The Communist and the Degenerate
Inside the bunker, Kniya raised his hands to pause Filoska's panicked breakdown.
"I know, Filoska, you have been sitting here listening to our useless shit for a very long period of time today," Kniya said, leaning back on the sofa. "But yeah, just listen to this last thing. Let's go to the past time again, just exactly six days ago, right after we bribed the guards and brought your little brother into this bunker."
(Flashback to six days ago...)
The heavy titanium doors of the bunker had just hissed open, revealing Filoska's teenage brother. He was holding a half-eaten chocolate bar and a brightly colored paperback book he had clearly salvaged from somewhere.
Kniya had just finished giving his evil, supervillain laugh and called him an idiot.
The teenager didn't flinch. He took a bite of his chocolate bar, glaring at the three heavily armed, incredibly expensive billionaires sitting on the leather sofas.
"Okay, you are calling yourselves rich, you absolute idiots," the teenager spat, crossing his arms in sheer defiance. "I know exactly who you guys are. You are fucking bastards. You are corporate parasites! You just suck other people's blood to build your massive monopolies! I am a communist, you know!"
Kniya's jaw literally dropped. He looked at Malesh and Salesh in pure horror.
"What the fuck?!" Kniya shrieked, highly offended by the sudden geopolitical assault in his own private bunker. "We are meeting so many conflicting ideologies in one place today! Aristocrats, capitalists, and now a fucking teenage communist?! This is a corporate headquarters, you little brat!"
Malesh, however, wasn't looking at the boy's defiant face. His deadpan, highly analytical eyes were locked entirely onto the paperback book the teenager was clutching under his arm.
Malesh squinted, reading the brightly illustrated cover. His completely robotic expression shattered into pure, unfiltered disgust.
"What the actual fuck?" Malesh muttered, standing up from the sofa and pointing an accusing finger at the kid. "This is a Demon Lord novel about highly explicit, horny things. What the fuck? You are reading that? You absolutely shouldn't do this."
The teenager blushed slightly, trying to hide the cover. "I... you know... I got that in the local library!"
"If you got that in a public library, bro, then the educational infrastructure of this country has completely failed," Malesh scolded him, sounding like an incredibly disappointed, deadpan father. "You are small. You are a teenager. You should not read this highly degenerate content. If your sister got to know about this thing, she would absolutely kill you."
The brother shuffled his feet nervously, looking down at the floor. "...But do you have any more?"
"Absolutely fucking not!" Kniya roared, throwing his hands in the air.
"Okay, actually," Malesh interrupted seamlessly, completely contradicting his own moral lecture. "If you are really interested into those things... I actually have a whole private library section for that. You can choose any one of the things you want. Any of the degenerate content you want to read, here it is, just read that."
Malesh pulled a massive, catalogue out of his briefcase and handed it to the communist teenager.
"They have all kinds of specific criterias," Malesh explained, his voice entirely flat and professional. "Step-bro, step-sis, highly complex forbidden family dynamics... everything is available. So don't worry. But there is absolutely no gay content in this specific archive, so yeah, just be aware of the logistical parameters."
The Reunion
(Back in the present time, inside the bunker...)
Filoska shot up from her armchair, her face burning bright red with absolute, furious denial.
"You are lying!" Filoska screamed at Kniya and Malesh, pointing a shaking finger at them. "You are absolutely lying! This is not my brother! My brother cannot do this! He is a pure, innocent, straight-A student!"
"This is the reality, Filoska," Malesh deadpanned, sipping a glass of water. "Your bloodline is biologically prone to degenerate literature."
"Yeah, and speaking of reality..." Kniya grinned, pressing a button on a remote control on his desk. "Here is your brother."
The heavy steel door to the bunker's private side-quarters hissed open.
Standing in the doorway, wearing a fresh set of clothes and holding a massive stack of highly questionable comic volumes, was Filoska's teenage brother.
Filoska completely froze. The air left her lungs. The sheer, overwhelming terror that had been crushing her chest for the last six days instantly evaporated, replaced by a flood of pure, unrestrained relief.
"How...?" Filoska gasped, tears instantly welling in her eyes as she looked back and forth between her bosses and the door. "How the fuck did you manage to do all of that?"
"I think so you should scold your brother first," Kniya suggested arrogantly, leaning back on the sofa. "And then, you know, then you can cry for a long period of time. It is a more efficient use of emotional labor."
"Don't tell me what to do!" Filoska snapped at him.
She didn't care about the corporate warlords right now. She sprinted across the bunker and threw her arms around her little brother, pulling him into a massive, desperate, bone-crushing hug.
"I'm okay, I'm okay!" her brother wheezed, hugging her back.
Sitting on the sofas, Kniya, Malesh, and Salesh completely dropped their chaotic, cutthroat executive personas. They sat in absolute silence, watching the two siblings reunite. For a brief, incredibly rare moment, a genuine, quiet look of happiness settled over the three billionaires. They had actually done something entirely good for once.
The emotional, heartwarming silence lasted for exactly ten seconds.
Filoska suddenly pulled back from the hug. She looked down at the massive stack of degenerate comic volumes in her brother's arms. Her eyes narrowed into furious slits.
"What the fuck are you reading?!" Filoska yelled, her big-sister rage instantly activating.
"Uh—nothing! Malesh gave them to me!" the brother panicked.
"I am officially cutting all of your pocket money from now on!" Filoska scolded him aggressively, smacking him on the back of the head. "You are grounded for the rest of the year! So that you cannot ever buy or read that kind of content and other things like that! What is wrong with you?!"
Kniya burst into loud, obnoxious laughter, completely ruining the emotional atmosphere. "I told you! She was going to absolutely kill him!"
The Secondary Head
As Filoska continued to brutally scold her brother in the corner of the bunker, Malesh turned his attention back to Kniya.
Malesh adjusted his tie, his highly analytical brain piecing together the massive geopolitical puzzle that Kniya had just laid out over the last hour.
"Okay, Kniya. Just tell me the truth," Malesh demanded, his deadpan voice cutting through the noise. "You told us everything about the royal family's inner workings. You know about the secret marriage traps, you know about their exact loan liabilities, and you know so much about their specific hierarchy. Who are you actually? What is your real position in this royal family that you constantly consider yourself superior to others?"
Salesh leaned forward, also highly suspicious. "Yeah. You claim you are a capitalist, but you know way too much about the crown."
Kniya stopped laughing. He slowly turned to look at Malesh and Salesh.
His arrogant, chaotic billionaire persona melted away, replaced by an aura of absolute, terrifying, cold-blooded authority. He looked every inch the ruthless aristocrat.
"I am the secondary head of the royal family," Kniya stated.
The bunker went dead silent. Even Filoska stopped yelling at her brother, slowly turning around to stare at Kniya in absolute shock.
"And Filoska," Kniya continued, his voice echoing smoothly off the concrete walls. "That thing Leon intimidated you with? The threat that he would legally remove you and your family from the noble network? It is definitely not possible. It is legally impossible for him to do that without my explicit permission."
"What?" Filoska whispered, completely stunned.
"Actually, the thing is that in the royal family, the bureaucratic rules of removal and addition are highly specific," Kniya lectured, pacing slowly around the coffee table like a sovereign king. "If I want to basically remove someone from the noble network... I can remove them directly with my own permission. I don't need to ask anyone. But if Leon wants to remove someone? He legally needs my permission AND his own permission to remove anyone from the royal family."
Kniya smirked, crossing his arms.
"And for adding, the rules are completely reversed," Kniya explained. "To add a new member into the royal family, Leon can directly add a new member without my permission. But if I want to add someone, I have to take Leon's permission. We are a perfectly balanced, two-key system."
Kniya looked at Filoska and rolled his eyes, shaking his head in disappointment.
"So technically, he couldn't remove you from the royal family at all," Kniya mocked. "You were terrified for absolutely no reason. You should have read the foundational rules of the royal family first before you went and got intimidated by him in a locked room. I think so, it was a very weird thing for a Vice President of your caliber to not do her basic legal research."
Malesh and Salesh sat on the leather sofa, entirely paralyzed in absolute, mind-breaking shock.
They had spent the last several years building a corporate empire with a guy who chewed gum, threw temper tantrums over spilled coffee, and argued about comic books...
And they had just found out he was the Secondary Head of the Royal Family. He literally possessed equivalent executive powers to Leon Debestez. Leon was considered the public "leader" of the Republic... but Kniya secretly held half the keys to the entire Aristocracy.