Chapter 1
Ares
People always thought pretty boys had it easier.
I had learned young that beauty made people careless. It made them assume softness where there was none. It made teachers excuse what they would have questioned in someone rougher around the edges. It made strangers smile too easily, girls linger too long, and men underestimate you in ways that could be useful if you knew what to do with them. People looked at a face like mine and decided I had been handed an easier life.
In some ways, I truly had.
I had not grown up in Glass Alley, Rustwater Docks or in one of the districts where blood on the pavement barely made people look twice. I had grown up in a decent enough neighborhood, in a decent enough family, with the kind of life that looked solid from the outside. My parents were good people. Present people. The sort who asked how school had been at dinner and meant it. The sort who remembered parent nights, paid bills on time, and believed structure could save a child.
My mother taught literature. My father worked long hours in a job that was respectable enough to bore me whenever he explained it. We were not rich, not even close, but there was always food in the kitchen, always heat in the winter, always someone waiting if I came home late. I had my own room. A door that locked. A window overlooking trimmed hedges and parked cars instead of sirens and street deals. By Dominion standards, that counted as luck.
Even as a kid, I liked systems more than people. Systems made sense. They failed for reasons. They held if they were built well and cracked if they were not. People were messier. They lied when they were scared. Smiled when they meant something cruel. Pretended they were saying one thing while wanting another entirely. I learned early that I preferred the clean honesty of code to the chaos of conversation.
My father brought home an old computer one winter when I was eleven. Some secondhand relic from work he had planned to throw out. He dropped it on the dining table with a laugh and told me if I could get it running, I could keep it.
He thought he was giving me something to do after school. He did not realize he was handing me the first thing that had ever felt like mine.
I took it apart that same night. Spread the pieces over the table, ignored dinner until my mother threatened to unplug the kitchen lights, and stayed up long past midnight just trying to understand how all those tiny parts worked together. By morning I had it running. By the end of the week I had figured out how to get around restrictions I was absolutely supposed to leave alone.
That was how it started. Not with gangs. Not with blood. Not with some tragic tumble into the underbelly of the Dominion. It started with curiosity. With school firewalls and forgotten passwords and stupid little locked systems that seemed almost insultingly easy to slip through once I understood the pattern. It started with a pulse of satisfaction every time something opened that was meant to stay shut.
I liked seeing what sat underneath the polished surface people trusted. The structure below the story. The hidden framework. The weak points.
I got good fast.
Too fast.
By fourteen, I could make things disappear from databases. Change records. Slip through private networks and sit there, quiet as a ghost, while people kept living their lives above me with no idea I was watching their systems breathe. I never did it for money in the beginning. That came later. At first, it was the challenge. The clean little thrill of outsmarting something that thought it was secure.
The truth was, I had always liked finding the cracks. Maybe that should have warned me about the kind of person I would become. Or the kind of people I would eventually meet.
Because Luca DeSantis did not enter my life through some dark alley exchange, or something shady. He entered it in a public gym.
That was almost funny, looking back. That rich kid in a public gym. Yet, he liked the normalcy of it, he had said.
I had started going because the pressure in my body needed somewhere to go. Because sitting still too long made me restless. Because my breakmark had started showing its teeth, and movement helped more than I wanted to admit. The gym was clean, and expensive enough to keep out most of the worst idiots, and it was open late. I liked the rhythm of it. The control.
Then one night, I noticed him. He was hard to miss, even if he had wanted to be. Luca looked handsome in a way that made people stare openly. Dark hair damp at the temples, broad shoulders under a black shirt. That easy smile. There was something watchful about him. Something cold around the mouth, even when he smiled. Men gave him space without seeming to realize they were doing it. Women looked at him like they wanted to risk it anyway.
I knew who he was, of course.
Everyone did.
A DeSantis did not walk into a room unnoticed in the Dominion. Not if you had half a brain. He was the Crow Prince after all. I told myself that was the end of my interest. Then he caught me looking one day.
Most people looked away when they were caught. Luca did not. He held my stare across the gym like he was amused by something I had not said aloud yet. I remembered gripping the bar a little tighter. Remembered the strange feeling that went through me, not fear exactly, but awareness. The sense that something had just tilted half an inch off balance.
He came over two nights later. Like a regular man making conversation after midnight beside the weights.
“You always watch everyone else’s form,” he said.
His voice was smoother than I expected. I reracked the weight and looked at him. “Occupational hazard.”
One dark brow lifted. “You have an occupation?”
I should have lied. Instead I smiled. “Depends who’s asking.”
That made something flicker in his face. Interest, maybe. Real interest, not the shallow kind I was used to getting from strangers who liked the packaging and assumed there was nothing underneath it.
That was the problem with men like Luca. They noticed when there was.
He started talking to me after that. Casually at first. A comment here. A question there. Sometimes he would drift over between sets, black gloves half on, expression unreadable, and ask things that sounded meaningless until I realized they were not. He never asked directly what I did. Never said hacking out loud. But he circled it. Tested the edges. Let me decide how much I wanted to reveal.
I did not know then that Luca would become one of the only constants in my life.
Back then, he was just the beautiful, dangerous Crow Prince of the Dominion, the Desantis line, who kept showing up at the gym, talking to me. There was something easy in those first months, something unexpectedly real. He was smarter than most people gave him credit for, quieter when he wanted to be, sharper in ways that did not always show until too late. Around him, I never felt like I had to flatten parts of myself to be tolerated. He liked edges. He liked minds that moved too fast.
We became friends before I realized I had let that happen. And years later, when my life split cleanly into a before and an after, it was Luca who stepped into the wreckage first.
You see, the Hollowborn did not reach our neighborhood all at once. That was the cruel part. The Void came creeping... Consuming street by street, block by block, swallowing places whole. People kept pretending it would stop before it reached them. That authorities would contain it. That walls, patrols, distance, all the usual lies, would hold.
They did not.
By the time the Hollowborn tore through our part of the district, by the time that black, hungry spread of shadow and monsters had eaten through the edges of everything I had once called home, it was already too late.
I lost my parents to it. To the Hollows.
There were years of memory wrapped around that sentence, and none of them ever softened. My mother’s voice. My father’s hands. The house that had once seemed so painfully ordinary. Gone. Torn open by a world that did not care how decent you had been, how careful, how innocent. The Void did not care about any of that. The Hollowborn least of all.
Grief changed me, but not in the noble way people liked to write about. It hollowed things out. Burned patience from my bones. Left me with sharper instincts and fewer illusions. I had already known the Dominion was cruel. Loss just stripped away the last of my surprise.
And when everything was gone, Luca came. Not with pity. Never that. With a place at his side. With a key in his hand. With an offer spoken in that same low, controlled voice that had first met me beside a weight rack years before.
A home with the Skulls.
By then, the Black Skulls were already becoming something feared across the Dominion. Rome and Luca DeSantis at the center of it, with Grayson under their protection and Beckham already bound so tightly to them he may as well have been blood. Derek had come first after the brothers, recruited as their loyal bodyguard and becoming something much more dangerous than that in the years since. Then there was me.
The sixth.
I became the sixth Skull, and I was so very proud of it. Proud of the name. Proud of the place. Proud, even then, of standing beside men the rest of the city only whispered about. They were not soft men. They were not easy men. But they were mine in the way family became yours when it was chosen, when it was built from loyalty instead of luck.
Rome gave the order. Luca gave the invitation. Beckham tested whether I could keep up. Derek watched in that silent, lethal way of his and decided, eventually, that I belonged. Grayson, still younger then, looked at me like I had always been there waiting to step into line beside them.
That was the thing about the Skulls. Once they let you in, they did not do it halfway.
And I had never done anything halfway either.
Pretty boys, people liked to think, had it easier.
Maybe they looked at me now, at the nice clothes and the sharp smile and the calm way I moved through rooms I had once never imagined entering, and still thought that. Maybe they saw the face first and the danger second. Maybe that was why they kept making the same mistake.
Let them.
Usually, I did.
Usually, I wore it well. The version of me that looked like he belonged exactly where he stood, like he had chosen every part of this life and had never once doubted the cost of it.
And maybe I had not.
Because after Derek came me. Then the red-haired twins, recruited after one bloody job went sideways in the east and two impossible illusion tricks saved Luca’s life before the rest of us had even realized we had been exposed. Cillian and Aaron Blackwood, my brothers now for eight years and counting. Chaos and silence. Trickster and the ghost. The seventh and eighth, dragged into our orbit because Rome respected their hustle, Luca respected their nerve, and the twins had both in spades. They had looked at the Black Skulls and seen something worth joining. Rome had looked back and seen two real dangerous weapons he would rather keep at his table than leave in somebody else’s hands.
Johnny Vega came last.
Skull nine.
The Blue Widows had already whispered his name before he officially wore ours, before Rome ever put the full weight of the Skulls behind him. He had the kind of strength people noticed first, but that was never what made him dangerous. It was the way he could walk into any room in the Dominion and leave with three new allies, two new secrets, and somebody willing to bleed for him before dawn. Rome recruited him because empires were not only built on fear. Some had to be built on charm, on reach, on loyalty earned in places the rest of us could not rule half as well. Luca trusted him. Beckham respected him. Derek did not hate him, which from Derek was practically an embrace. And Johnny, with that mouth and that laugh and that brutal kind of devotion he hid behind jokes, became ours all the same.
Nine of us.
Rome. Luca. Grayson. Beckham. Derek. Me. The twins. Johnny.
The Black Skulls.
For years, it had felt like something immovable. Something forged too brutally and too completely to ever really break. We bent. We bled. We fought like hell with each other and for each other, but when it came down to it, we stood as one. The nine of us, inseparable.
I had believed that with the kind of certainty only fools and loyal men ever truly managed. But tonight might have been the first time I had ever seen it differently.
Tonight might have been the first time I looked at what we were, at what had just happened, and felt something cold slip down my spine.
I could not swear the nine of us would ever stand shoulder to shoulder again and still be what we had been.
Not after tonight. Not after whatever had cracked open in the middle of us and refused to close again. We had always felt untouchable in our violence, in our loyalty, in the brutal shape of what we were together. But tonight left me staring at the wreck of that certainty, wondering if this was how something sacred finally began to die.
