The Kingmakers

The first rule of regime change is simple: the story must come before the blood.

Not the truth—the story. The one that gets told in headlines and whispered in embassies. The one that floats through think tanks and settles over evening news like fog. A righteous tale, clean and simple. A villain. A victim. A hero.

And somewhere, behind it all, men like Gabriel Sloan. No official rank. No public face. Just a burner passport, access to seven black accounts, and the authority to destabilize sovereign governments if the calculus made sense. Gabriel wasn’t a spy. He was a sculptor. His medium was nations. They called him a Kingmaker.

In the war rooms at Langley, they spoke of him in low tones. He’d orchestrated a soft coup in Tunisia without firing a shot. Toppled a monarch in East Africa using three college students and a YouTube leak. When the United States wanted a government to change without fingerprints, they called the Kingmakers.

They were not a unit, not a task force. They were doctrine. Their authority superseded ambassadors and generals. They bypassed laws, borders, moral frameworks. When they arrived, things changed—silently, surgically, absolutely.

World leaders knew of them. Not by name, never by face, but by aftermath. A speech gone wrong. A scandal that never existed before the flash drive hit the press. A convoy disappearing into the hills. The Kingmakers were the reason fragile governments slept with one eye open.

No one fucked with the Kingmakers.

Now, Gabriel stood at the window of a hotel in Buenos Aires, watching the rain turn to steam against the streetlights. His phone buzzed twice. A new file. He opened it.

SUBJECT: DÍAZ, LUCIA

Age: 42

Profession: Environmental Scientist

Public Credibility Score: 91%

Vulnerability Profile: Moderate

Malleability Index: TBD

Lucia Díaz. Clean image. Outspoken. Widowed. No clear ties to current power blocs. That was good. Clean slates made the best kings. Or queens.

Gabriel looked up at the sky and lit a cigarette. “Begin preliminary shaping,” he said into his comm.

Within days, stories about Lucia Díaz began circulating. Her interviews appeared on syndicated talk shows. Her TEDx talk from a decade ago—previously ignored—was suddenly trending. Anonymous donations flooded her NGO. By week’s end, three foreign think tanks had cited her climate model as the region’s best hope for stability.

None of it was organic.

Gabriel watched from a café across the street as she walked her daughter to school. She didn’t know yet. Not really. That her life was being rewritten in real-time. That every choice she thought was hers had already been rehearsed in dark rooms by men like him. But she’d feel it soon. The lift. The gravity. The Kingmakers didn’t choose leaders. They built them.

The first contact came through an NGO intermediary. An invitation to attend a regional conference. An award. A speech. Gabriel wrote it himself, tested it through a sentiment analysis suite, and had it fed to her aide as a "draft." She barely changed a word.

By the third month, she was being touted as a possible presidential candidate by major outlets. Privately, she was uneasy. She told friends she wasn’t ready. That she didn’t want power. Gabriel smiled when he read the intercepted transcript. They always said that. The good ones.

Election night came like a coronation. Lucia Díaz won by a landslide. The people had chosen. Or at least, they believed they had. That belief—that illusion of will—was the final masterpiece.

She cried during her victory speech. Hugged her daughter. Promised change. Three days later, Gabriel visited her under the guise of an international advisor.

“I know who you are,” she said before he spoke. “You’re the one who made this happen.”

“I didn’t make anything,” he replied. “I just cleared the way.”

She studied him, tired and alert all at once. “What do you want?”

He slid a document across the table. Five pages. Trade routes. Military access. Energy infrastructure.

“Continuity,” he said.

She read the first page, then stopped. “This isn’t reform. This is colonization.”

Gabriel shrugged. “It’s policy. Signed by people you trust.”

“I won’t be your puppet.”

He leaned back. “Then you’ll be a martyr.”

She didn’t sign that day. But she didn’t refuse again. Weeks passed. Meetings were held. Speeches were made. She spoke the lines they gave her, voted the way they told her. The papers called her a moderate. A pragmatist. A stabilizing force.

At night, she sat alone in the presidential residence, staring into her own reflection like she was waiting to be replaced by someone else. Sleep came in pieces. Her daughter—once talkative, fearless—had grown quiet. She had started locking her bedroom door.

Lucia hated herself. Not in a vague, poetic way—but with a gnawing, pulsing nausea she couldn’t outrun. Every time she stepped behind a podium or shook a foreign hand, she felt another part of her calcify. She would stand in front of the mirror afterward and rehearse apologies she would never say aloud.

The threats weren’t just political. There were names mentioned. Faces shown to her in photographs—advisors, colleagues, even distant cousins. The implication was clear. Compliance wasn’t just suggested. It was demanded.

She told herself it was temporary. That survival came first. That her silence was the price of patience. But patience had a cost. And every day, it felt like she was trading pieces of her soul for borrowed time.

She started taking long drives at night without a motorcade, alone except for a single loyal driver who never asked questions. She sat in unlit chapels. Walked the edges of dead parks in shoes too expensive for the mud. She would write her thoughts in a journal, then burn the pages in a sink.

She needed them to think she had adjusted. She needed them to believe they had broken her. But she was watching. Counting doors. Listening for cracks. Finding the names of people who still believed in her—quietly, secretly. There were diplomats who had winced when she signed. Military attachés who gave her sidelong glances. Civilian staff who lingered too long before saying, "Ma’am, if you ever need anything..."

She was building a map. Not of terrain. Of loyalty. And when she made her move, it would be precise. Devastating. She would break the box they built around her. And once she did, she would burn the whole fucking thing to the ground.

"Fuck these Kingmakers, who are they to play God?" she muttered to herself.

But they wern't Gods. Gods have rules, they don't interfere in humanity. They were men. Godless, soulless entities who moved world leaders around like they were chess pieces. No one fucked with the Kingmakers, and if she wasn't careful, she was going to learn that lesson that hard way.