Chapter Four
711 Words
Rover was born into war long before he knew the word for it.
His childhood was violence wrapped in silence. Blood, guns, power, that was the language of his home. His father, the feared underworld king, ruled an empire with intelligence so sharp it cut before you noticed the wound. Cold. Calculating. Untouchable.
But at home, there was her.
Rover's mother.
Soft hands, kind voice. She hummed lullabies even while sirens wailed in the distance. She was warmth in a kingdom built of concrete and cruelty.
Until the night it shattered.
Rover was just ten, lying on the floor with her, building a small plastic city. She had laughed when he insisted on putting the police station next to the candy shop. He remembered that laugh. The way it rang.
Then came the bullets.
Glass exploded. Screams. Blood.
His mother crumpled beside him before he even realized the sound had come from a gun.
He didn't remember who dragged him away. Just the heat of her blood. And the way his father arrived too late.
Too late, but not empty-handed.
The man who gave the order died with his throat crushed between Rover's father's hands. And the rest of his family, his children, everyone tied to his name, were wiped out like they'd never existed.
And then... his father put a gun in his mouth and joined his wife.
Rover didn't cry.
He couldn't.
He was raised after that by his uncle, the next in line and with him came Ezren. His cousin. His brother in everything. They trained together. Ate together. Fought together. Ezren was there the first time Rover held a gun. There the first time he killed. There the first time he took a fall and Ezren pulled him back up, laughing like nothing could ever touch them.
But as the years passed, the shadows shifted.
Rover rose too high. Too fast. Became too powerful.
And Ezren watched. Waited.
Pretended.
Rover trusted him with his empire. Trusted him with everything until the night Ezren put two bullets in his chest and whispered:
"You've ruled long enough. Your name dies tonight."
And walked away.
Rover didn't fall because of pain.
He fell because that betrayal was the last thing he never saw coming.
Cynrim didn't remember her parents.
Not their names, not their faces just the feeling that something had been taken from her before she even knew how to miss it.
Her earliest memory was of rainwater dripping through the orphanage ceiling, and her tiny fingers tracing shapes on the cold floor as she waited for someone to pick her. No one ever did.
But she smiled anyway.
That was the thing about Cynrim, she learned early that light was something you had to carry inside you, especially when the world refused to offer any.
She was the child who helped the others with homework, who split her bread even when she was starving, who made up stories under blanket forts to drown out the sounds of the older kids crying at night.
She was bright ,too bright for that place. Always top of her class, always the first to volunteer when the local clinics brought doctors to speak. The moment she saw a scalpel and stethoscope, she knew. That's what she would be someone who saved people. Someone who brought calm in the middle of chaos.
She studied harder than anyone else. Earned scholarships. Fought tooth and nail to get into med school, then graduated top of her class, her hands already steady from years in trauma centers where blood flowed like rivers and life hung on seconds.
But no matter how far she went, Cynrim never stopped visiting the orphanage.
Every week.
She brought the kids sweets, patched scraped knees, sat under the same leaky ceiling and told new stories with her same old smile. Because she remembered what it meant to feel forgotten.
She never let herself grow cold.
But somewhere inside her, buried deep ,was a scar of her own. Not on the skin, but deeper. A quiet ache for family, for touch, for something soft and constant. Something she told herself she didn't need.
Until a man named Rover bled into her living room.
And the storm she never expected started to rise
- Writer
