure it reached every major news outlet across Central and South America. Every journalist, every tabloid, every headline-hungry media station received an anonymous tip, an "exclusive" insight into the twisted truth of Jose Demingo’s secret life.

If there was one thing we knew about Demingo, it was that he took his dick and his reputation very fucking seriously. And now both were in ruins.

We had also finally gotten a clean look at him. On one of the hard drives, there was surveillance footage of him for some reason, like one of his men was going to stab him in the back anyway. Multiple angles at different locations. The difference with these ones was that there were no more grainy images, no more secondhand descriptions. This was him, clear as day.

And the man himself looked like a fucking monster.

One side of his face was completely melted. He looked like something out of a horror movie. Like his flesh had been devoured by fire or acid, twisting his features into something barely human. Scar tissue pulled tight across his skull, warping his expression into a permanent sneer. He had the kind of face that made children cry, the kind of face that haunted nightmares. It was also clear that he hadn’t been able to seek medical attention for it, and a scar that’d normally make my heart break for the person living with it… Well, karma worked in wonderous ways.

Ironically, his appearance wasn’t even his biggest problem, because now the entire world believed he was the leader of a gay orgy suicide cult. In his world, that wasn’t just an insult, that was a death sentence. His allies would start questioning him, would start wondering if he had gone soft. More than likely, they’d already decided he was losing control.

And once doubt crept in, it spread like a disease.

His men would hesitate before following orders. His lieutenants would second-guess his judgment. His rivals would start circling like vultures, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. And that was more dangerous than anything we could have done to him physically. Because men like Demingo didn’t fear bullets, they feared weakness. They feared irrelevance, and losing their grip on power, so we just had to keep pushing. We had to do it hard enough and relentlessly enough until he had no choice but to come out and play.

Chapter 9

Jagger

"You’re what?”

We were sitting in the dimly lit church on our compound, the heavy scent of burning wax and dust mingling in the air. Tension sat thick between the wooden pews, pressing in on us like an invisible weight. Preacher hadn’t had the chance to talk to Kyle yet, not with all the chaos we’d been dealing with, and now she was dropping this bombshell on us.

“No fucking way.”

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