The room stank of iron. Blood dripped from the splintered furniture, pooling across the wooden floor in wide crimson streaks. The neon light outside still flickered through the shattered window, painting the massacre in alternating flashes of blue and red.
Leo stood over the last of the fallen men, his chest rising and falling with unnatural calm. His eyes glowed faintly gold, then dimmed back to the deep brown of his mortal guise.
His fists unclenched, and the veins along his arms retreated beneath his skin. Slowly, deliberately, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing away the dark red that stained his lips.
Leona sat on the edge of a broken table, her dress torn, her hands streaked with blood. Her breath came sharp at first, then softened, though her eyes remained alert. The elegance of her posture made the room's ruin seem like a throne chamber, the bodies at her feet the grim offerings of a defeated army.
Silence pressed in. No more footsteps. No more gunfire. Only the faint hum of the city outside, oblivious to what had transpired here.
Leona spoke first, her voice low and steady.
"They thought we were prey," she murmured, her accent a soft thread of Africa woven into the foreign tongue. "They had no idea what they awakened. They didn't only fall by our fangs. Now their hideout."
Leo turned to her, his jaw tight. "They will not be the last. This land is not Africa. Its beasts wear suits instead of armor. But they are beasts all the same. Just like the first five and their hideout. We will find them and we will kill them all. All the mafias, all the syndicates."
He knelt briefly beside one of the corpses, closing its eyes with a strange reverence. Despite the violence in his veins, his old soul carried rituals of respect. He had killed, but he did not mock the dead.
Leona watched him carefully. She saw the struggle flicker behind his eyes. The pull between redemption and instinct. He had promised her peace when they left their homeland. Promised her that the days of endless slaughter were behind them. And yet here they were, dripping in blood again.
She rose from the table and crossed the ruined floor, her bare feet silent even among the glass and debris. Placing her hand on his shoulder, she bent close.
"You fell, my lion. They thought you were gone. But even death fears you."
Leo looked up at her, eyes narrowing with something between pride and sorrow. "For a moment, I was gone. I felt the darkness pulling me. But your voice… your rage… it dragged me back. You are the tether that holds me to this world, Rishi."
Her lips curved into the faintest smile at the sound of her ancient name, one that only he still used. In public, she was Leona. To the world, a stranger. But to him, always Rishi, the woman who once walked barefoot through the savannas, whose laughter carried under the baobab trees.
Outside, sirens wailed faintly in the distance, weaving through the veins of the city. Leona tilted her head, listening. "We cannot linger. Someone will come."
Leo rose to his full height, towering and broad, his silhouette cutting through the dying light of the room. "Yes," he said, his voice calm now. "But not yet. Let them find the ashes of their own kind. Let the story spread. Let the city know the price of disturbing us."
For a moment, the couple stood together in the wreckage. Ancient immortals wrapped in silence, bound by a bond thicker than the blood dripping from their hands. The carnage at their feet was not a feast, but a warning.
Leona's gaze swept over the ruin one last time. Her feline eyes glowed briefly, catching the reflection of the broken glass. "This city will not understand peace, Leo. It will only test us."
He placed his hand in hers, fingers interlacing with unshakable certainty. "Then let it test us," he answered, his voice a quiet thunder. "We did not come here to bow. If they come, we will answer."
Together, they stepped over the bodies, the night air wrapping around them as they slipped out into the narrow alleys of China. The city pulsed unaware, but in its shadows, something eternal had awakened.
And thus, the hunt began.
The morning came slow and gray, the kind of morning that smelled of rain but delivered only heavy clouds. In the narrow district where the syndicate once operated, police cars lined the streets, their red-and-blue lights painting the alleys in steady pulses.
Detective Jian Wu stepped under the tattered caution tape, the soles of his polished shoes sticking slightly to the damp concrete.
He was tall for his age, his lean frame carried by the sharp poise of a man who had spent twenty years reading the city's sins in cigarette smoke and spilled blood. His eyes, narrow and steady, scanned the building as if the walls themselves might whisper answers.
Inside, the air reeked. Metallic. Sour. The kind of smell you couldn't wash out of memory. He pulled on latex gloves and motioned for his partner.
"Report," Jian said simply.
Officer Mei Ling flipped through her notepad, her short hair brushing her jawline as she walked him through the scene. "Seventeen dead, including the five at the alley. All members of the Zhao Syndicate. No witnesses willing to speak. No neighbors willing to admit hearing anything beyond… commotion." She hesitated. "Sir, this wasn't a gunfight. It wasn't even a raid. It's…"
Jian finished for her, his gaze lingering on the crimson stains splattered across the cracked wall. "Slaughter."
The bodies had already been moved, but the floor still told the story. Blood trails. Fractured bones. A table split clean down the center. Jian crouched and ran his gloved finger across a long claw-like groove etched deep into the wooden floor. He held it up, studying the faint residue. Not a blade. Not steel. Something else.
"Animals?" Mei suggested weakly, but even as she said it, the words felt ridiculous.
Jian shook his head. "No animal walks in, closes the doors, and leaves nothing alive. This was deliberate. Controlled." His eyes narrowed. "And efficient."
He rose, pulling his coat tighter around him as if shielding himself from the memory. "Start canvassing. Someone saw something. This city doesn't stay quiet without reason."
Though he seemed alright, Jian Wu had already felt a pain he hasn't felt in a very long time.
Across the city, the Zhao Syndicate's hidden stronghold lay cloaked in incense smoke and grief.
In a grand hall lined with red lanterns, the surviving leaders gathered around a coffin draped in black silk. Though seventeen had perished, it was the loss of Master Zhao's nephew, his favored heir, that sent rage through the underworld like wildfire.
Master Zhao himself sat on a raised chair, his thin frame cloaked in dark robes. His face was carved in stone, but his eyes, sharp and burning, betrayed the storm within. Around him, his lieutenants shifted uneasily, knowing that the old man's silence was more dangerous than any outburst.
Finally, Zhao spoke, his voice low, guttural.
"My blood lies in the ground. My house humiliated. Tell me… who did this?"
One lieutenant, broad-shouldered and scarred, slammed his fist against the table. "We do not know yet, Master. The police sniff like dogs, but they will find nothing. Some of our men before their last breath mentioned foreigners. Africans. A man and a woman."
A murmur rippled through the room. Foreigners were not new to the city, but rarely did they tread boldly enough to provoke the Zhao Syndicate.
"Foreigners?" Zhao's lips curled around the word like venom. "Then foreigners will bleed. Find them. Burn the streets if you must."
Another lieutenant hesitated. "If the police investigate, Master… there will be consequences."
Master Zhao rose, his frail body trembling only slightly as he leaned on his carved staff. "The police serve fear. Fear belongs to us. Whoever these… creatures are, they have stolen that fear. I will not rest until their heads hang from my gates."
The hall erupted in agreement, fists pounding, voices swearing vengeance.
Meanwhile, Jian Wu and Mei Ling stepped out of the ruined syndicate building into the muted daylight. Mei frowned as she scribbled her notes.
"What do you make of it, sir?" she asked.
Jian lit a cigarette, the smoke curling upward like a slow question mark. He stared into the distance, replaying the scene in his mind: the blood patterns, the claw marks, the unnatural silence.
"I make of it," he said finally, "that the Zhao Syndicate has made enemies they cannot fight. And whoever those enemies are… they are not ordinary."
Mei tilted her head. "You think… foreign gangs?"
Jian didn't answer immediately. He blew out a slow stream of smoke, watching it vanish into the city's gray sky. "Maybe," he murmured. "Or maybe something else. Something that doesn't fit in our reports."
He dropped the cigarette, grinding it into the concrete. His gaze turned toward the district records he'd reviewed earlier that morning. A new couple. Recently moved here. African. Calm, quiet, polite.
"Find me the names of every foreign couple that's moved into this city in the last six months," Jian said, his tone leaving no room for doubt.
Mei blinked. "All of them?"
"All of them," Jian confirmed. His eyes narrowed, sharp as blades. "Because somewhere in this city, a storm has already begun."
Far from the flashing sirens and the burning incense of vengeance, Leo and Leona sat quietly in their apartment. The curtains were drawn. The table was set with bowls of rice and tea. To any outsider, they looked like nothing more than a married couple enjoying a meal.
But beneath the surface, the city's hunt had already begun. One side with badges, the other with blood.
And in the stillness of their small home, Leo and Leona knew their peace had already shattered.