The silence was heavier than the concrete walls. They were back in the battered, filthy van, now driving with purpose not toward an empire, but toward a janitorial task. They had been dismissed, given a bucket and a mop, and told to clean up the blood from their own humiliation.
Pranav stared out the window at the flashing chaos of Santa Fortuna. The city lights, usually a vibrant promise of opportunity, now looked like mocking, predatory eyes. The word "tools" echoed in his mind, sharp and corrosive. He thinks we're predictable. He thinks we're useful only as servants.
He instinctively looked at Arpika, sitting next to him, her posture rigid. Sam Corvini's quiet dismissal of her charm, calling it "predictable", had been a deeper wound than any physical blow.
---
The streetlights blurred into streaks of synthetic colour. Arpika wasn't looking at the city; she was looking inward.
She was thirteen, the air in the cramped apartment thick with cheap gin and the smell of desperation. The landlord, an oily, middle-aged man with heavy hands, was standing too close, demanding rent. Her foster mother was already passed out on the sofa. Arpika didn't plead. She didn't cry.
She leaned in close, her child's face carefully arranged into an expression of knowing maturity. She didn't mention the rent. She mentioned his wife, the small gambling debt he thought he'd hidden, the time he parked his car three blocks away from the mistress's apartment. She listed his vulnerabilities like ingredients in a recipe.
"You don't want me to talk about any of this, right, Mr. Flores?" she whispered, her voice innocent, smooth. Leverage. Always calculating leverage. The man's face went white. He backed away, stumbling on the rug, the rent forgotten. She survived because she was underestimated. She had twisted him, turned his power into her obedience. She was a lie woven in silk, and Sam had seen the coarse thread beneath the veneer. The memory was a slash of cold terror.
---
A low, guttural noise escaped Sanvi's throat. She was gripping the seatbelt, fighting a phantom opponent. Her broken plan, her exposed fury, her silenced knife, it had all been exposed as a meaningless temper tantrum to Vikram.
She was sixteen, barely an adult, cornered in a garbage-strewn alley behind the local bodega._ The cheap fluorescent light flickered over the four older boys surrounding her and her younger brother. Her brother, tiny and trembling, was hiding behind her legs. Fear, paralyzing and absolute, seized her.
But the moment the first boy reached for her brother, the fear dissolved into a chemical surge of pure, violent instinct. She snatched a broken beer bottle from the ground, the jagged glass reflecting the light. Her movement wasn't skilled; it was raw, uncontrolled fury, disguised as fight. She didn't aim for damage; she aimed for stop. She moved like a cornered animal, slashing, screaming, fighting with the terror of a child protecting the only thing left she cared about. The rage was the shield. The moment had revealed the trauma buried beneath the chaos, a desperate, brutal loyalty that demanded violence as its currency.
---
Pranav felt the heat of his own cheeks. Tools. That word defined him now. He looked at the duffel bag on the floor, no longer a beacon, but a heavy sack of dirty obligation.
He was seventeen, standing in his father's bankrupt office. The bank note was pinned to the corkboard, the ink mocking him. His father, a man who believed in structure and hard work, was defeated, broken into a defeated whisper. Failure, a cold, crushing weight, settled on Pranav's chest. Insignificance. The terror of belonging to nothing, of meaning nothing.
Pranav stared at the floor, not seeing the dust, but seeing the empty space where a great name should have been written. The desire for a "future empire" wasn't ambition; it was a desperate **shield**. A grandiose architecture of lies erected against the humiliating past. If he was destined for power, the past couldn't break him. But Sam had seen the fragile foundation of that shield.
---
Sathwik sat absolutely still in the back, silent as always, the newly dried blood on his sleeve invisible in the gloom. He didn't seem troubled by the events, only compliant with the new reality.
He was twenty-one, standing guard in a warehouse far more desolate than the one they had just ruined. He stood behind the local gang leader, a man who spoke with loud, confident commands and carried an air of absolute, unquestioned power. Sathwik's eyes were obedient and empty, fixed on the leader's back. He wasn't thinking about right or wrong, survival or ethics. He was simply following the strongest voice in the room. Loyalty as a reflex. A lifetime spent seeking the weight of authority, submitting to the inevitable dominance. His actions were always shaped by the presence of power, never by his own volition. Now, the strongest voice belonged to Sam Corvini.
---
Gautham was rocking slightly, muttering under his breath about the optimal dispersal patterns for tear gas. He was terrified, but he was calculating, seeking the mathematical probability of survival.
He was twelve, huddled in a linen closet, the screaming outside the flimsy door shaking the entire house. Domestic chaos. Bottles breaking. Voices raised. He wasn't fighting. He wasn't crying. He was calculating: the closet was closest to the back window; the storm drain two blocks down led to the main culvert. He was thinking faster, lying fast to the neighbour when he slipped out, his instincts wired for flight, not fight. He was the quick-witted mouse surviving the demolition of the home, his brain a perpetual scouting mission for exits. Sam Corvini's cold gaze had frozen that instinct, trapping the mouse in the open.
---
Five souls, broken by past failures, past needs, or past violence. Five individuals who had clung to Pranav's stupid, ambitious plan because it promised an escape, a transformation. They had walked into danger because the unknown terror was still preferable to the familiar, suffocating terror of their former lives. They wanted out, or they wanted up.
But now, they were simply trapped.
Pranav gripped the worn steering wheel. He understood now. They had come to the Corvini, not for an empire, but for a reckoning. They had earned their new masters. The question was, could they survive the apprenticeship?
The van sped toward the dark warehouse, carrying five ghosts and a very expensive duffel bag.