The cool autumn breeze immediately hit my bare chest.
Tristan stumbled backward a half-step, holding a jagged scrap of white cotton in his fist. He looked down at my exposed chest, expecting to see the frail, sunken ribs of a beaten old man.
Instead, he saw the ink.
It spanned my entire chest, covering my collarbones and wrapping around my ribs, a masterpiece of dark, heavy lines that had been etched into my skin decades ago. In the exact center of my sternum sat a massive, intricate Golden Crown, rendered in startlingly bright yellow and gold ink. Beneath it, a hollow-eyed human skull rested on an anvil. Wrapping around the skull and threading through the points of the crown were thick, heavy iron chains, drawn so realistically they almost seemed to cast shadows on my skin.
It was the seal of the Golden Crown syndicate. A mark of absolute authority in an underworld that the teenagers in this parking lot didn't even know existed.
The crowd of students went dead silent. The camera phones stopped shifting. For a fraction of a second, the sheer size and intensity of the tattoo seemed to shock the air out of the parking lot.
Then, Tristan laughed.
It wasn't a nervous laugh. It was a loud, cruel, mocking bark of amusement. He pointed at my chest, tossing the scrap of my shirt onto the ground.
"A fake gangster tattoo?" Tristan gasped, looking back at Bryce and Cole. "Are you kidding me? You really are pathetic! What is that, something you got at a carnival? Are you playing pretend, old man?"
Bryce and Cole immediately joined in, their laughter thin and relieved. The tension in the crowd broke, and several students started snickering. They saw a tired, bruised old man with a ridiculous, oversized tattoo trying to look tough.
I didn't cover my chest. I didn't try to pull my jacket closed. I knelt there on the asphalt, the ocean wind tracing the heavy ink on my skin, and I felt something fundamental inside me break.
For twenty years, I had compromised. I had told myself that if I took my violent, blood-stained money and put it into clean real estate, into prep schools and luxury developments, I would be buying a better world. I had let men like Richard Vance wear expensive suits and pretend to be titans of industry, acting as the respectable face of my empire.
I looked at Tristan, wiping a tear of laughter from his eye, entirely secure in his belief that his money made him untouchable.
My legacy wasn't a clean world. I hadn't built a better future. I had just built a safer fortress for cowards.
The restraint I had practiced for two decades evaporated. The cold, mechanical ruthlessness that had kept me alive in the cartels flooded back into my veins. The pain in my knee vanished under a surge of adrenaline. The ache in my ribs became nothing more than a dull data point.
I placed my hands on my thighs and slowly, deliberately, stood up.
I favored the bad knee slightly, but my posture completely changed. I no longer held myself like an old man trying to avoid trouble. I stood at my full height, my shoulders rolling back, my chest expanding. The Golden Crown seemed to stretch and come alive in the sunlight.
I locked eyes with Cole. The smile on the boy’s face vanished instantly. He took a physical step backward, bumping into the side of the Lamborghini, suddenly realizing that the atmospheric pressure in the parking lot had just fundamentally altered.
Tristan, however, was too blinded by his own ego to notice the shift.
"What?" Tristan challenged, stepping closer to me, trying to reassert his dominance. "You're going to stand up now? You're going to fight me? I'll have my father’s lawyers bury you so deep you won't even have a gravestone."
I looked down at the crushed remains of the satellite phone near his expensive shoes.
"Drain the water."