What people never learn is the smell of blood. It's metallic — like a rusty iron exposed to rain. Sickly sweet. After you have smelled it, really, that is the kind of soak into carpeting, pooling beneath fluorescence, drying down onto fingers at 3 AM, you don't forget.
It becomes part of you. But stitched in your memory like a scar you cannot see. Since the age of twelve, Lucien Graves had detected blood. He was standing at the floor-to-ceiling window of his penthouse, forty-three floors above New Verona, when he could smell it again tonight. Faint. Distant. But there. Blowing on that cold wind that gave that howling sound on the glass as if a wounded beast begging entry.
The city lay below him — a shimmering network of neon and shadow. Every street, every alley, every dark corner where dollars exchanged hands and men traded loyalties — it was all his. The docks, the clubs, politicians clad in pressed suits. Or the cops who turned up late? All the lifeblood that pumped through New Verona's veins pumped for one reason — because Lucien Graves let it.
They named him The Black Emperor. Not because he sought it. Because there simply wasn't a word that described what he was.
Measuring at six-foot-two, he was a blade in a fitted black suit — all angles and efficiency.
It might have been carved from stone — coal-scissor-cut, angular, precise, cruel in its politeness.
Hair dark and slicked back off a face women would kill for, men would die beneath. He had a thin scar that trailed from his left ear down to his jaw — a memento from the first street brawl he engaged in at the age of thirteen.
He'd won that fight. He'd won every fight since. His eyes were like storm clouds over a frozen sea — dark gray, cold, completely without mercy. He was thirty-four years old. From nothing, he had constructed an empire. An orphan from the Ashwick slums who clawed his way up through blood and fire till there was no more room above him.
And tonight, for the first time in twenty-two years, the musk of blood in the air was his. He inhaled on his cigarette for a second.
The coal shone orange on the window, a half-century nova in a rain-soaked glass pane."
"You're quiet tonight, Marco." With those words, the silence in the room was shattered like stones dropped into tranquil waters.
Marco Deluca stood directly behind him, by the carved mahogany desk where empires had been negotiated, and death sentences signed with a nod.
His right hand. The brother in everything but blood. Eleven years of wars, fought as grooms waged in togs. Trust — eleven years of it — the only trust Lucien had ever bestowed on another human being.
"Just thinking, boss." Marco's voice was steady. Practiced. Alright for a guy who was just contemplating to be this controlled. Lucien didn't turn around. He saw Marco glimmering in the glass — a phantom threaded through the city's lanterns.
How his hand hovered close to his hip. The way he tied his jaw up. How his eyes kept darting towards the door, like a dog listening for its owner's whistle.
Seventeen assassination attempts Lucien had survived. Death had come for him seventeen times, and he had never once let it hold onto him. He'd cultivated something deeper than instinct: a cool, primate knowledge bordering on marrow deep.
A whisper in the shadows that urged him to move, fight, and kill before his conscious brain even had time to process the danger.
That whisper was screaming." What are you thinking about?" Lucien asked. His voice didn't change. Didn't harden. Didn't waver. It stayed what it always was — low, silky smooth and entirely composed.
" The future," Marco said.
" Funny." Lucien exhaled smoke. And it curled upon the glass like a soul departing.
"So am I".
"The door opened." Lucien didn't turn. He didn't need to. The reflection told him everything.
Six men strode in tactical formation—black getup, assault rifles, the careful footfall of professionals no doubt well compensated to put one man down.
And behind them, striding along like a man who already thought he had it in the bag, was Salvatore Mancini, Fat, Balding. A face that sweated far too readily for an outdoor worker of any description, but despite that, a wry grin danced across it.
The familial head of Mancini, the only rival Lucien had permitted to live. Not out of mercy. From the belief Salvatore was too pathetic to be a danger. A miscalculation. Perhaps his first. Certainly his last.
" Marco," Lucien pronounced the name as if he were reading an obituary.
I'm sorry, Lucien." Marco's voice cracked.
Eleven years and a fracture on the foundation. "They offered me everything. The territories. The docks. The East Side. I — I didn't have a choice".
"There's always a choice." Lucien took another drag. Held the smoke in his lungs. Let it burn.
"How long?" Silence.
" How long, Marco?"
"...Six months." Six months. Eighteen years worth of dinners. Of strategy meetings. Of Lucien abandoning the one man he ever thought would never stab him with a knife in the back.
A hundred and eighty days, a dead man still breathing; Lucien laughed. It was a soft sound, no louder than an exhalation.
But it sliced through the room like a knife. Two of the armed men shifted. One adjusted his grip on his weapon.
The sound of Lucien Graves laughing even made hitmen nervous — it carried, strong and bright, through body armor and loaded guns.
"It's a bit like this You know," Lucien said, still gazing over the city, "I found you when you were sixteen in a gutter. Half-starved. Having been beaten bloody by your father. I cleaned you up. Gave you a name. Gave you a purpose. I molded you into something, Marco. I made you a man."
"I know." A whisper now.
Barely audible over the rain." This is how you repay me, Salvatore strode up on heels, clicking on marble. He opened his arms like a preacher at the pulpit.
"Lucien Graves. The Black Emperor. You took everything that mattered from me — from my family. My father. My brother. My territory." He halted, soaking it in with the need of a little guy who was just given a big gun.
"I used to take nothing from you, now I take everything." Lucien stubbed his cigarette on the window.
The spark died quietly with a hiss. He turned around. Every rifle in the room tightened. Every finger kissed its trigger.
Even Salvatore — inebriated from his free-flowing brashness — took one half-step back, before regaining composure. Because Lucien Graves — even unarmed, even outnumbered eight to one, even standing in the crosshairs of his own death was the most dangerous thing in that room.
It wasn't his body. It wasn't a hidden weapon. It was his eyes. That gray, lifeless gaze that had seen men plead for their lives without blinking, Eyes that didn't plead. Didn't rage. Didn't fear. They calculated.
Even now. Even at the end. Lucien said, "You think, it ends here. Not a question."
"In the end," Salvatore said. His smile quivered slightly at the edges. "Any last words, Emperor?"
Lucien straightened his jacket. Black. Tailored. Immaculate. He was never anything less than what he was, not even at the brink of extinction.
He looked at Marco. Held his gaze. Even that silence was slow to respond, but eventually followed with a crescendo:
"Let the silence hang in the air until it broke under its own weight. You'll be dead within six months without me. None of you will. This city will eat you alive. And when it does — when you find yourself up to your neck in the shit you've created — you'll recall this moment. I think you'll forget you had the trust of someone like me. And you tossed it away for some land".
Marco's eyes glistened. His hand was shaking by his side. Salvatore's jaw tightened.
"Kill him."
Lucien took the first bullet directly on his chest. Not a stabbing — a soul-level squeezing, a squeeze from the hand of God on his ribs.
The air left his lungs. Red spread on his white shirt like a black flower blooming. He didn't fall. One of the bullets struck his shoulder.
A third embedded itself in his stomach. The fourth shattered a rib. The room echoed with thunder — muzzle flash splattered the marble walls in flashes of white and orange.
He staggered. One step. Two. He hit the broken window with his back. His legs were failing. Everything was tinted crimson.
Lucien Graves —the orphan from Ashwick, the boy who had nothing, the man who had built everything —did not kneel. He stood. Dying. Bleeding from seven wounds. His body a ruin. And he stood. One last time, his eye found Marco. And in them was not hatred. Not rage. Not even pain. Just disappointment. He said,
"I'll see you in hell, " the glass shattered behind him. It didn't matter if from the bullets or the weight of an empire finally collapsing. Cold air swallowed him. Rain hammered his face. Forty-three floors between him and the ground — the city lights turned into a smear of gold as he fell.
The wind screamed. Or perhaps that was the hush. So this is how it ends. Not in battle. Not in glory, but in betrayal. Like it always was.
Like it always would be. He closed his eyes. If there is a next… I will trust nobody.
The ground came. Darkness followed.
There was nothing. No light. No fire. None of those pearly gates, no burning lake, only an endless black, frigid and mute as a starless cosmos.
And then — a pulse. Deep. Ancient. Like a pulse from the womb of creation.
A voice that wasn't a voice.
Not sound — but sense, implanted directly into the fibers of his being.
[ ABYSSAL SOVEREIGN SYSTEM -- INITIALIZING ]
[ CANDIDATE SOUL DETECTED: LUCIEN GRAVES ]
[ ORIGIN WORLD: EARTH -- STATUS: DECEASED ]
[ SOUL INTEGRITY: 99.97% -- COMPATIBLE ]
[ SOUL TRANSFER INITIATING ]
[ DESTINATION: WORLD -- VYRANTHOS ]
[ BINDING SYSTEM TO HOST SOUL ]
[-- ]
[ WARNING: THIS PROCESS IS IRREVERSIBLE ]
[ WELCOME, SOVEREIGN ]
[ YOUR REIGN BEGINS NOW ]
Lucien Graves awoke in the dark.