Dawn slid into the city without confidence, spilling weak gold through the cracks between tower blocks. It looked less like morning and more like a reminder that the night hadn't fully left yet an uneasy truce between light and shadow. Prince drove through it like a man gliding between timelines, the Hellcat's deep hum rolling through streets still half asleep.
He wasn't heading anywhere in particular.
He was hunting direction.
Sometimes the road told the truth when people wouldn't.
The fog was thinning, revealing the veins of London the alleyways, the marketplaces slowly waking, the river sluggishly reflecting the pale sky. Prince tightened his grip on the steering wheel. Navarro's new game had rules written in invisible ink, and the only way to read them was to feel them.
Still, as the city opened out in front of him, he sensed something shifting. A new frequency. A heavier silence. A giant in the grid, waking slowly.
He parked the Hellcat by the riverfront, its matte-black body gleaming under the hesitant sun. The river smelled of metal and forgotten secrets. Prince leaned against the hood, eyes scanning the horizon. Not for danger. For patterns.
He'd learned something over the past few days: Navarro wasn't trying to intimidate him. He wasn't even trying to recruit him.
He was evaluating him.
Like a king testing the temperament of a lion before inviting it into the throne room.
That thought crawled under Prince's skin, sharp as a shard of glass.
He wasn't anyone's spectacle.
He wasn't a pawn in anyone's throne game.
He was building his own crown.
A sharp crack split the air. Not a gunshot wood snapping. Something falling. Prince turned sharply, instincts firing in silence.
On the far side of the river walk, a man stumbled out from behind a bench. He wasn't dressed like Navarro's shadows no biker gear, no communication earpieces, no military precision. Instead he wore a dirt-stained coat, hood up, hands shaking.
Prince's muscles coiled.
The man lifted a piece of cardboard. Not a threat. A plea.
Prince moved closer, staying at an angle, every sense alert. The man dropped the cardboard and held up something else something that made Prince stop cold.
A photo.
Another one.
Another angle.
This time it wasn't the gym.
It was the Hellcat.
Parked outside Prince's building.
Taken only hours earlier.
The timestamp glared at him.
The man thrust the photo at Prince, breath ragged, eyes darting around like he feared unseen hunters.
Prince snatched the photo and leaned in subtly, searching the man's expression. Fear wasn't the problem fear spoke clearly. No, this man carried something else. Something heavier. Something carved into him like a message no one listened to.
The man tried to speak voice breaking, too weak, too frantic for words.
And then Prince saw it.
The mark on the man's wrist.
A black circle with a line through it.
The same symbol from the card left in the gym.
Prince's breath sharpened, not from shock but recognition. This wasn't a threat. This was fallout. Someone who had served a purpose in Navarro's world and been discarded like a broken piece.
The man trembled, raising his sleeve higher, showing bruises, showing shaking hands like they carried ghosts.
Prince wanted answers, but the man's body was giving out. A collapse waiting for permission.
Prince reached out to steady him
and the man jerked violently.
Not toward Prince. Away.
His eyes widened as if he'd seen something over Prince's shoulder.
Someone.
Or something.
Prince spun
but the walkway behind him was empty. Only rippling fog, sunlight trembling over water, and the quiet stretch of concrete.
When he turned back, the man was already gone.
Not walking.
Not running.
Gone.
Vanished into the morning like smoke whisked away by wind.
Prince exhaled sharply. Not panic. Frustration. The kind that shaped itself into a vow. Someone had sent that man. Not Navarro. Navarro didn't send messengers who shook.
This was a rival.
A ghost working parallel to Navarro's grid.
The war was wider than he thought.
Prince climbed back into the Hellcat, dropped into the seat like a coiled weapon, and started the engine. The machine growled to life, vibrating with a knowing hunger as if it, too, felt the shift in the city's pulse.
He drove to Camden. Not the flashy, tourist-lit parts the backstreets where the vendors dealt in what wasn't meant to be found. The air smelled of incense, petrol, and yesterday's smoke. Music thumped faintly from underground clubs still awake from the night.
Prince parked the Hellcat between two vans both too expensive for the neighborhood, both too quiet. Exactly the kind of detail Navarro's world would plant like seeds.
He walked through the narrow corridors of market stalls, eyes tracking subtle movements the flick of a curtain, a metallic gleam under a tarp, the shift of shadow behind a stand of vintage jackets.
At the far edge of the market sat a tent blue, worn, unassuming. Too unassuming.
Inside, old CCTV monitors flickered.
Stacks of hard drives hummed.
Cables snaked like veins.
A data pit.
Prince stepped inside, the air thick with heat and static. A woman sat in front of a wall of screens, her hair shaved on one side, tattoos crawling up her arms like ancient scripts.
She didn't turn. Didn't flinch. Just said:
"Been waiting for you, Sovereign."
Prince froze.
No one called him that.
Not yet.
Not publicly.
Not in the under-net.
He stepped closer, body heavy with caution.
The woman tapped a screen, pulling up an image the man from the riverfront.
"He's not Navarro's," she said, eyes still on the monitor. "He's running from someone worse."
Prince didn't speak. The woman didn't need him to.
"He was one of the first test subjects," she continued, voice steady. "Navarro's rival your real problem has been building a network under the city. A network of watchers. Sensors. Eyes without faces."
"Why show me this?" Prince asked quietly.
The woman finally turned.
Her eyes were tired. Sharp. Heavy with truths she didn't want.
"Because you're the only one Navarro fears," she said. "And the only one his rival wants."
Prince felt the floor steady under his feet as if the universe was reinforcing itself around him.
A storm rising on two sides.
A shadow war expanding beneath the city.
And him caught between giants.
No.
Not caught.
Positioned.
The woman pointed at another screen. A satellite image of South London. Dozens of tiny red dots flickered, spreading like infected veins.
"Those are trackers," she said. "Not on people on places. On areas of influence. Navarro controls half. His rival controls the other half. But you "
She tapped a blank section.
An empty space in the middle.
No red dots.
No influence.
" you're the gap. The blind spot. The one variable neither side can predict."
Prince stared at the map, pulse deepening. The city wasn't just waking. It was dividing.
"And they both want to use you," the woman said.
Her voice didn't hold fear.
It held fact.
Prince stepped closer, eyes locked on the screen.
"The man by the river what did he want?"
The woman hesitated.
Then said:
"To warn you."
Something tightened in Prince's chest a cold knot, a heavy weight, a sharpened truth.
He was already inside the war.
Whether he chose it or not.
He turned toward the exit. The woman didn't stop him, didn't follow. But her last words chased him like a shadow:
"When giants fight, the city doesn't shake."
A pause.
A breath.
"People do."
Prince walked back to the Hellcat, jaw set, mind burning. He slipped into the seat and the engine ignited like a heartbeat synced to his own.
He didn't speed away.
He drove slowly, eyes scanning mirrors, senses alive.
The city was no longer a city.
It was a chessboard.
Two kings loading their pieces.
And him...
Something far more dangerous than a pawn.
A free piece.
The Hellcat glided through the streets like a beast sensing predators on all sides. Prince didn't know Navarro's rival yet, didn't know what they wanted, didn't know how deep their network ran.
But he knew one thing:
He wouldn't be the hunted piece.
He would be the unpredictable one.
The one neither side could cage.
The one who shifted the entire board.
Prince accelerated, weaving through traffic with smooth precision.
The storm was gathering.
And this time
Prince wasn't just preparing for war.
He was stepping into it.