Page 2 of The Mafia Bloodline
And now, all those threads had led me here. To this rooftop, crouched in the cold, watching the building below like it held the answers carved into its bricks.
I didn’t know if he was inside. I didn’t know if he was alive. But I knew this, every path I’d taken, every lead I’d chased, every hour of exhaustion and grief and fear had pointed me to one name.
Malakai.
And if he had anything to do with my father’s disappearance, then hopefully tonight, I’d find out. The trail led here. To this building.
It looked abandoned from the street, windows dark, the brickwork cracked and soot-stained from a fire long ago. But the comings and goings I’d tracked for the last two weeks told a different story. Big men in heavier coats than the weather demanded. Vans that drove in heavy and left lighter. No signs. No logos. And the same name whispered in the fragments I’d uncovered in pubs and back alleys; his name is Malakai.
Even saying it in my head sent a shiver down my spine. I didn’t know if Malakai was man, monster, or myth. But I knew he was connected to the demons, the same demons I’d once written off as fairy tales told to keep kids from wandering too far into the dark.
The first time I heard his name, it had been whispered, hissed really, between two men at O’Malley’s bar on the east side. I’d been three whiskeys in, pretending not to listen while they played cards and lost money they didn’t have. “Malakai doesn’t forgive debt,” one of them said, his voice low. The other paled and muttered, “Better to owe the devil himself.”
I thought it was just criminal folklore, some bogeyman loan shark. But then I started hearing it again. At warehouses. In alleys. In the notes my father left behind, half scribbled, half smudged, like he’d been chasing the same ghost, and it finally caught him.
The night I stopped believing it was just a story, I was tailing a man I thought was tied to my father’s disappearance. He ducked into a condemned building, and I followed. What I saw… I told myself I was drunk, hallucinating, seeing shadows wrong. But shadows don’t sprout claws. Shadows don’t peel back their jaws wide enough to swallow a man whole. Shadows don’t bleed black.
I remember the sound. Wet. Wrong. The man screamed until he didn’t, and when I stumbled back into the street, I thought I’d gone mad. I wanted to believe I was mad. Because the alternative meant the world wasn’t what I thought it was.
But the bruises on my arms from where one of them grabbed me said otherwise. The smell of sulphur, clinging to my clothes for days, said otherwise. And every whisper I followed after that, all the debts, all the missing people, all the blood in places it shouldn’t be, it all pointed to one name at the centre.
Malakai.
If my father was alive, he was tangled in that nightmare. And if he was dead, Malakai was the one who had the answers. Either way, I was done pretending demons weren’t real.
I adjusted my binoculars, focusing on the side entrance. My heart pounded, my breath shallow, but my hands were steady. Clumsy, awkward, a mess in daylight, that was me. Trip over a chair, spill my coffee, make strangers stare when I knocked over displays in shops. But here, in the dark, when it was about finding my father? I was sharper because I can’t mess this up.
A figure shifted below, the door opening just wide enough to spill light into the alley. My chest tightened, the faint glow catching on mist and turning it into something almost otherworldly. The silhouette moved with confidence, too steady,too sure of itself to be some junkie looking for shelter. Broad shoulders, a deliberate step, like a man who feared nothing because he had reason to fear nothing.
My nails dug into the rough concrete as I leaned forward, forcing myself to breathe evenly, though my heart was sprinting a marathon. Every instinct screamed at me to move back, to blend deeper into the shadows, but I couldn’t. If I looked away, if I missed something, then eight months of clawing through scraps of paper and whispered rumours would mean nothing.
The man paused just beyond the door, a cigarette ember flaring to life as he lit it. The tiny flame burned too bright in the dark, and for a second, I thought I saw the unnatural gleam of eyes catching the light. Not normal eyes. Predatory. My throat went dry, the chill of the night biting deeper.
This was it, the closest I’d been to anyone connected to Malakai. One wrong move and I was dead, but one right move could mean answers.
My chest rose and fell shallowly, adrenaline flooding me with heat that had nothing to do with the cold mist curling around the rooftops. I pressed closer to the ledge, forcing myself to stillness, to silence. I couldn’t blink. Couldn’t breathe too loud.
Because whatever stepped out of that building didn’t move like a man. And I had the sinking feeling that if I was caught, there wouldn’t even be enough of me left to bury.
And then…
“Not the smartest hiding spot,” a low voice murmured behind me.
I nearly screamed. My body jerked, almost slipping off the ledge, but a hand clamped around my wrist, steadying me with a grip like steel. My breath caught as I spun toward him.
The man was tall, his hair dark as midnight, his eyes…God, his eyes were like shards of ice glowing faintly behind his tinted glasses under the moonlight. It wasn’t just their colour, it was the way they pinned me, cold, calculating, like he was dissecting me without a single touch. He wore black, every line of his body carved into the kind of stillness that didn’t come from training but from instinct, from being born to hunt. He wasn’t simply dressed to disappear into shadow…he was the shadow.
Another man stood a pace behind him, broader, heavier, his frame built like a wall of muscle and menace. Where the first radiated sharp-edged control, this one burned low and steady, eyes the colour of smouldering embers that seemed to strip the night down to nothing. His silence wasn’t emptiness, it was warning. He didn’t need to move to prove what he could do. The weight of his presence was enough to make the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
I swallowed hard, the sound loud in my ears. “Who the hell…”
The first man didn’t release me, not physically, but with his gaze, holding mine in a grip stronger than any chain. Cold. Unblinking. And for a heartbeat, I swore I felt something snap through me, like a live wire catching flame. The world tilted sideways, all the noise of the alley and the sting of the night air dimming, until there was nothing left but those glacial eyes locking me in place.
Whoever he was, he wasn’t ordinary. Was he also a Demon? He was a predator disguised in human skin, carved out of danger itself.
And worse, deep down, part of me wasn’t afraid. Not nearly enough. Heat curled low in my chest, something reckless and terrifying. Because standing there in the moonlight, with his eyes pinning me like prey…somehow, I didn’t want to run.
His head tilted slightly, a movement so subtle it was more animal than human, as though he were cataloguing me, measuring the exact shape of my breath, the pound of my pulse. And then he moved. One step, soundless, and then another, until the shadows peeled back enough to reveal the hard lines of his jaw, the cut of his mouth, the breadth of his shoulders beneath the black clothes.
