Zarek recoiled, the sting in his forearm blooming into a throbbing heat. He glanced at the wound, a clean, deep furrow executed with the precision of ten thousand hours of practice.Tae-hyun stood frozen, mouth agape, eyes darting from the blood on the gravel to his assistant. "Doyun? Since when do you...?"Doyun didn’t answer. He didn't even blink. He stepped forward, his knives humming in a tight, predatory circle."You talk too much, Tae-hyun," Doyun said, his voice stripped of its usual subservience. "Get in the car, sir. The Riggs boy is mine now."Zarek hissed through his teeth, hand diving into his tactical backpack."I wondered when the monster would finally step out from behind the suit."Doyun didn't just run; he exploded.The first knife aimed for Zarek’s throat, the second for his heart. Zarek threw himself backward, the blades whispering past his skin, close enough to feel the cold of the steel. In that heartbeat, he realized that without a change in tactics, he would

Zarek didn’t turn.He didn’t need to. He had memorized Doyun’s ragged rhythm, the drag of his boots, the hitch in his breath.Without breaking stride, Zarek pivoted his hip and lashed out with a back kick.It was blind. Mechanical. Delivered with piston-like precision.His heel connected squarely with Doyun’s sternum.CRACK.The sound of bone giving way echoed louder than the idling engines of the SUVs.Doyun was launched backward, his body folding like a broken chair. He hit the gravel five feet away and stayed there, his chest rising in shallow, involuntary twitches.The light in his eyes began to dim, finally snuffed out beneath the weight of Zarek’s boot.Zarek turned back to Tae-hyun.“He’s done,” Zarek rasped, stopping inches from the car door. “There’s no one left to get your popcorn, Tae-hyun. No one left to bleed for you.”Tae-hyun fell back into the leather seat, hands raised in a trembling shield.“Wait—Riggs! Wait! I have money! I have the names! I can give you the signatu

Zarek didn’t finish him. Instead, he stood over the broken masterpiece, watching the blue light beneath Tae-hyun’s skin flicker and dim like a dying neon sign.The silence of the lot was eerie, punctuated only by the distant, rhythmic clink-clink of the SUV’s cooling engine and the low, pathetic moans of mercenaries scattered in the dark.Zarek reached down, grabbed a fistful of Tae-hyun’s matted blond hair, and hauled his head up.Tae-hyun’s face was a ruin of torn flesh and polished alloy; one eye swollen shut, the other darting in a frantic, mechanical twitch.“I’m not going to ask you for names anymore,” Zarek said, his voice dropping to a whisper colder than the night air. “We both know you’re too terrified of them to speak. So let’s make it simple. Give me the organization. Give me the banner you all crawl under.”Tae-hyun let out a wet, rattling laugh, blood bubbling between his teeth.“You think… you think a name will save you? Knowing is a death sentence, Riggs. I’m a high-ti

Shaw’s heart hammered against his ribs, not from fear, but from the sudden, jarring shift in the atmosphere. One second, he was speaking to a harmless grandmother; the next, he was standing across from someone who knew a name scrubbed from every official record in the city.In a blur of motion, Shaw closed the distance in a single, predatory stride. He leaned over the counter, his massive frame casting a shadow that swallowed the woman and her hydrangeas. His gaze turned to flint.“Who are you?” Shaw demanded, his voice a low vibration. “How do you know that name? The Riggs family was erased twenty years ago. No one in this zip code should be breathing that word out loud.”The woman didn’t flinch. She didn’t even blink at the display of federal aggression.She simply set her shears on the wooden counter with a deliberate clack and met his eyes.“Lower your hackles, Agent,” she said, her voice as steady as a heartbeat. “I won’t harm the Riggs boy. If I wanted him dead, I would have

Suddenly, the darkness ahead erupted into blinding white.High beams, dozens of them, snapped on at once, forming a wall of light that turned the windshield into an opaque sheet of glare.Zarek slammed on the brakes. The heavy SUV fishtailed, screeching to a halt.Before the dust could settle, the roar of engines surrounded him.Four, no, six, blacked-out SUVs tore from the treeline, boxing him in.They moved with the surgical precision of a wolf pack, their bumpers pinning him in place.The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the rhythmic clicking of cooling metal.Then the doors of the surrounding vehicles opened in unison.Several men stepped out.These weren’t the mercenaries from the lot; these were professional strike teams, clad in matte-black tactical gear and carrying suppressed submachine guns.They didn’t shout.They didn’t scramble.They moved into a tight semi-circle, their lasers painting a constellation of red dots across Zarek’s chest.A man in a charcoal