The doors of the Boren estate’s private training pavilion rattled with the continuous, rhythmic thunder of gunfire. Damian didn’t even wait for the automated biometric scanners to completely clear his security clearance; he shoved the reinforced glass panels open, his white lab coat billowing around his legs as he stormed into the indoor shooting range.

At the far end of the firing line stood Bellero Boren. The notorious underworld dictator stood with his boots planted firmly on the concrete floor, his stark white hair gleaming under the harsh fluorescent spotlights. He was wearing sound-canceling ear blockers, his wrinkled features locked into a mask of execution as he raised a firearm.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

The weapon kicked in his hands, sending three armor-piercing rounds tearing through the chest cavity of a ballistic gel silhouette fifty yards down the range.

"Father! Stop firing and look at me right now!" Damian shouted, his voice completely drowned out by the thunderous echoes of the machinery. He took three aggressive strides forward, his eyes flashing with an equal Alpha heat as he bypassed the personal bodyguards standing at the perimeter. "We have a catastrophic medical emergency! Turn the weapon down!"

Bellero ignored him. He didn’t even turn his head, his focus remaining rigidly anchored on the smoking barrel of his gun as he slammed a fresh magazine into the chamber, preparing to pull the trigger once more. To him, his son’s shouting was nothing but a distant vibration through his ear blockers.

Unable to handle the agonizing delay while Jannah’s internal metrics were actively collapsing in the hospital, Damian lost his sanity. He lunged forward, his hands shooting out to rip the padded ear blockers completely off his father’s head, throwing the plastic gear onto the concrete floorboards.

"I told you to snap out of it and listen to me this exact second!" Damian roared, face-to-face with the Mafia boss, his chest heaving with desperation.

Bellero’s hand froze on the grip of his firearm, his head slowly turning around as a terrifyingly dark stillness settled over his massive shoulders. His eyes narrowed into lethal, burning slits, a growl vibrating in his chest from the audacity of his son’s physical interruption. "You have exactly three seconds to explain why you are disrupting my target practice, Damian," Bellero whispered, his voice dropping. "Before I forget that my own blood flows through your veins."

"Do you know that the bullet your ’elite’ hitmen put into Jannah Nenth’s body was coated in a slow-acting synthetic poison?!" Damian fired right back, his voice cracking with raw emotion as he planted his shoes firmly on the floor. "She is currently hooked up to life-support monitors at the Upper District Hospital, shivering and shaking on the verge of absolute system failure! Her tissue is actively undergoing a rapid cellular degradation because of your reckless violence!"

Bellero’s frame went rigid. His sharp features twisted into a look of genuine shock, his grip on the firearm loosening slightly as he processed the information. "What... what the hell did you just say?" the old Mafia boss rasped, his brow furrowing in confusion.

"Stop pretending you have no idea about the poisoning, Father!" Damian hissed through his teeth, his fists clenching. "Your enforcers deployed those bullets on that lower road! You need to drop this pathetic act and provide the chemical antidote code this very moment if you actually want your future daughter-in-law to survive the night! If she dies, your precious chance at securing our lineage’s future dies along with her!"

"Shut your naive mouth, Damian!" Bellero roared suddenly, his voice a deafening, demonic boom that rattled the glass partitions of the shooting range. He slammed the firearm down onto the prep counter, shattering a plastic cleaning tray into splinters. "I have absolutely no idea what kind of chemical agent you are screaming about! I run an empire of blood and iron, yes, but I explicitly ordered a clean execution for that bastard Dorrent Grefo! I didn’t know the bullet was poisoned!"

Bellero took a stride forward, his underworld aura expanding violently until it completely suffocated the oxygen in the pavilion. His wrinkled face was swamped with a sudden, murderous fury that made his bodyguards instinctively step back into the shadows. "If what said is true... then those pathetic, blind fools downstairs have hidden a rogue variable from my desk. You should probably talk to the men who actually shot the bullet before it’s too late for her system."

The old man’s golden eyes completely swamped with fire as he turned toward his next-in-command, Jared, who was waiting near the security terminal. "Jared! Get the keys to the lower cells right now! I am going to skin those three bastards alive this instant if they aren’t willing to talk and confess to this treason! If they make this mistake my last chance at having my family produce an Enigma... they will die a thousand times before their hearts stop beating!"

Without waiting for his son, Bellero marched out of the training pavilion, his boots pounding against the stone floorboards as he headed straight toward the elevator bay leading to the sub-levels of the estate. Damian followed right behind him.

The elevator doors hissed open to reveal the freezing, damp concrete corridors of the basement chamber. As they approached the central interrogation cell, the low, agonizing groans of Tobby, Fred, and Denmark echoed through the iron bars. The three hitmen had been tied up by their wrists to heavy structural chains dangling from the ceiling, their shirts torn to shreds, their backs bruised and bleeding from the relentless, brutal beating Jared’s enforcers had unleashed.

Bellero kicked the steel cell door open with a resounding BANG, his frame filling the threshold. He strode into the center of the damp room, completely ignoring the pooling water on the floor as he grabbed an iron pipe from the wall rack.

"Line them up and pull their heads back!" Bellero commanded, his voice a flat, freezing promise of death.

Jared’s enforcers immediately stepped forward, brutally grabbing the chains and jerking the three bleeding hitmen upward until their toes barely touched the concrete floor.

Bellero slammed the iron pipe violently against Denmark’s uninjured thigh, the loud CRACK of the metal against bone making the man let out an agonizing scream that echoed through the basement. "I am not going to ask twice!" Bellero roared, his eyes burning into the three trembling men. "Which one of you coated that ammunition with a slow-acting synthetic poison?! Who gave you the authorization to bring chemical filth into my contract?!"

"Boss... please... we don’t know anything about poison!" Fred whimpered, spit and blood leaking from his split lips as he convulsed within the iron chains. "We just loaded the standard rounds... I swear to God, Boss!"

Bellero didn’t say a word. He swung the iron pipe back, forcefully striking Fred across his ribs, the impact causing the hitman to vomit a spray of dark fluid onto the floorboards. The torture was completely relentless, the enforcers delivering heavy, systemic blows to their midsections until the entire room was thick with the scent of physical suffering.

"Stop... stop the beating... please, Boss... it was me!"

A broken, ragged voice suddenly cut through the heavy slashes of the whip. At the far end of the chain, Tobby hung with his head bowed, his shoulders violently shaking as tears of pain and exhaustion mixed with the sweat on his face. He slowly raised his bruised visage, his glazed eyes looking directly into Bellero’s murderous glare. "It was me... I was the one who fired the bullet ... and I was the one who coated the metal tips with the synthetic agent before we left the armory."

Damian stepped forward, his white lab coat stained with the damp mist of the cellar as he gripped the iron bars. "What specific chemical compound did you use, Tobby?!" 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

Bellero shoved his son back with a massive arm, stepping into Tobby’s personal space, his fingers wrapping around the hitman’s bloody hair to violently yank his head backward until his neck bones strained. "Why the hell did you bring poison into my operation, you blind fool?! You nearly destroyed my family’s future!"

Tobby let out a bitter, weeping laugh, his teeth stained crimson as he glared through his messy hair. "Because I hate that arrogant bastard Dorrent Grefo to the core of my soul, Boss! I wanted him to die an agonizing, slow death from the infection if the bullet didn’t manage to rip through his heart on the road! I wanted to ensure his total eradication!"

Bellero’s jaw clenched with an absolute, terrifying fury. "And why the hell do you hold that much personal malice against the Grefo Group, you piece of trash?!"

"Because three years ago... that cold-blooded tech tycoon made my father’s logistics firm go completely bankrupt!" Tobby screamed out, his voice cracking with a deep, long-standing resentment that had rotted his mind for years. "My father failed to pay back a specific, multi-million-credit industrial loan he had borrowed from the Grefo Group’s administrative board... and Dorrent personally signed the enforcement papers that threw my old man into a prison! It completely destroyed my entire family, affecting my education... I didn’t manage to finish my university degree, and I was forced to become a pathetic gangster just to survive in the slums! That is why I did it! I wanted to tear his life apart the same way he tore mine!"

"I don’t give a single damn about your pathetic education or your bankrupt father!" Bellero roared, his voice a deafening boom as he backhanded Tobby across the face, sending a fresh splatter of blood across the concrete wall. He let go of his hair, his breathing turning ragged as he turned his back on the bleeding man, his eyes snapping directly onto Damian’s tense posture.

The old Mafia boss adjusted his expensive, blood-stained silk cuffs, his voice dropping into a flat, demonic rasp that carried the absolute weight of a ticking clock as he pointed a trembling finger at Tobby’s chest.

"Stop your pathetic talking right this instant and give my son that antidote this very moment before it’s too late..."