Chapter 42: The Awakening
****Third Person POV****
The room was dark, shrouded in velvet shadows that bled across the high ceilings and gilded walls like spilled ink. The air was thick with silence, pierced only by the intermittent drip of water echoing from some unseen corner of the underground safehouse. A faint heartbeat monitor blinked in green rhythm beside a narrow metal bed—silent yet steady, like a soldier waiting for orders. And there, beneath a sheet of sterile white, Dante Vale lay motionless.
His chest rose in slow, even breaths. His face—still marked by the bruises from the staged ambush—remained ghostly pale. Only a faint twitch at the corner of his mouth suggested that he was still tethered to the waking world.
They believed him dead.
Victor Raze, the kingpin who’d orc
