He wore a fitted black shirt tucked into dark slacks, the fabric clinging to his muscles like it feared him. His sleeves were rolled up, veins twisting down his arms like ropes. A matte-black watch sat heavy on his wrist.
He was massive—a tower of man—and he didn't need to move to take over a room. The air bent to him. The silence obeyed him.
But I didn't want to look at him.
I kept my eyes down—on the cracked tiles, on the broken boxes in the corner, on the black stains that marked the concrete floor like forgotten blood.
The warehouse around us was vast and cruel. A dead space. Hollow like a ruined cathedral. Stacked boxes leaned like corpses against rusted racks, and the sharp stink of weed and chemicals clung to everything. There was a flickering bulb overhead, humming faintly, casting trembling shadows on our faces.
I could feel him watching me.
His scent reached me before he moved—smoke and spice, mixed with something raw and wild, like earth after rain or the skin of something dangerous.
This is him, I realized.
Not a myth. Not a whisper. Not a warning spoken in fear.
He was real.
He was Black Tiger.
"Na this one try do pass himself," Jide sneered from behind me, breaking the silence. "Him think say he be gangster. Say make we show am wetin gangster really mean."
Without warning, he kicked me in the stomach.
A violent, deliberate blow.
I choked.
White hot pain exploded through my core. My ulcer—the one I thought had gone—flared awake, tearing through me like broken glass. My knees buckled.
"Aaagh!" I screamed, curling inward, pain rising to my throat.
"Boss, e no serious like that jor," Jide chuckled. "Na just small correction. Make e sabi say no be every time we go dey take mouth talk—"
He didn't finish the sentence.
Bang.
Jide collapsed. A red hole bloomed in the side of his head.
The silence was instant, sharp as a blade.
The other men froze.
Even my own breathing stopped.
The gun in Black Tiger's hand still smoked.
He had shot Jide in cold blood. No yelling. No threat.
Just a bullet.
"When something is mine," he said quietly, as if he'd just returned from a brief thought, "I don't share. And I don't explain."
The man beside him, another gang member, dropped to his knees instantly. "Boss abeg! Abeg no vex. I no know say na your boy. I swear—"
Black Tiger ignored him.
He stepped closer to me, lowering his gun, and crouched down where I knelt on the floor, shaking and holding my stomach.
His voice was a low growl, but calm.
"Speak not a word to him," he said to the room.
"Let none of you lay your hands or eyes on him. He is mine to deal with. This is my only warning. Defy it, and the consequences will make you beg for death—yet death will not come."
Nobody moved.
Even I froze, my heart thundering. Mine?
He reached for me.
"No... no, please..." I whimpered, trying to pull away. "Let me go with them. Please. I'll behave. I swear... I swear—"
But my voice was drowned by his presence.
He lifted me like I weighed nothing.
As if I were glass. As if I were breakable.
And in his arms, I was.
I expected his hands to be rough, to grip me like property—but they weren't. They were warm. Firm. Gentle.
I trembled.
His chest was solid. I could hear his heartbeat—steady, slow, unmoved. It felt like resting against a lion. No—not a lion. A panther in the dark. Quiet. Deadly.
The two girls—Nina and Bukky—were being dragged away, screaming.
"Cyprian!" Nina cried, reaching for me.
I opened my mouth to call out—but I couldn't.
The pain. The fear. His scent—cedar and smoke and something unnameable—was in my lungs.
And then the door shut between us.
I was carried into another car. Alone.
Still bound.
Still broken.
But held.
And that was the beginning.
The moment I realized the man who could ruin me… might also be the one who saves me.