Owned By The Psychotic Billionaire (Mafia BL)

PAST ORION’S POV

I do not feel a single pang from my conscience for taking those lives. They were dogs, empty husks moving through the world.

If killing them gives me this rush, if it numbs the hollow ache in my chest, then why not do it?

The feeling settles over me with cool clarity. As long as I do this, as long as I swim in this chaos, I will be okay.

The thought of finding Adrien crosses my mind. It always does. I think about hunting him down, tracing his footsteps, wrapping my hands around his wrists, and dragging him back to my side where he belongs.

But every time I imagine doing that, my hands go completely cold.

A crippling, suffocating feeling grips my chest. My back breaks out into a cold sweat.

Because as much as I love doing whatever I want, the main reason my relationship— or whatever anyone might call it— with Adrien grew to where it was, was because Adrien followed me around willingly.

He did it of his own volition. He hated me, he wanted to kill me, but he chose to stand in my shadow every single day.

If I drag him back by force, if I lock him into this life he chose to run away from... wouldn’t that just kill the purpose of everything? Wouldn’t that destroy the fragile, beautiful thread we built between us?

Wouldn’t it just kill the Adrien I knew?

The thought of turning him into a hollow shell fills me with an unbearable sense of unease.

At seventeen, I do not understand that what I am feeling is fear. I have never feared a man, a weapon, or death itself. But I am terrified of losing the person I know because of my own selfish desires. Desires I do not even fully comprehend yet.

So I make my peace with it. It is better to let him go for now. Just for now. Not forever. Because I will always get Adrien back in the end.

Before I form my own organization, I spend months going around slaughtering other small gangs. I move through the city’s underbelly like a ghost, breaking into small hideouts and wiping out entire street crews in a single night.

The local police department starts investigating the string of quiet massacres. They give me a ridiculous name. They call me the Back-Alley Fiend.

At first, the investigators refuse to believe a single person is doing this. They think it is a rivalry between bigger syndicates.

But as forensic evidence accumulates, as the ballistics and blade angles are analyzed, they come to a terrifying realization.

It is just one single individual carrying out these murders.

I hate the title. Back-Alley Fiend. To me, it makes me sound like some low-class mugger who drags drunk tourists into a dark corner, steals their watches, and maybe robs them of their underwear. It sounds cheap.

At the same time, I find it incredibly funny. Whoever sat in a brightly lit police station and coined that name is definitely going to get a visit from me one day.

By the time I turn eighteen, I decide I am done playing alone. I need to build a real foundation. I need capable fighters and men to assemble my own group.

I refuse to recruit from the small street gangs I have been wiping out.

Most of them disgust me to my very core. I cannot stand their obsession with low-life behavior, their pathetic habit of forcing themselves on the weak. I do not understand what goes through their minds when they look at a victim.

Sometimes, when Adrien was still with me, I felt inclined to touch him in a more intimate way. Like that afternoon when I backed him into the narrow janitor’s locker, when the scent of dust and cleaning chemicals was thick in the air, and I pressed my lips against his.

I remember the sharp heat of his breath, the way his fingers dug into my coat, fighting me and holding on all at once. I remember him.

I did not really understand why I felt those things. I did not know if it was normal, because I only ever saw men directing those urges toward women. But I felt them for Adrien.

The feelings were there, plain and undeniable, so I accepted them. I knew I would find a way to understand them eventually.

But the thought of holding Adrien down? The thought of forcing myself on him against his will? It never once entered my mind.

Why would I ever do something so foul? That is what creatures with no self-control, no personality, and no individuality do. It is not something a human being does.

So I go looking for real men. Men who fight because it is all they have left.

That is how I find the underground cages, and that is where I meet Niko. Or rather, the Wildcat.

He is an eighteen-year-old street rat fighting in an iron cage, beating grown men into bloody pulps to the roar of a drunken crowd. I sit in the audience, watching him through the steel mesh.

I buy out the entire seating area around me so no one breathes near my space. I watch the way he moves, the dry, melancholic boredom in his amber eyes. He is brilliant.

When I walk into his dressing room after his match and introduce myself, he looks at me like I am insane. We beat the absolute shit out of each other for thirty solid minutes right there on the filthy concrete floor.

He breaks four of my ribs and splits my forehead wide open. I break his forearm, crack his ribs, and crush a nerve in his leg.

When the dust settles, we are both lying on our backs, covered in our own blood, laughing up at a flickering lightbulb like a pair of kindred lunatics.

I ask him his name, and he tells me it is Niko. N-I-K-O.

I tell him it is a ridiculous, plagiarized spelling and ask why it cannot just be spelled with a C. He tells me to ask his dead parents. I tell him to come find me in a year so we can have more fun, and I leave him lying on the floor, cackling to himself like a loon.

After Niko, I move through other underground fighting rings, picking out the absolute best, the most dangerous, and the most broken.

I gather them together under my hand.

Then, I crash into the underworld with the weight of a freight train.

I do not negotiate. I do not negotiate territory. I happily carve my name into the bodies of existing underground bosses, slicing through their networks and sliding myself into their seats with all the bright enthusiasm of a child opening a new toy.

I am having fun. The most fun I have had in a long time.

And yet, when the blood dries and the fighting stops, my life settles right back into the same boring, grey monotone.

When I am not killing, when I am not torturing some rival lieutenant for the simple thrill of it, the grey sky returns. Because through all of this, Adrien is not there.