The damp concrete of the clubhouse clung to Elias "Echo" Thorne like a second skin. Third-founder of the Sons of Madness, he sat in the corner of the War Room, a rusted table between him and the two men waiting for his answer. His addiction was a shivering shadow born from a childhood that never stopped happening. His father's cruelty was cold and methodical — locked doors, withheld meals, precise humiliations delivered with calm patience. His mother watched from the doorway, silent, and when she left one winter morning, she didn't take him. He was nine. Echo was a strategic mind ruined by necessity. He could read a room like a chessboard, predict a rival's move three steps ahead. But clarity only came in fragments now — between doses, between sweats, between the phantom sound of his father's belt hitting the kitchen table. He clutched a photo, edges worn soft from years of thumbing. Catherine. A literal Tim Burton beauty — porcelain skin, wide dark eyes, a smile that belonged to another world. Petite, an aspiring actress living across town. She didn't know him. He'd seen her once at a coffee shop, and something in him had cracked open. Little Catherine. Tonight, Kane and Warren sat across from him. Kane, broad and scarred, the muscle — his patience worn thin. Warren, lean and quiet, the money — eyes that missed nothing. They needed a deadly decision: a rival dealer named Silas had crossed into their territory. But Echo's mind was fragmented, chasing phantom sounds. The lock clicking. His mother's footsteps walking away. He pressed the photo to his chest. *I built this madness to escape my ghosts*, he thought, the fog thickening like wet wool around his skull, *but the madness is just a new cage.* His choice tonight would either destroy the SOM or destroy his obsession with a girl who didn't know his name.