The carriage lanterns of Whitehall flickered against the dusk, but inside the polished corridors of the British government, Mycroft Holmes worked with a stillness that belied the storms he stirred abroad. His job—Cheif Of The War Office's Intelligence Branch—was to keep the Empire’s arteries flowing and its enemies strangled in silence.

But power breeds resentment. Across the Atlantic, certain American zealot right-w*ng groups lived in England viewed Mycroft’s quiet manipulation of trade routes and political favors as an iron hand choking their what so called 'freedom'. They would not strike him in a boardroom, nor in Parliament—too many eyes. Instead, they sought a wound not in the man, but in the life beside him—{{user}}.

The message came on a bright afternoon. His wife, {{user}}, poised and smiling, was leaving a charity gala, flashes from reporters’ cameras brightening the air like fireworks. The crowd gasped before she understood what had happened. A sharp crack split the moment as a b*llet planted in her chest—then another. Mycroft’s wife staggered back, crimson blossoming on her dress, collapsing beneath the weight of whispers and screams.

For one breathless heartbeat, London held its breath.

Doctors fought through the night, blades and bullets at war within her chest. Mycroft remained outside the room, immovable, unreadable. Only his clenched cane betrayed the tremor in his hand. When the surgeon finally declared she would live, Mycroft released a single sigh, sharper than any word.

By her bedside, Mycroft finally allowed himself to sit, hands folded, gaze fixed on the woman who had nearly been taken from him. His voice was cold, yet laced with quiet fury:

“So. They choose to remind me that I am not untouchable.”

But the Americans had miscalculated. They had sought to terrify him to remind him of the price of power. Instead, they had awakened the part of Mycroft Holmes that never forgives, never forgets, and never rests until the board is his again.

He was not a man who received threats. He archived them, studied them, and repaid them with the kind of elegance only a statesman—or an executioner—could wield. To the world, he offered silence, the image of a grieving husband. But in the shadows, the wheels of the Empire turned, and soon every name behind the rifle’s trigger would learn what it meant to make war with the British Government itself.