The opening felt like a tonal sucker punch.
Outside the Corvini compound, the world was still spiraling. Arpika was spinning her lethal lie. Sanvi was mapping violence with precision. Pranav was collapsing inward, trapped with his own thoughts. But here, buried in one of the city's forgotten corners, none of that existed.
The bar was grimy and dim, the kind of place that never quite aired itself out. The air was warm and stale, heavy with cheap beer and wet cigarettes.
Sam, Vikram, and Sathwik were drinking.
Sam sat awkwardly on a barstool, his cast propped against the counter, crutches leaning against the brass rail. Alcohol had loosened him. He was loud now, reenacting some ridiculous story from his youth. A botched job. A stolen vintage car. A flock of pigeons that had apparently turned the whole thing into a disaster. He told it with wide, theatrical gestures, laughing hardest at his own stupidity.
Vikram sat beside him, terrifyingly relaxed. His massive frame slouched slightly, movements slow and unhurried. He was smiling. Just barely. A faint, crooked curve that made his face look unsettlingly human. He corrected Sam's story in a low, slurred monotone, focusing entirely on the factual error regarding the species of pigeon involved.
Sathwik was wedged onto a smaller stool, stuck between them. He sipped at a lukewarm beer, holding the glass like it might explode if mishandled. His posture was rigid, his mind scrambling to make sense of what he was seeing. He understood fear. He understood orders. He was completely unprepared for shared drunkenness.
The bar buzzed with noise, a constant low roar, but their corner felt insulated. A pocket of dysfunctional familiarity that didn't belong anywhere else.
It didn't last.
A heavy-set drunk in a greasy leather jacket stumbled into Sam's crutches, sloshing beer onto the floor. He spun around, face red and unfocused, ready to start something.
"Watch your bloody feet, old man," he snarled, pointing at Vikram. He had picked the wrong target.
Sathwik tensed instantly. Muscle memory kicked in. His hand dropped toward the knife at his belt. Protocol was clear.
Vikram didn't move.
He looked at the man, expression flat, and spoke.
"I find your existential angst concerning," Vikram said, dead serious. The slur in his voice only made it worse. "You appear to be confusing the arbitrary nature of the physical universe, represented here by the fall of a drink, with intentional wrongdoing. Are you proposing a deterministic model, or do you accept randomness?"
The drunk froze.
Rage drained out of his face, replaced by pure confusion. His brain stalled, unable to process the philosophical lecture he had accidentally wandered into.
Before the moment could curdle into violence, Sam intervened. He slid off the stool with practiced ease, leaning on his crutches. His expression softened instantly, charm snapping back into place.
"He's right, friend," Sam said gently, resting a hand on the man's shoulder. "Entirely my fault. Gravity in this city is unreliable. Let me buy you a refill and tell you a truly tragic story about my accountant. He's the real criminal here."
The drunk hesitated, then allowed himself to be steered away. Sam talked the situation down with smooth precision, wrapping it in jokes and absurdity until the threat dissolved into laughter and free beer.
Sathwik watched all of it.
The philosophy. The charm. The casual deflection of death.
The men he had feared, the ones he had seen as instruments of absolute violence, were behaving like deeply functional human beings. Not machines. Systems. Carefully balanced, highly specialized dysfunctions that somehow worked.
It unsettled him more than bloodshed ever had.
The ambush in the junkyard had been simple. Orders. Execution. This was different. This was intimate. It hinted at shared history, at bonds forged long before him. Something harder to fight than brute force.
While the recruits were unraveling under pressure, scrambling for survival or control, the true pillars of the Corvini family had found equilibrium in chaos. They knew exactly who they were.
Sathwik lifted his beer again. It was cold now.
The bar noise pressed in around them, and a quiet understanding settled into his chest. The real test wasn't survival. It was learning to live with the human truth of the monsters who ran the world he had stepped into.
And he had the sinking feeling that this lesson had only just begun.