The season of illegal fights where all and anyone important enough in their level of the underworld bet their money. It was an entire industry, of buying boys, training them to fight till death, only the survivors becoming men and making it to the actual circuit, going around to different locations and fighting for either masters or money. Alpha had stumbled upon it accidentally when he'd be fighting his way up the streets, trying to make ends meet after his mother's death. And once he'd realized the potential of fortune his fists could rake in, he had taken over. The fights had no rules, just two guys in a cage both knowing only one of them could make it out, and every fight Alpha was in, he was the one who got out.
And for that reason, they began calling him The Finisher.
He gave them quick deaths unless they pissed him off. And now he was pissed because the media was calling the killer Fortis Finisher. Oh, he'd not give that butcher a quick death, that was for sure.
“How's the Syndicate been?” Alpha asked, remembering the request his half-brother Dante Maroni had made a few weeks ago.
“Surprisingly quiet.”
A phantom pain bloomed in his right eye socket. Even after so many years, it took him by surprise sometimes, the sensation of having the eye, of losing it, feeling a hollow ache, one he couldn’t really explain. Alpha shook it off, knowing that rubbing the eye only made it worse.
“There’s a note on the desk Jasmine found on her car,” he told the younger man. Hector moved to the note, tearing the flap open, taking the paper out. Since losing his eye, his other senses had become more acute. He’d trained them to be.
“Ugh,” Hector groaned. “Jasmine is like a sister to me, dude. I don't want to read what some asshole wants to do to her. I need to bleach my eyes out.”
Alpha shook his head, disappointed. He’d been hoping for some kind of intervention, anything to remove the monster terrifying his streets.
“Cops know anything more?” he asked, focusing on the sunlight falling on the lush green in the distance.
“Not that we know of.”
“Fuck.”
It was a fucked up situation. Alpha had been aware of a serial killer amongst the streets killing off high-risk sex workers for over two years now. None of his girls had been hurt, but word on the street had spread like wildfire. The police hadn’t been able to piece it together much mainly because they didn’t have the time or resources to spend on such victim profiles. The one cop who had wanted to solve it had been transferred to another division last month, the corruption at the seed of the system. It was one of the reasons he had taken power over the city.
“Any word on the Caine’s sister?” Alpha asked, taking another breath as he tried to make sense of everything happening in his world. “The feelers come back?”
“Nothing yet,” Hector told him. “It was such a long time ago, it’s taking a while to trace it back. Most information is either gone or deliberately suppressed. It's taking time.”
Yes, it had been a long time. And if his guess was correct, the girl was either dead or deep in the clutches of the Syndicate. For her sake and Caine’s, he hoped she was in a grave. Growing up the way he had, as the son of a sex worker, living in a dilapidated red light district of the city, he’d grown up seeing what happened to women who sold themselves under a pimp. The Syndicate made it all look like a walk in the park. From what he knew about them, their depravity was much, much worse. Flesh trade was only one arm of the organization. Alpha knew there were countless others. They had their hands in everything—human fights, dog fights, organ black market trade, sick slavery, anything one could and couldn’t fathom. And even after knowing so much, he had no idea who they were, where they operated, and how deep their tentacles went.
"You think she's alive?" Hector questioned, coming to stand at his side again. He was an emotional bastard, and since he'd been leading the investigation into the missing girls, Alpha knew his friend was invested.
"For her sake," Alpha squashed down Hector's wish. "I hope not."
His entanglement with The Syndicate went way back. Knowing the ways his mother had risked herself for their survival had instilled a sense of responsibility in him at a young age. He’d been twelve the first time he’s used his fists, pummeling the pimp who’d beaten his mother. While the pimp had disappeared, he’d realized he couldn’t just sit and do nothing. So, he had begun fighting on the streets for money, and earning himself a nasty reputation. Most of the scars on his body accounted for such fights when he had been young and stupid, because on the streets there were no rules. And while his mother had died immediately after, his sense of responsibility for those people, his people, had never really left.
Soon after, he had begun offering the workers in his neighborhood the protection of his name, and they had simply begun to give him a little money without him even asking or wanting it since he began making more than enough with his wins. He was a protector, not a pimp. But over time, the word about his pack spread—a pack where only voluntarily sex workers were allowed to work for themselves without anyone breathing down their neck, where they could keep whatever they made, and they themselves began to hand him a cut for his security. Women came looking for protection from clients, and boys came wanting to work. Alpha had given them both. Now, he had over one thousand sex workers in the country who worked under his name on their own terms, completely voluntarily, and hundreds of men protecting them.
And the Syndicate didn’t like that at all. He had been a thorn in their side simply by existing and doing what he could for his people. They’d tried to get him to work for them, but Alpha being who he was, had given them the middle finger. And they couldn't touch him, not with the empire he'd built, not with the power he now had in their seedy world. It was a part of the underworld that was dirty and dark, and he wondered what he was even thinking entertaining the idea of bringing someone like Zephyr into it. His loneliness was getting to his head, nothing more.
Maybe he needed a good fuck. It had been over a year since he’d been with someone, and maybe he just needed to get his dick wet again just like he liked it.
The only time he had entertained the thought of dating someone in the recent past had been when he’d seen Amara in the city. Given her beauty and her strength, it had been impossible not to be attracted to it all. But she belonged to his brother, and they were going to get married next week. He’d received the invitation but he still didn’t know if he would go, especially with the way everything was going to shit in his city.
He felt Victor enter the office, the youngest of the three, the best-looking, and usually the angriest.
“She quizzed me about you,” Victor reported, his face more relaxed than he's seen in a while.
Alpha turned around to face the boy he’d seen grow up with them. “What did she ask?”
A frown marred the handsome fucker’s face. “Weird shit. Your favorite color, food, shoe size.”
Hector huffed a laugh at his brother. “You know what they say about a guy’s shoe size. Maybe she was curious since you didn’t whip it out.”
Victor rolled his eyes at his brother’s snark. “She also asked me for your number.”
Alpha sighed. “Did you give it to her?”
“She was… persistent,” Victor replied in a dry tone.
Amusement, as he’d come to expect in the little time he’d spent with her, filled him. He didn’t know what it was, maybe her tiny stature, maybe her ferocity, maybe her utter disregard for predictability. But she broke the ennui, and that was the main reason Alpha was at a loss about what to do with her proposition—accept and see where it led, or refuse and let life go on as it was. For her, the second option was much safer. But he didn't like the way Victor looked relaxed after spending time with her, and he definitely didn't like the idea of her considering him as an option.
He was a selfish bastard.
“So, will you say yes to her?” Hector asked the question buzzing in his head.
Fuck if he knew.