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I n Carrow’s worst nightmares, he was omniscient and powerless — the memories both real and imagined playing before him like scenes of a movie.

The executions started sometime after 7 p.m. He’d been able to piece that much together after the fact. And so the dreams always started off with the same timing.

Once he’d put together the timeline of that day, Carrow realized that Johns and Jackie had been the first to go. In reality, the cops would find the two gang members slumped in a gory mess in the back room of the pool hall that The Kettle Syndicate managed at the time. They’d been offed execution style, on their knees. In Carrow’s dreams, the two of them were always being made to kneel there for a span of time that felt infinite, begging for their lives as the gunmen aimed.

On the other side of the wall, similar mayhem took place: a gun at Emilio’s temple, another pressed into Mendoza’s back, a third aimed at Frankie. More lives begged for and lost.

Carrow’s dreaming mind forced him to watch every syrup-slow moment of the men’s lives before they were snuffed out.

The murders played out again and again and again. The pool hall, the warehouse, the transport truck, the little office on the bay, the safehouse on the westside. The only ones he’d seen firsthand had been the executions at Carrow’s own compound, but his dreaming mind was all too happy to fill in the details from the other scenes.

It had been a carefully timed operation, the systematic murders pulled off seamlessly to exterminate Carrow’s entire gang network in one evening.

It was the kind of thing Carrow told himself that the other gangs of Las Abras would never be capable of pulling off. It had required real teamwork and months of planning, observation.

Apart, the gangs surrounding The Kettle Syndicate were weak. TKS had risen to power so steadily in the Southern California landscape that stopping them never even felt like an option.

At least, that’s what Carrow had assumed.

The little gangs at their feet seemed too disparate to unite. Would Aryan bikers really be able to join forces and work with the ex-cartel gangs that patrolled south Las Abras? Would the gang of young black women who’d become famous for their high-stakes carjackings actually cooperate with another gang long enough to accomplish anything if the other gang was made up of the sexist bikers who raced through the city’s streets at 3 a.m.?

But in the end, against all odds, they had.

His dreams didn’t bother to embellish upon the details of the murders at Carrow’s compound. There was nothing that could be added to the scene to make them grislier than they already were in Carrow’s real memory.

Ten of his best men had died at the compound that day. His soldiers. His friends.

They died at the hands of the rival gangs’ leaders, who descended on the compound, needing to send a message to Carrow. They made him watch.

And then, the worst injury to him that day: they left him alive.

The men and women who gathered there in the one spot where he felt safe didn’t lay a hand on him other than to restrain him. He remembered every detail in his dreams.

They tied him in a way that they knew he could escape and left him on the floor of his office.

The dreams always shot forward from the point at which they left him there, skimming past the way that he’d gotten loose before racing from point to point to confirm his worst fears.

The pool hall, the warehouse, the transport truck, the little office on the bay, the safehouse on the westside.

It was the same scene inside each building.

The Kettle Syndicate was dead. Carrow was the only survivor.

A month after their first night together, Dust was in Carrow’s bed during one of the nightmares.

It was rare for them to spend a night apart after that first night in the safehouse, and there was no point in sleeping in Dust’s bed. Carrow’s suite was predictably the nicest in the penthouse with ridiculously fine trappings and a sprawling bed.

Dust had noticed the way the man would move in his sleep sometimes, clenching his fists and grinding his molars with a sickening squeal that would jar Dust out of his own dreams. Certainly, Dust thought, it wouldn’t be unusual for The Company to have nightmares.

They all had sins that could only be acknowledged in the unguarded moments when they gave in to their subconscious minds.

But that night was different.

He woke up because he was being moved, because hands were grasping him, pulling him out of sleep. It was disorienting, and Dust pushed away from the needy hands before he remembered where he was, could comprehend the feeling of the smooth, cool sheets against his bare skin. Carrow. The Company.

The man in bed with him let out a ragged noise that could’ve been a sob when he drew back. Dust moved immediately to correct the error, vaguely panicked by the sound.

“Hey, hey, ” he said soothingly. “Hey, Carrow, come on, you’re dreaming.”

The man was faintly visible in the dark, lying on his side and blinking, still half-asleep maybe. Dust snaked an arm under Carrow’s neck and put the other around his waist, drawing the larger man closer, squeezing him in the dark because he didn’t know what else to do.

“Hey, you’re safe, ok?” Dust said softly.

“The Company,” Carrow said, his voice tight.

“Yeah, everybody’s here. We’re all safe.”

He pressed his lips against Carrow’s, trying to be soothing but almost pulling back when he felt that the other man’s face was wet. Before Dust could even comprehend it, Carrow was turning away, flipping to his other side, embarrassed maybe.

“Fucking nightmares,” he said. It was clear that he was trying to keep the trembling out of his voice, but Carrow wasn’t entirely successful. He sounded frightened — something Dust had never heard before in the other man’s voice.

Carrow had attempted to sleep after that, sitting in bed for several minutes until Dust guessed he’d had enough of recalling whatever awful thing he’d been dreaming of. The man rose, careful not to wake Dust — who he must have assumed had already fallen back to sleep — shouldered into a light robe, and slipped out of his bedroom. Dust didn’t try to follow him.

When he came back — maybe it was an hour later or maybe it was more — he smelled like cognac and cigarettes and city air. Dust didn’t know if he’d managed to escape the nightmare or if he’d just dulled it with enough drink, but the man fell into a deep sleep afterwards.

He was still sleeping when Dust got up to start the next day. He didn’t try to rouse the man.

Before the day that launched a million nightmares for Carrow, there had been decades of success for The Kettle Syndicate.

Carrow had been just 25 when he took over as the acting boss for the gang.

Riley sent the word once he was established in prison — and of course it hadn’t been difficult to make the appointment, even behind bars. TKS was just as well-connected inside the pen as it was in the free world of Southern California. His conviction was meaningless to the chain of command. Riley would remain the true boss. It was just that he couldn’t direct the type of on-street action that he needed to from within a cell.

So the young Carrow became Riley’s right hand on the outside. The acting boss .

The move was controversial. There was talk of dissent throughout the gang, of soldiers who were unhappy at being passed over for promotion and men in the top tier of leadership who resented the favoritism that Riley had always shown for A.R. Carrow since he’d joined up as a teenager.

The first man from the inside who crossed Carrow was found executed in his own bathtub.

The second, bound and suffocated and left in a ditch.

There wasn’t a third.

Carrow insisted from the start that he hadn’t had a hand in the revenge killings in the ranks of The Kettle Syndicate — and it had been true. Carrow never asked for people to cleave to him out of fear and didn’t believe that intimidation made for great leadership. He led by example, challenged the men surrounding him to work just as hard as he did, and was in perpetual motion from the moment he joined TKS. That didn’t change when he became the boss on the outside.

No, someone else had taken up the mantle of protection for him, and that someone never did come forward. But it just took two lives lost before the rest of the gang fell into order.

(Two lives too many, Carrow thought. But two lives nonetheless.)

The Kettle Syndicate , named for the rundown industrial area south of Las Abras where the gang was founded, flourished like never before in the years after Carrow took the reins. Their membership swelled as men abandoned their old gangs, drawn to the power of TKS, to the charismatic and serious young leader who became more infamous each day.

Riley died in prison half a decade later, waiting on an appeal. It had been cancer — and anyone who had visited him or seen him on the inside knew that the diagnosis was accurate. He’d wasted until he was almost unrecognizable. Still, rumors flew that Riley had been assassinated — by a rival gang, maybe by the Aryans, and sometimes in rumors even by Carrow’s own order.

Carrow ignored the rumors easily. Riley had been like a father to him. It was ludicrous to think that he’d ever have harmed the man.

The reality of the situation was quite the opposite. Carrow felt lost in the year after the boss’ death. TKS had been Riley’s vision from the start, even if Carrow had been effectively running the organization for six years. Carrow wrestled with himself over how to proceed as the true head of the gang.

Should he take the organization in a new, more profitable direction — one that came along with a fresh vision and a better opportunity for growth — or should he do his best to honor Riley’s legacy and never stray from that path?

After one more year of petty crimes and small-time jobs, Carrow doing his best to imagine what Riley would’ve wanted all the while, the new boss decided to follow his own vision.

TKS would take on bigger, higher-profile jobs.

Inclusion in the gang became more difficult, rules more rigid. He began to hire people from around the country who he felt would be a good fit for the crew, employing highly-trained professionals who could amplify their missions with their talents for demolitions, technology, extraction, and sharp shooting.

He scaled up their security and spent more time planning. It took just a few months to get the city of Las Abras in his pocket. He alternately bought and earned friends for The Kettle Syndicate. Carrow donated to the campaign of any rising political star who would accept his dirty money. He did favors for the ultra-rich who came to Las Abras to work and play, whether they wanted a cheating spouse tailed or a debt settled.

He did good things, too. The men of The Kettle Syndicate punished criminals who looked to take advantage of the struggling classes of the city. They bought land in the “slums” of the city, clearing dilapidated buildings and provided the resources for the surrounding neighborhoods to have parks instead. And after a significant amount of legal work to protect the recipients, Carrow donated funds to the support systems that people had already put in place to help themselves: afterschool programs, rehab centers, soup kitchens.

His men laughed at him at first, joking that he’d gotten too caught up in wanting to be liked. But in months, they saw the landscape change. Heists were easier because common people kept their mouths shut about Carrow and his gang when the police came knocking.

Intimidation was one thing. Being respected and protected by the city surrounding you was quite another.

Under Carrow’s new policies, the rise of The Kettle Syndicate had been, in a word, meteoric .

And its end had been an abrupt nightmare, one that colored Carrow’s darkest fears for The Company.