Page 48 of Forbidden Empire

I texted Selene without hesitation.

ESME: He thinks he owns me. Watch my back.

Eight

AIDON

From the window of my office, I narrowed my eyes into the darkness, gaze trained on my club below. Plumes of cigar smoke curled thick in the air, catching the pulsing, electric flashes of the dance floor and swirling in the sudden bursts of colored light. The effect was disorienting. Ominous.

Something was off.

A cold shiver traced down my spine, the unmistakable sense of trouble stalking the edges of my thoughts. My gaze swept the room, cataloging the faces of those gathered, the regulars, the newcomers, the veterans of The Underworld.

I read every twitch, every sideways glance, the silent language of men who knew how to hide secrets and hold grudges.

Nights like this made me wonder why I’d ever created this place at all.

I knew the reasons, of course, but stress had a way of clouding even the sharpest motivations, of making old certainties dissolve into smoke.

My mind drifted, lost for a moment in those same blue-gray clouds, back through the years and the city streets that led me here.

Chicago seemed like another planet, a different life altogether. I was nothing like the boy I’d been then, though maybe the roots had always been there, waiting.

It made sense now, in a way. Of course, I ended up here.

A sudden rush of memory hit me, sharp and cruel: my parents, flickering through my mind like a reel from an old film.

My mother’s face, barely remembered, brought a familiar ache twisting deep inside me. She’d vanished when I was a kid, leaving behind fragmented moments, impressions that faded every year.

And yet, here I was.

My father was a different story. A different kind of gravity, pulling me off kilter, shaping the man I’d become.

The life he led. The life he surrendered to was etched into me, whether I liked it or not.

Sometimes I wondered who I might have been if he’d been a different man. If he’d wanted more than the next hand of cards, if he’d been stronger, present. If he’d been a father instead of just a man in the same house.

After my mother left, he was a husk. Hollowed out, haunted by memories I was never part of. He fought every day, but not for us, not for family. He fought for escape. For the bottle. For the flash of cash we never had.

For me? Maybe. On the good days, I told myself it was possible. But I couldn’t pretend he’d tried his best. Anyone’s best would have been better than what he gave me.

Gambling was his obsession. Not me, not his family, not even himself. That was obvious. It always had been.

I lost count of the nights he staggered home, bloodied and unsteady, black eyes and broken ribs and a terror in his eyes I’dnever seen anywhere else. He was scared of the people he owed, the debts he couldn’t pay, the life he’d dragged us both into.

By the time I hit my teens, he was gone, gone, circling rock bottom and taking me with him into every pit he found.

Raising myself was brutal. But near the end, parenting him, caring for him, left marks on me no one could see. Ones that never faded.

Then, one afternoon, I came home and found him in the garage. Beaten. Bleeding. Almost unrecognizable, except for the shape of his regret.

After he died, nothing was the same. The world quieted, as if it were grieving with me, every echo of him lingering in the hollow of our rooms.

The emptiness was suffocating, but the chaos he’d left behind clung to the walls, a gnawing shadow that never let up.

The path I spiraled down after that felt inevitable. What else was there when you had nothing, when every day was a challenge and survival was a game no one won? I would have done anything in those days. Anything at all.

And I had.