POV: Lucien
I have not said Marcus Decker’s name out loud in four years.
That is not accident. It is erasure, deliberate, disciplined because names are power, and I stopped giving him mine the night I pulled a bullet from my shoulder in a ditch outside Varenholm and understood exactly who had put it there.
Faye watches me with quiet focus, the kind she uses when she has identified something important and allows it space to surface.
“He ran this territory before you,” she says.
“He built it,” I reply. “From nothing, same as I did or so I believed. I came up under him. Fifteen years old, no family worth naming. He was the first to see usefulness instead of discard.”
I pause.
“I gave him twelve years. Built half of what he had. I thought it was loyalty.”
“You thought it was partnershi
