Owned By The Psychotic Billionaire (Mafia BL)

PAST ORION’S POV

The sturdy oak door to the old hag’s study is heavy, old, and thick enough to muffle the sound of my own pulse. I stand in front of her desk with my hands at my sides.

Leon sits in the corner on a leather armchair.

He shrinks into the cushions, his hands twitching over his knees. His face is pale, his eyes wide with a mix of shock and pure panic as he watches me.

He knows what I am about to do. He just cannot fathom it. To Leon, our family name is a mountain, a crown, a cage we are born to protect.

Lady Dimitra does not look up right away. She lets the silence stretch, relying on her usual commanding presence to make me feel small. It’s a shame that’s never happened before.

She signs a document, sets her pen down with a deliberate tap, and finally rests her cold glare on me.

”You are being absurd, Orion,” she says. Her voice is sharp and laced with authority. ”This is another one of your spur-of-the-moment decisions. You think you can throw a temper tantrum, walk out those doors, and pretend you do not carry the blood of this family?”

I look at her. I do not feel anger. I do not feel defiance. I just feel hollow.

”I am not throwing a tantrum,” I tell her, my voice flat. ”I am leaving.”

Dimitra’s eyes narrow slightly. ”You will sit down, and you will listen to me. You are a Vassilis. You will inherit what is yours, and you will conduct yourself as— ”

”I don’t care,” I interrupt her.

Leon gasps softly from the corner, his knuckles turning white as he grips the armrests. No one interrupts Dimitra. No one gives her no face like this.

No one but me.

Dimitra’s jaw tightens. ”If you walk out that door today, Orion, you leave everything behind. The prestige, the protection, the fortune. You will be nothing.”

”Keep it,” I say. I turn my back on her and reach for the brass door handle.

”Orion!” Her voice cracks like a whip behind me, ringing with furious disbelief. ”Come back here this instant!”

I do not pause. I pull the door open and step out into the hallway.

Behind me, I hear Leon’s shaky, breathless murmur to himself. ”He really... he just threw it all away.”

I drop the prestigious Vassilis name like trash on the rugs of the corridor. It means nothing to me. Nothing at all. Because Adrien is gone.

He left at seventeen. And when he ran, he took the sun with him.

I walked out of the estate and into the city, expecting the world to go on as it usually does. I thought I would always know what to do. I am Orion. I am the one who held the leash, the one who controlled the board.

I always believed the sun would rise and fall and I would still stand firmly in the center of my own world.

Instead, I am lost. A boy who followed me everywhere with pathetic killing intent has somehow slipped out of my sphere of influence.

Without Adrien, I am empty. I am done. I do not tell anyone I am depressed. I do not use that word. But every time I look up at the sky, it does not matter if it is a clear blue or a heavy, storm-drenched grey.

Everything has lost its color. It is all in a dull, flat monotone.

When I walk down the street, I do not care where my feet land. When I sit down at a table, I barely taste the food. I leave my survival up to chance.

If a car runs a red light while I cross the street, I do not hurry my pace. If I eat, I eat. If I starve, I starve.

To fill the suffocating silence in my head, I begin to work out. I train until my lungs burn and my muscles tear.

I push my body through intense, grueling recomposition, reshaping my frame with raw iron and sheer exhaustion simply because I do not know what else to do with my life.

My hands feel empty. My shadow feels too light without him behind me.

Two months after leaving the estate, I am walking through an alleyway near the lower docks late at night. The rain is light, sticking to my clothes.

A sharp, wet scream pierces the quiet.

I stop. I turn my head toward a nook behind a rusted dumpster.

Two men are there. One is pinning a young woman against the brick wall, tearing at her jacket while she hitches her breath, sobbing and fighting with everything she has. The second man is laughing, holding her wrists above her head.

I stand there, staring at them. A wave of profound disgust washes over me.

In my world, I have never even imagined things like this happening. It is a concept so foreign, so deeply pathetic, that my mind struggles to process it.

What kind of evil are these dogs doing? To hold someone down, to force them, to degrade another human being for a fleeting, desperate urge?

What sort of mediocrity is this?

It shows a complete lack of self-control, a total absence of personality or dignity. Even dogs have individual character. These scum have nothing.

”Hey,” I say. My voice carries down the damp alley, flat and cold.

The men freeze. The one holding her wrists turns around, dropping his hand to a pocket knife at his belt. ”Mind your own fucking business, kid. Get out of here before— ”

I do not let him finish speaking.

I step forward, grab his wrist, and twist it until the bone snaps clean out of its socket. He screams, dropping the knife.

Before the second man can react, I palm his face and slam his head straight into the brick wall with enough force to crack the mortar. He crumples to the wet ground, unconscious.

The first man is on his knees, clutching his broken wrist, panting through his teeth. He looks up at me with terrified, venomous eyes.

”You’re dead,” he wheezes out, spitting blood onto my shoes. ”You don’t know who we work for. Our boss... our boss is going to fucking avenge us! He’ll hunt you down!”

I look down at him. I look at the sobbing woman scrambling away into the main street. Then I look back at the kneeling man.

A tiny, strange spark ignites in the pit of my stomach.

”Is he?” I ask softly.

I step back. I do not kill the man with the broken wrist. I let him go. I stand in the dark alley and watch him stagger to his feet, clutching his arm, and stumble away to report to his master.

I follow him from a distance, walking slowly through the rain, trailing his blood drops.

He leads me straight to a dilapidated warehouse near the river. Inside, there are nearly thirty men sitting around crates, drinking, playing cards, and counting illegal weapons.

I walk through the front door without knocking.

What follows is an explosion of noise, flesh, and blood. It is my first time fighting and killing a crowd of people at seventeen.

I do not have a gun or any other kind of ammunition.

I use a rusty crowbar I pick up from the doorframe, my bare fists, and whatever heavy objects I can lay my hands on. They surge at me like a wave of angry hornets.

I break jaws, smash kneecaps, and crush throats.

In the middle of the chaos, a man sneaks behind me with a jagged hunting knife. He drives it deep into my lower back.

Pain flashes white-hot across my vision. The steel bites close to my spine. A few inches to the left or right, and I would have been paralyzed for life.

God. Just the thought sends a thrill down my spine.

I turn around, grab the man by his throat, and drive my fingers into his windpipe until he stops moving. Then I pull the knife out of my own back and finish the rest of them.

When the warehouse goes quiet, I slump against a wooden crate, dripping in sweat and deep red blood. I am panting heavily. The wound in my lower back burns like molten lead.

I look at my hands. They are trembling.

For the first time in months, the grey fog in my mind clears just a little bit. The raw, violent thrill of the fight brings a strange, sharp surge of life back into my eyes.

For all those moments while I was tearing through those men, fighting for my breath, the dull, agonizing pain of Adrien running away was numbed.

I sit there in the dead warehouse among the bodies, listening to my own ragged breathing.

That is where the idea comes to me. I will start my own underground group. My own syndicate.