The Island That Rules Us All

A buffoonish president uses secret tapes to blackmail his way into absolute power.

President Rexton Thorne liked when people called him a fool.

He liked it when pundits frothed on air about his misspellings. He liked when protesters caricatured him with red-faced drawings, fangs drawn in marker. He liked it when they said he couldn’t read a briefing, couldn’t hold a sentence, couldn’t govern.

Because while they laughed, he signed 14 bills.

While they meme’d, he restructured oversight.

While they screamed, he erased himself from the record.

It had started on a storm-thick night, just after the body of Garrick Vane was wheeled out of a federal holding facility under a sheet that didn’t cover what was missing. Vane, billionaire and infamous trafficker of influence, had recorded everything. Cameras in lamps. Cameras in vents. Cameras under the velvet goddamn pillows.

There were thousands of hours of footage, and every minute was a secret waiting to burn.

Inside the West Wing's secure archive chamber, the man who had once laughed alongside Vane at the Valenhurst Retreat sat stone still. Thorne had been on those tapes. Young. Careless. Arrogant. The kind of arrogance that thinks a drink in one hand erases the girl crying off-camera.

But Thorne didn’t weep. He issued orders.

And beside him, whispering as always, was Silas Reign.

Reign had the voice of a priest and the eyes of a hangman. He rarely appeared in public, and when he did, he stood behind the President’s left shoulder, hands clasped, face unreadable. He had come from nowhere and knew everything. Court records. Intel files. Skeletons with sealed birthdates.

He was the one who found the archive.

He was the one who said, "Delete Room Twelve. All of it."

Room Twelve was Thorne’s.

The rest?

Carefully cataloged. Copied. Filed. Encrypted. Shown only in whispers.

Not a word was spoken aloud, but the message spread like frost through the halls of power:

We have the tapes. You were there. Vote accordingly.

That was how Thorne passed the Sovereign Immunity Act.

That was how entire panels of judicial oversight evaporated overnight.

That was how they built Alligator Station — a detention camp in the Everglades with no public record of occupancy.

And that was how, beneath all the chaos, the protests, the drama of a collapsing republic, one man ruled it all with nothing but erasure and fear.

In the final hours of his second term, President Thorne stood by the Oval Office window, looking out over a quiet lawn.

Behind him, Silas Reign folded a leather case.

“Do you ever wonder if they’ll come for us?” Thorne muttered.

“They won’t,” Reign said. “Because they can’t prove you were ever there.”

A pause. Then, with a smirk:

“Let them call you a clown. You rewrote the kingdom with a red nose.”