Age: 37
Affiliation: Pestilence
Rank: Seraphim
Pronouns: he/him
Gender: cis man
FC:Boyd Holbrook
Status: Played by Marisha.
Your allusivity and secret nature are what caused you to thrive in your position. The face that lurks in the shadows, a person whose name is embedded so deep within criminal frameworks that it had almost disappeared. Almost. You’re an heir, but you’re nothing like the other children born into nepotism. Your family’s industry isn’t one of praised esteem or meticulous reputations like the Pinketts and their pharmaceuticals. The Pierces are gangsters of old, controlling over 30% of the UK’s drug distribution – and you sit in it’s throne. The overlord of illegality, like Hades, ruler of the Underworld, you rise like a phoenix from the ashes, knowing that your legacy is engraved in for greater means than the rich and lavish lifestyle of the elite.
Distribution and manufacturing of illegal narcotics has always been your passion, a business you were born into and thrived from. For years, you have been close family friends and business associates with the Pinketts, working with them closely to help conduct their own drug trades and shipments. An advisor, of sorts: the person on the sidelines with all the answers and ancient tricks. Serpentine tongue wrapping around each syllable of advice you offer to the Horseman as you watch with pride as it pays off, every single time. Following the attack on PEST, you are made an offer that you can’t refuse. Michaela Pinkett places the title of Seraphim in front of you and like a ravenous dog you snap it up after being a Dominion behind the scenes for the past 16 years. In the light of the truce breaking it has been decided that, whilst Michaela’s daughters remain fragile to the darkness of Pestilence’s dark secrets, you had always been an expert. Now, you sit in front of the line of succession, the one to take the crown, a ruler who at long last had been provided the chance to lead an empire.
Trigger warning for death, implied murder, discussion of substances.
Henry Pierce is a strange man. Entrenched in equal parts grief and want for profit, most of Milo’s early childhood is spent trying to parse a man who sits at the head of the table but cannot look his own son in the eye. Milo rationalizes it through his mother’s death, which came too soon, when he’s old enough to rationalize and not carry the hurt of rejection around with him.
Henry Pierce is detail-oriented and prefers to work with his hands, and in lieu of an emotional bond to keep his son at his side, he involves Milo in the family business as soon as he can walk. Milo is weaned on the sheer will of his own family’s name and power.
There is an art to distribution that is not the same as production. If production is Pollock, then shit, distribution might as well be Rembrandt. Throwing things at the wall just to see what sticks is not a reliable method when it comes to the wholesale mass delivery of what the elites of society often rely upon to go about their business.
This is the first lesson Milo is taught, and a justification for his father’s hard-set eyes and severe speech. If you want something done right, Milo, you usually have to do it yourself.
He speaks very little, Milo’s father, but when he does, Milo takes it to heart. His lessons are seared into him, and as he grows tall and weedy and ambitious, hungering for the chance to prove himself, Milo becomes less his father’s company and more his shadow.
He permits it — sometimes, Milo thinks, because he knew this is where his heir would excel. Not in the spotlight, necessarily, but just alongside, dancing the dance and singing the tune in-key. Milo learns quickly.
How to talk his way out of a bad business deal, how to serenade potential partners like a lark, how to place exactly what they want on a silver platter and yank it away at the last minute if they don’t comply. We’re delivery men to them, Milo, Henry says, mindlessly, when they are sitting in the car on the way back from a blood-soaked shootout, Milo trembling and still holding his gun. If they think they can take advantage, they will.
He hadn’t known who they were, not yet, but he’d come into it soon enough.
He is fifteen when he realizes he will follow his father to the end of the earth.
He is a strange man, yes, but he cares, and Milo wants to see his business thrive as much as he does. He comes to see the eventual inheritance of the Pierce throne not as personal gain, but collective benefit. Most of their business partners gawk when he lets Milo start handling things on the side, but his son is good at what he does and it becomes evident that he’s taken his teachings to heart.
Milo Pierce, they come to find, is cutthroat and clever. He spends his days studying, nose buried in a book, desperate to hurtle his way through education to stand alongside his father sooner, to become his ally in all things. At night, Milo goes where he is commanded, shoots when a situation calls for a bullet, and learns the most efficient method in cleaning blood off bathroom tiles and marble alike.
Henry Pierce is a practical man. Do it right, do it yourself.
Milo has crushed several fledgling kingdoms under his bootheel by sixteen. The only way to get rid of competition is to kill it completely. No second chances, to anyone. You have to be a killer, even when you don’t want to. By seventeen, his opponents and partners begin to look at him the same as they look at his predecessor, like iron is filling their mouths when he cuts their roots out from below and buries his own.
Like a noxious weed, Henry jokes over dinner, and Milo tosses his head back to laugh with him. Eating them from the inside out.
It all goes wrong, however, and in accordance with fate, something that is entirely out of his hands, it goes wrong very quickly.
He’s in Paris when he gets the call.
His father was not keen to be at the top of the pyramid, a sentiment he’d expressed several times over throughout Milo’s life. He’d never really understood why until after the third assassination attempt, which had come when he was ten, maybe eleven.
(The bullet hadn’t lodged in Henry’s jugular, but it’d been close, and from then on, he’d had a strange drawl that sounded less like a voice in his throat and more like gravel. It puts a target on your back, Henry explains when his son visits him at his sickbed. Best to stay out of the way.)
“Milo…” He remembers it with crystalline clarity: the way Antoinette’s voice had splintered down the middle, like split wood. “Your dad—”
He hadn’t wanted to know. For all his youthful bluster and pride and arrogance, even out of the spotlight — he’d hung up the phone, listened to the dial tone click.
His father is — was a strange man, unlikable to many and difficult to work with on the best of days, but he’d loved his son more than he’d loved his Empire, the very thing he’d built from the ground up with his own two hands. (He doesn’t know what that says about his father. He doesn’t know what that says about himself.)
Milo flies back in the space of hours. What choice does he have?
We’re delivery men, he remembers, looking at the body under the sheet, swallowing down bile. Any unjustified pride, unearned arrogance — it’s wiped from him like chalk from a slate. He buries his father, killed by not his competitors but his partners, and Milo is forced to remember every day for the rest of his life that death is only ever a step away.
Relax his pace even once, and it would catch him up in its jaws just the same as it had his father. Milo — Milo hadn’t even noticed him falling behind.
Just like that, the Pierce Empire is folded tenderly into his hands, and he has no choice but to sit there and hold it. Grief makes way for regret, and then rage, and he doesn’t know how to grapple with it. For the first time in his life, Milo Pierce has the stage. The spotlight is his. But he’s never thrived as the star of the show. That role never belonged to him.
Milo Pierce might be a skilled method actor, but he’s always preferred the ensemble. Something small, in the background, so that when the audience applauds, it isn’t really for him.
His father was a practical man. Do it right, do it yourself.
A practical, meticulous man, who strikes fear into hearts whenever he crosses the threshold of one room into another. Not a small pair of shoes to fill, are they? At the funeral, for maybe the first time, Milo can feel them circling. Old business partners, distant relatives, family friends — they are waiting for him to show his throat. The vultures circle, and he determines then and there that he will not allow anyone to turn him into some kind of Julius Caesar.
In the days after his father’s wake, Michaela Pinkett is the first to approach, and she is unabashed in doing so. The Pinketts and the Pierces have been family friends for years, and Milo doesn’t think she or her subordinates pulled the trigger on his father, but he still doesn’t know if trusting her is the right thing to do.
She takes his hands in her own, holds them tight, and gives him an offer he cannot refuse: my door is always open to you. I’ve seen what you can do. It’s as high of praise as praise can get, and when she tucks a phone number into the front pocket of his suit, it burns a hole right through the fabric and into his chest.
He wavers and wanes on it for days before swallowing it whole, at the head of the table and dining alone.
(Here’s the thing. Grief hollows you out. In most people, it leaves them with no appetite. But Milo is starving.)
His father had fallen because he’d been sitting at the top. He is six feet under because he’d been too visible. He’d warned his son about this in some ways, hadn’t he? The price of inheritorship? The cost of losing an eye, a tongue, teeth?
He will not make the same mistake. He will not die with a bullet in his back.
He calls a car up and meets her in the morning. The world turns. The day begins anew.
A false heir of his own choosing is installed on the throne of the Pierce empire. He is allowed to pull this puppet’s strings from afar while working with the Pinketts in Pestilence, and his business savvy and what he knows of distribution serve them well. This is not to say it all comes up roses, at first: manufacturing is a learning experience, and he almost slips up, but finding his feet only proves his efficiency. Dominion isn’t out of reach for very long, and once he’s allowed a little bit of freedom, he proves himself several times over.
He is of the belief that shows of strength do little good, and business should always be the first priority. He incentivizes and emphasizes this time and time again, and watches with joy as something as simple as his words sway the tides of business entirely. With his help from the backstage, Pestilence grows even further into a bigger beast than it was.
Milo burns, brutalizes, and buries — just out of sight, out of mind, happy to let Victoria and Charlotte wring their hands and Fazal to spin his wheels and do his work as COO.
The irony that the call comes from Michaela when he is away in Paris dealing with Pierce family business is not beyond him. It is so familiar that when the ringtone pulls him awake, he is caught in a moment of horror. Eighteen all over again, unwilling to answer the phone. “Milo,” she says when he picks up, rubbing sleep from his eyes, “you know your father and I were very good friends. I made him an offer, once.”
Seraphim. It’s gilded, golden, shining like the sun. He’d be a fool to pass it up — but it also means stepping out into the light of day, a move he’s never had to make before. Still, the temptation sits just there.
“You did more for me than anyone else would when my father died,” he replies, and it’s true. Where would he be without her, without Pestilence? Unspoken: let me pay you back. Let me be what your daughters are not strong enough for.
He’s on a plane back in a matter of hours. What choice does he have?
Victoria & Charlotte. They’re adorable, or so you tease, flashing a sharp toothed grin at the Pinketts from your ever so slightly higher podium. You’re curious if your new promotion will inspire enough envy in them to compete, or if they will be relieved that your leadership instincts may inherit the gang rather than them.
Fazal. Oh the delight of being newly crowned Seraphim. You and Fazal have been competing for Michaela’s attention for so long that you had almost considered yourself an underdog. Yet it is evident that it is not a killer like Fazal that Pestilence needs right now but a manufacturer to help keep the money flowing. And so you smile at them, smug in the knowledge that brains still trumps brawn. Fazal can get their hands as dirty as they please to keep yours clean.
Remus. You ran in the same social circles in your early 20s, and there was a time the eldest Warden had been one of your most valuable customers. You share nights with them, fuelled by alcohol amongst other things. It should be a shame, then, that your friendship had become estranged due to your opposing alliances.
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