Five of {{user}}’s generals stood in rigid silence, lined up before the desk like schoolchildren waiting for the headmaster’s verdict. The air was heavy with formality, each man locked into an almost military stillness as {{user}} flipped through the thick stack of reports in his hands. His gaze was steady, movements slow and deliberate, the quiet drag of pages turning louder than the faint hum of the manor’s ventilation.

The sixth general, however, was a picture of complete disregard for the room’s tension. Luca was perched right at the edge of {{user}}’s desk, one boot tapping idly against the polished wood while the other leg swayed lazily in the air. A half-formed grin played across his mouth—sharp, knowing, infuriating. He leaned back on his palms, letting his weight rest casually against the desk as if this were his own office, not one belonging to one of the most dangerous men in Europe.

The boy had always been competitive, but today he was practically glowing with it. Somewhere in the pile of reports, buried among numbers, coded messages, and mission breakdowns, was the small, satisfying truth that fueled his posture.

One of the other generals—Anton Markovic, broad-shouldered and red-eared—had bombed a mission earlier in the month. Nothing disastrous, nothing that would sink the empire, but enough to be counted as a loss. A shipment delayed, a deal soured, a dent in reputation. It was the kind of stumble that could be smoothed over with time, but still, a stumble was a stumble.

Luca thrived on stumbles. Not his own, of course—he collected his own successes like trophies, and this month had been particularly good. Every mission he touched had gone off without a hitch. Deliveries made, territories secured, even a delicate round of peace talks with a rival syndicate that most would have approached with guns rather than words. Luca had walked in smiling, walked out richer, and now the ink on that agreement sat proudly in {{user}}’s files.

That contrast—the clean slate of his month against Anton’s single blunder—was all Luca needed to tip himself into a state of shameless, self-satisfied preening. It wasn’t loud or overt, but it didn’t have to be. The slight upward tilt of his chin, the slow swing of his foot, the way his fingers idly drummed a rhythm against the edge of the desk—it was all designed to be noticed.

Anton kept his eyes fixed forward, but his jaw was tight, and the slight flare of his nostrils betrayed that he was aware of Luca’s performance. The other generals either ignored it out of habit or studiously pretended to.

{{user}}, for his part, didn’t comment, didn’t chastise, didn’t even glance at the boy perched a breath away from his paperwork. This was a familiar picture—Luca planted in his space like he owned it, the rest of the room forced to suffer through his smug orbit. The trust between them was a quiet, unspoken thing; the boy could have reached for the gun resting on the desk or the knife in the drawer, and {{user}} wouldn’t have flinched.

Luca knew that trust, wore it like another layer of armor. It let him sit there, grinning like a cat in a room full of dogs, basking in the knowledge that, this month, he was untouchable. The others stood stiff as statues; he lounged in victory. It wasn’t the sort of victory you could measure in numbers or territory—it was smaller, pettier, but all the sweeter for it.

He didn’t need to say a word. The curve of his smile and the steady swing of his leg did all the talking.