Chapter 1: First Move
Kendrick
They called Paxora the City of Peace, but peace here didn’t come cheap.
It was the kind sold behind silk curtains, sealed with diamond cufflinks, and signed with measured smiles that never quite reached the eyes. You could smell the power in the air, in the gasoline perfume of stretch limos, in the mint-slick cigars tucked into a man’s jacket like ammunition, in the way everyone looked at you—studied you—before deciding whether to shake your hand or shoot you in the head.
I’ve been here for three years. Long enough to know where the cracks in the pavement hid listening devices. Long enough to know which newspapers were owned by which men. And still they looked at me like a stray dog dressed in a suit.
They weren’t wrong.
I wasn’t born into any of this. Not the Rolex, not the penthouse view, not the silk shirts I couldn’t stop itching under. I used to wash blood off my hands with dish soap. Now I used imported cologne and bottled charms. The name I wore, Kendrick Richmond, was a costume stitched together with stolen money and heirs.
I used to be Kendrick Fletcher. The street rat who worked for royalty. Then, I turned into Kendrick Rossi. The boy who kissed a mafia princess and burned her entire family to the ground. I left Sicily with my son, Arthur, in my arms and hell at my back. Took Marco, the last of the Rossi line, his quiet wife and his child Tony. We changed our names the moment the plane landed. I told them it was for safety. Partially, it was. But deep down, it was because Kendrick Richmond sounded like someone who could own a city.
I came here not to hide, but to conquer.
I didn’t want Kendrick to disappear. I wanted him to be reborn. In Paxora, where glass towers touched the sky and men hid their knives in their handshakes, I’d make the Richmond name holy. The last name of kings. The kind whispered at cocktail parties and feared to speak aloud.
I only had one problem. The DeSantis family. The so-called founders of Paxora. Old money. Old rulers. The kind of family whose photo albums looked like business contracts and whose children were raised to kill through smiles and glares.
They came to me within a week of my arrival. The first time, they were polite. “We try to keep Paxora at peace,” one of them said, uttering words like venom. “No room for noisy names.”
The second time, they skipped the smile. “Leave while you still have your name intact.”
Yet, the third time, they pulled their weapons. “An outsider like you could never be welcomed in our city.”
That’s when I understood. They weren’t worried about their city. They were afraid of me. Of what I could build here. The man who slaughtered the Rossis didn’t deserve a place within them. The nobody who charmed the daughter of Sicily’s leaders, bore their heir, and later stole everything from them. The boy who was supposed to stay in the shadows. The dog that bit back his owner’s hand.
But I stayed. Because I didn’t come to Paxora to play house. I came to build a goddamn empire. I just had to play my part, the new-money mogul, the young widow with tragedy behind his eyes. I made deals in glass offices with floor-to-ceiling views. I smiled at charity galas I bought my way into. I wore navy-blue suits and spoke with an accent I’d practiced in the mirror until my tongue forgot how to be poor.
But even after three years, I still couldn’t match their pace. While they polished their silverware and bragged about hedge funds over martinis, I was studying the city’s spine. Its layout. Its rhythm. Its rules. I watched who paid who. Learned how to hold power. Who to keep at a distance, who to tame, and who to rival.
It didn’t take long to realize something most men were too scared to say out loud. Paxora wasn’t a normal city. It was a masquerade. Everyone wore a mask, hiding his hunger for blood behind gold. What mattered was who held the knife when the music stopped.
Then, I found my own mask. An old hotel, just rotting in the heart of the city. It was nothing special. Beige bricks. Cracked marble floors. Half the windows were broken. The sign out front read The Crimson Hotel, a name it hadn’t shone in years. So, I bought it under a shell company. Paid an architect to sketch something beautiful. Rewired the guts. Put gold on the walls. Velvet on the beds. Crystal in the chandeliers. I renamed it The Royals Hotel, a name dressed up as a warning that not anyone was welcomed in there.
I didn’t even get to advertise it. Words traveled faster than light in cities like this. You leave a door ajar and the right devils walk in. But, the wrong ones came knocking at mine.
Three black cars pulled up in front of my hotel like a funeral procession. The Don, Vincenzo DeSantis, stepped through the revolving doors wearing a suit that probably cost more than the entire building used to be worth. On his right, walked his son, Giuseppe DeSantis, a guy who looked my age or maybe older.
“I thought we warned you,” Vincenzo said calmly, “to stay out of our city.”
“You did,” I replied, adjusting my cufflinks—a gift from a senator’s wife, funnily enough—and smiled like I didn’t grow up learning how to gut a man without leaving a stain on the floor. “But this part didn’t seem taken.”
If I had the Don himself coming to my door, then I was stroking a sensitive nerve. I smiled at that thought.
Vincenzo stepped forward. “You try starting anything illegal here, casinos, gun runs, laundering, I don’t care what kind of empire you’re dreaming of, I will burn it to the ground. This district was crime-free and shall remain the way it is.”
I nodded slowly, like I understood. Like I agreed. But in my head, I was thinking: If they told me not to build my empire in the Elite District, then I’d certainly build my throne right there.
It wasn’t just a hotel I was building. It was a legacy. I crafted the legend from scratch. The Richmond family was wiped out in a vicious attack overseas, slaughtered, betrayed, targeted by enemies who wanted to erase them from the map. Only a few of us survived. Me. Arthur. Marco. His wife. His son. That was what I fed the city. That we were survivors. People pitied victims.
Marco played the role perfectly. He was older, the kind of man who looked like he could’ve been head of a family in another life. In my lie, he was, but only on papers. People trusted older men. I let him have that. Let him run the one thing we carried over from the past, the arms business. That had always been the Rossis’ specialty. Ships coming in from Croatia, crates marked as agricultural tools, steel barrels tucked under floorboards.
I knew Marco could keep that part afloat. The smuggling routes. The fake ledgers. The offshore accounts. Let him hold the map. Let him think he was steering. While I stood in the background, dreaming about building up a kingdom of my own.
I didn’t want to just inherit a business soaked in someone else’s history. I didn’t want to carry the Rossi name like a cursed inheritance, not even hidden under a new label. I wanted something that spoke me. That bore the signature of Kendrick Richmond. I needed to create something that only I could control. Something that didn’t remind me of Katrina’s eyes or Marco’s silence or the bones I buried in Sicilian dirt.
