Page 16 of The Beautiful Dead

I pressed harder, the graphite deepening, darkening. Everything else faded as I added flecks of blood glistening in the unseen light. There was only art and a feeling that, somehow, the shadows were watching.

CHAPTER 4

DOMINO

Darkness and rain cloaked me, offering the cover I needed to move unseen through the shadowed streets. The cold wind whipped around me, chafing against my skin, and the blood in my veins sang. After leaving Denny’s, I sent my men to Blackwater Docks to receive and transport the incoming drug shipment. Our deliveries were being targeted on multiple fronts, but with Chief Rutter taken care of, there was only one loose end to tie up.

But the streets had been silent the last few days, giving me no answers. My patience was hanging on by a thread. It wouldn’t be long before the streets ran red as I hunted down the rats that were hiding in the gutters.

Once they’d received their instructions and were strapped up and in position, I slipped back into the city alone. That’s when I felt it. Eyes on me. A slow prickle of unease ran down my spine, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. My hands clenched into fists at my sides before I shoved them into my pockets.

I moved through the rain-slick streets, my steps almost silent against the wet asphalt. But beneath the faint noise of my movement, there it was—a second set of footsteps. Faint.Careful. He tried to blend into the night, but the delayed echo of his steps was impossible to miss if you were paying attention. And I was; I never let my guard down. In my world, you always had to be prepared for the one you trusted most to sink a knife into your back.

Amateur.

He might as well have had a spotlight on him—careless, overconfident. Tonight’s hunt would be entertaining. I couldn’t wait to show him the error of his ways.

The shift had already happened, even if he didn’t know it yet. No longer the hunter—he was the hunted, dangling from strings only I could cut.

A Gallo. It was always them. Like cockroaches crawling out of the woodwork, infesting every crack and crevice.

They had been trying to sink their claws into Marlow Heights for as long as I’d been alive. My father had kept them at bay for twenty years. Now, that duty was mine. One day, I would inherit his title. Don. And this city would be my kingdom.

To say my father relied on me would be an understatement. The gunshot wound to his leg had never healed right, leaving him dependent on a cane for anything more than a short distance. If he wasn’t personally handling an interrogation in the compound’s basement, he sent me.

I had been the face of the DeMarco empire for five years now, and my reign of terror was undefeated.

The only way the Gallo family would ever take Marlow Heights was if my cold, dead body burned in the pits of hell. And that wasn’t happening.

I would fight to my last breath, meeting them blow for blow, my grin bloodstained and feral.

Because I lived for this.

The brutality. The violence. The power.

The art of it.

Leaving macabre scenes for the pigs to stumble upon, watching them fumble for answers, knowing I was untouchable—it was a pastime I indulged in. My control was absolute. A mockery of everything they stood for. And I loved every second of it.

Especially when the body they found belonged to one of their own.

The shipment had come in at the docks, the lawless side of the city. A place where men like me ran the streets, peddling products to the underprivileged masses—people Marlow Heights’ officials kept down by any means necessary.

Religion parading as politics.

Taxes.

Unemployment.

A system designed so the rich grew richer, and the poor got crushed beneath their feet.

If I were the kind of man who cared, maybe it would have mattered. But I wasn’t.

We used districts across the river to run our operations. No one looked too closely at the abandoned warehouses, the crumbling factories left behind by the industrial revolution. The exteriors remained untouched, forgotten relics of a city that had long since moved on. But inside?

Inside, they were whatever I needed them to be. Drug processing centers. Interrogation rooms. Training facilities. Execution hubs. And then, of course—my playground.

A place only I knew how to reach. A secret buried so deep that even my most trusted men had no idea where it was. And it would stay that way.

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