The silence John Corvini left behind was not the silence of an empty room. It was a stunned, suffocating quiet, the kind that empties the soul and leaves the air vibrating with an unbearable new truth. We remained motionless, five figures processing the seismic shift in our reality. The myth of the benevolent, unassailable Corvini founders had dissolved, replaced by a lineage built on the most profound act of betrayal.
Murdered their masters. Stole everything.
Pranav felt a pressure building in his chest, rising from the hollow pit where his ambition had once resided. It was the realization that there was no bottom to the abyss he had fallen into. He hadn't failed; he had merely been inducted into the true tradition of failure, betrayal, and violence.
A sound slipped out of him high, broken, hysterical. It wasn't a sob or a cry of pain. It was a laugh. The laugh of someone who just realized the only path to the top required becoming a parricide. His grand plans for 'empire-building' were pathetic mimicry; the true lesson was pure, cold treason.
The noise cut through the stunned silence, grating and brittle.
Sanvi moved before anyone else could react. Her face was pale, her eyes wide with fear, not anger. She snapped, swinging her arm and hitting Pranav hard across the face.
The slap cut the sound instantly, the sharp sting of the contact anchoring Pranav back to the immediate, agonizing present.
"Shut up!" she hissed, her voice trembling. "Don't you dare laugh."
She wasn't stopping the laughter out of contempt for him; she was stopping the sound out of pure, instinctual fear of the truth it represented.
Arpika, leaning against the wall, was visibly shaking, her composure finally shattered. The cool, calculating mask was gone, revealing genuine, deep-seated terror.
"He wasn't threatening us," she whispered, her voice barely audible. "He didn't say anything about debt or Vikram or punishment."
Her eyes darted around the room, settling on each of our faces, confirming the horrifying conclusion.
"He was… welcoming us."
And that was the horror. We weren't captured as punishment for our recklessness. We weren't recruited merely as disposable soldiers. We weren't adopted as lost kids in need of discipline.
We were chosen for something far worse: because our worst, most reckless, most self-serving impulses perfectly matched the Corvini legacy. Our individual flaws, Pranav's delusion of power, Sanvi's chaotic violence, Arpika's cold betrayal, Gautham's instinct for flight, and Sathwik's obedience to the strongest were not weaknesses. They were the raw materials that had built this empire.
We weren't being shaped into monsters. We had been selected precisely because we already were.
The room settled back into a heavy silence, but this silence was different. It was the silence of five people looking into the pit and finally seeing their own reflections at the bottom. The shame of their past failures gave way to the terrifying scope of their future potential.
Pranav touched his cheek where Sanvi had struck him. The sting was secondary to the realization that the man who had just left the room had seen his greatest, darkest desire and ratified it. John hadn't given them freedom; he had given them permission.
The five of them sat small, silent, and terrified, understanding the full, grotesque ritual of their induction. They hadn't joined a crime family that demanded loyalty.
They were inducted into a lineage built on murder, betrayal, and ambition sharpened into a lethal ritual.
The final shot was the profound weight of that understanding. John Corvini had just handed them their future like a gift wrapped in blood, and now, they were forced to unwrap it.