---
The night their family was slaughtered was the night the Syphiruz brothers were truly born.
It was raining when the blood started to spill.
The Syphiruz estate — once a fortress of stone and steel — burned like wet paper.
Gunshots shattered the silence.
Screams clawed at the storm.
Sebastian was the first to wake.
He sat up in bed, heart hammering, instinct screaming at him.
Beside him, Ethan stirred, frowning.
"Seb…" Ethan murmured, voice thick with sleep.
Then the window exploded inward.
Glass, rain, and bullets tore through the room.
Sebastian tackled Ethan to the floor without thinking, shielding his twin with his body.
In the next room, they heard their younger brothers crying out — Alex and Stephan, Jack and Max — all still too young to even understand what was happening.
"Get up," Sebastian snarled.
He hauled Ethan to his feet, blood dripping from a shallow cut on his forehead.
Without hesitating, he yanked open the hidden panel behind the dresser — their father's emergency escape tunnel — and shoved Ethan inside.
"Go. Get the others. Meet me at the south exit."
Ethan hesitated, eyes wide and wild.
"But what about—"
Sebastian grabbed him by the collar, voice cutting and final.
"Move."
Ethan obeyed.
Sebastian turned and sprinted into the smoke-choked hallway.
The world was chaos.
Flames curled along the wallpaper.
Men in black masks stormed through the house, guns barking, boots smashing through memories.
Sebastian didn't hesitate.
He grabbed a fallen pistol from a dead guard and shot the nearest intruder between the eyes.
Blood splattered the wall.
Another came at him — he ducked under the clumsy swing of a rifle and drove his knife up under the bastard's chin.
The man dropped without a sound.
Sebastian didn't stop to think.
Didn't stop to grieve.
Didn't stop to fear.
Only moved.
Only killed.
Only survived.
---
Down in the nursery, Alex shielded Stephan with his own small body as two masked men kicked open the door.
Max screamed in terror, hiding behind Jack, who looked ready to throw himself at the intruders with nothing but his fists.
The men raised their guns.
A shot rang out.
One of them jerked backward, a neat hole between his eyes.
Sebastian stood in the doorway, gun smoking, rain pouring from his soaked hair, face carved in stone.
"Get behind me," he barked.
The boys obeyed instantly.
Sebastian took the second man down with two bullets — one to the chest, one to the head.
Blood splattered the crib.
Sebastian didn't flinch.
He herded the boys into the escape tunnel, where Ethan waited, pale but determined.
"Go, go, go!" Ethan urged, pulling the younger boys into the darkness.
Sebastian followed, slamming the panel shut behind him just as more footsteps thundered down the hallway.
The tunnel was narrow, cold, pitch-black.
They crawled through the earth like rats, listening to their home burn above them.
In the darkness, memories flickered like dying sparks — their mother's laugh, their father's steady hand on a shoulder, the smell of old books and polished wood. Gone. All of it, gone.
None of them spoke.
There was nothing left to say.
---
They emerged into the forest at the southern edge of the estate.
Sebastian turned to watch as the mansion — everything they had ever known — collapsed into flames.
A cold, merciless rage settled over him.
For a moment — a single, breaking heartbeat — Sebastian's hand trembled at his side.
Then he clenched his fist so hard his knuckles cracked, crushing the weakness into dust.
Behind him, Ethan clutched Max to his chest, whispering broken comforts.
Alex stood beside Stephan, hand resting protectively on his twin's shoulder.
Jack knelt in the mud, shaking, fists clenched so tightly his knuckles bled.
Sebastian faced them.
"We survive," he said, voice flat. "We rebuild. We avenge them."
Ethan met his eyes, something hard and furious blooming in his chest.
"How?"
Sebastian smiled — a terrible, broken smile.
"By becoming worse monsters than the ones who made us."
---
The years that followed were a blur of blood, steel, and pain.
They lived on the streets at first — stealing, fighting, surviving by instinct.
Sebastian was their leader, their shield, their sword.
Ethan was the strategist, the calm in the storm.
Alex and Stephan became the enforcers — brutal, efficient, remorseless.
Jack and Max, the youngest, were the saboteurs — small enough to slip where no one else could, deadly enough to leave bodies in their wake.
They built an empire from nothing.
Street by street.
Blood by blood.
They took over the slums first — wiping out petty gangs and drug pushers with ruthless precision.
Then the docks — seizing control of the black-market trade routes.
Then the financial district — laundering their growing fortune through legitimate businesses.
By the time Sebastian was twenty-three, the name "Syphiruz" was whispered with fear and reverence in every dark alley and gilded boardroom.
No one knew how they had risen so fast.
No one dared question it.
The brothers had become kings.
And they would destroy anyone who dared threaten their reign.
---
One night, years later, they sat around the long obsidian table in their private war room.
The walls were lined with maps, screens flickering with surveillance footage, dossiers stacked like corpses.
Sebastian leaned back in his chair, a glass of whiskey in one hand.
"Expansion," he said.
The others listened.
"We take Europe next."
Ethan nodded, already pulling up schematics on his tablet.
"There's a void in Milan," he said. "The old families are weak. Scattered. Easy pickings."
Stephan grinned, sharp and cruel.
"Finally. Some real sport."
Alex cracked his knuckles.
"Let's start with the Ricci family. They've got their fingers in arms trafficking."
Jack smirked.
"And gambling."
Max leaned forward, dark eyes gleaming.
"And human cargo."
Sebastian's jaw tightened.
He hated traffickers.
Despised them.
There was no honor in that trade.
Only rot.
"We'll gut them first," he said.
"And then?" Ethan asked.
Sebastian's smile was razor-sharp.
"Then we drown Milan in blood."
---
It didn't take long.
The Syphiruz brothers moved like a plague — silent, unstoppable.
Within six months, the Ricci family was nothing but a memory.
Their leaders were found skinned and hung from the bridges of the Navigli canals, their blood staining the water crimson.
No one claimed responsibility.
No one needed to.
The message was clear.
The kings had arrived.
---
One night, after a particularly brutal assault on a rival compound, Sebastian stood alone on a balcony overlooking the city.
The lights below seemed so small.
So fragile.
Ethan joined him, nursing a cigarette.
"You ever wonder," Ethan asked, voice low, "what we would've become if that night hadn't happened?"
Sebastian didn't answer immediately.
He stared down at the city — the empire they had built from ash and bone.
"No," he said finally.
Ethan smiled grimly.
"Me neither."
They stood in silence, the wind cold and sharp.
Finally, Sebastian spoke again, voice softer than a whisper.
"We're not men, Ethan."
Ethan turned to him, frowning.
"We're weapons."
---
Elsewhere, Jack and Max sat in a darkened booth of one of their nightclubs, counting profits and nursing bruised knuckles.
"You think he ever sleeps?" Max muttered.
Jack laughed bitterly.
"Sebastian? Sleep? He barely remembers to breathe."
Max stared into his whiskey.
"I miss them," he said.
Jack didn't pretend not to know who he meant.
Their parents. Their family.
Their old life.
He reached across the table and gripped Max's forearm.
"I do too," he said. "But this… this is all we have now."
Max nodded, jaw tight.
"And we protect it. No matter what."
---
Meanwhile, Alex and Stephan trained in the underground arena below the compound.
Blow for blow, strike for strike, they moved like mirror images — deadly and precise.
Stephan grinned as he caught Alex with a sharp elbow to the ribs.
"Sloppy," he taunted.
Alex smirked, wiping blood from his lip.
"Still kicked your ass."
They laughed — low and dangerous.
Training was survival.
Weakness was death.
---
At the center of it all, Sebastian watched his brothers — his soldiers — and knew one thing with absolute certainty.
They were no longer just a family.
They were a kingdom.
And kingdoms were built on blood.
---
But even as their power grew, so did the whispers.
Rumors of a new threat.
A ghost in the underworld.
A shadow that left black cards and dead bodies in its wake.
Sebastian dismissed the rumors at first.
Until one night, when a courier — a boy no older than twelve, bruised and bleeding — staggered to the compound gates.
The guards never even saw who sent him.
Inside was a black card.
A golden rose wrapped in thorns.
And a simple message, scrawled in elegant handwriting:
> You've been kissed by the Thorns.
Sebastian crushed the card in his fist, rage boiling in his veins.
Someone dared to challenge them.
Someone dared to mock them.
He turned to his brothers, eyes burning.
"Find them," he snarled. "Find them and rip their fucking hearts out."
And so the hunt began.
---
END OF CHAPTER 2