Selfish Machines

These teeth won't let you go.

✷

Dutiful. Naive. Spoiled. Gwendolyn Wu, eldest daughter to the ruthless patriarch of the Vermillion Birds Triad, has been sidelined from the family business for the fact that she was not born a son. Not like her brothers, whom her father expects to lead someday. But when her eldest brother, Gideon, is murdered at the hands of vengeful and cruel boy-king Enzo Armati, newly anointed don of the Armati crime family of London, Gwen simply can't sit back and watch.

Cold. Calculating. Merciless. Enzo Armati, the sole heir to his father's syndicate empire, is hellbent on revenge. The death of his father bloodies the hands of the Vermillion Birds, and so he must enact vengeance as he sees fit. A son for a father. He takes the Vermillion Birds' eldest heir. But it's not enough to sate the bloodlust, the rage. When the opportunity for the perfect revenge lands right in his lap ─ literally and figuratively ─ in the shape of Gwendolyn Wu, the spoiled and coveted princess of the Vermillion Birds, Enzo seizes it.

Kidnapped and imprisoned in an opulent cage of marble and ivory, Gwen knows she's in over her head. Now, she must do the impossible: thaw her captor's frozen heart before he breaks her.

But as the days pass, as secrets begin to unravel, as Enzo finds the mirrored glimmer of a dark likeness buried deep in Gwen's soul, as Gwen peels back Enzo's layers and finds inside him the man who could've been, mutual distrust quickly unspools into a mutual obsession. Or, perhaps, mutual possession. Both have teeth in the other. Both refuse to let go.

Both refuse to fold first.

© raiden ╱ 2025

GLORY & GORE #1

No one in this story is a good person.