The storm had not yet lifted from the Costa estate, and the clouds that loomed above were not of weather, but of war.
Morning light filtered through shattered stained-glass windows, casting fractured colors across the marble floor of the estate’s great hall. The air was thick with the scent of scorched gunpowder, blood, and something worse....betrayal. The aftermath of the ambush that ended Chapter 96 still lingered in the silence, in the bullet holes scarring the walls, and in the solemn expressions of those who survived.
Adrian Costa stood before a table strewn with maps and dossiers, the veins in his forearms taut as he clenched the edge. His eyes, sharp and bloodshot, flicked between zones of his crumbling empire. The Resurrection Council, formed under Cassiel’s cunning, had already
