A luxury tower, high floor, expensive quiet.
“Boss.
Kane’s already on it.
A small job like this doesn’t need your instructions three times over.” The confidant at the desk’s edge kept his tone respectful.
“I know.
Something still doesn’t sit right.” Frank D’Amico wore the full uniform of the upper-crust elite, suit pressed to a knife’s edge, and on paper he chaired an import-export concern.
Off paper, there was no dark trade in this city he didn’t have a hand somewhere inside.
The local patrol cops ate from his palm and so did people considerably above them; if Chief George Stacy himself ever moved to arrest him, the tip-off would likely beat the chief’s own car out of the parking garage.
And in Frank’s honest assessment, the Moss kid hadn’t done it.
A teenager with a small company and a dead family, killing a made man and leaving residue?
No.
This smelled bigger.
The site sat in Manhattan, close against Hell’s Kitchen, and Hell’s Kitchen came with its own residents: a handful of vigilantes nobody had ever gotten to the bottom of, and above them the largest underground empire on the continent, ruled by a name that changed men’s faces when it was spoken.
Kingpin.
If either of those had reached out and touched his organization, then Frank could do exactly nothing but swallow it and smile.
Gunfire crackled somewhere below.
Frank didn’t startle.
He picked up the phone with the calm of a man ordering lunch.
“What’s happening?” “Boss, two intruders have penetrated the building.
Please rest easy.
Security strength is entirely sufficient.” It usually was.
A man in Frank’s line collected enemies who wanted him skinned alive, and every one of them, over the years, had gone to the seabed without leaving so much as a body.
Honest cops, ambush journalists, all of it handled.
Money bought silence on the white side and muscle on the black side, and Frank had never economized on the muscle: bodyguards and gunmen past counting, top-shelf professionals of Kane’s grade in double digits, and, for special occasions, mutants who liked getting paid.
Nobody reached his face without his permission.
That was the theory, and downstairs, it was holding.
The lower floors rang with gunfire and the occasional scream, lead pouring in sheets, not one surface left intact.
Through it moved a shadow: a small, quick body flickering between cover, reaping lives with blades and darts, while a heavyset man laid down covering fire behind her.
For a stretch, sheer surprise and skill let the pair carve through the rabble.
The stretch ended.
Thugs weren’t lambs, and the organization’s mid-tier arrived with weight: massed firepower, devastating shotguns going off in choirs, thunder detonating right beside the intruders’ ears.
The math flipped fast.
Now, the moment either of them showed a head, that head became a distribution.
And outside, the evening produced one more uninvited guest.
A taxi rolled to a stop well down the block.
The driver leaned over his wheel, squinting at the distant tower, where light flickered wrong and dull booms kept rolling out.
“Young man, you sure about this?
That sounds like gunfire.
This is underworld ground.” “Yeah.
Here’s fine.” Trist stepped out, paid, and waved the old boy off before he could develop a conscience about it.
“Looks like something’s already happening.” He tipped his head back at the tower.
The logic that had brought him here ran short and cold.
A killer at his door meant someone had marked him.
Gali’s black-tech had emptied that killer’s phone, and the phone had emptied Frank: name, holdings, appetites, all of it laid out on the coffee table in an hour.
Reading it, Trist genuinely couldn’t locate what he’d done to offend an underground organization, and it also genuinely didn’t matter.
The thing had happened.
Frank would learn the hit failed, and a man like that, after the rage passed, might well reach for the comic company next, and a disrupted publishing schedule meant disrupted fan points, and that touched the foundation.
The clean solution to a problem like Frank wasn’t negotiation or warning.
It was uprooting.
Kill it once, kill it completely.
What he had not budgeted for was arriving to find the gang mid-catastrophe already, some other party having come for Frank first.
The route in told the story: bullet craters stitched across every wall, thugs down with blade wounds, a few merely disabled and wide-eyed, conscious enough to watch a teenager stroll through the wreckage and head straight for the elevators.
Ding.
The doors opened on the fourth floor into a wall of noise, gun-thunder rolling through the open plan, and Trist stepped out and surveyed the battlefield with his hands loose at his sides.
The shooting stuttered and stopped.
Every thug in view stared at the newcomer, because the newcomer carried no tension whatsoever.
He’d walked in on a firefight wearing the posture of a man touring a showroom.
Behind a shredded pillar, the small figure and the big man traded a glance with the same question in it: who is this kid?
A white man sleeved in tattoos decided to own the question.
He strode over, dual pistols, and set one muzzle level with Trist’s face, grinning around the threat.
“Kid.
Who are you?
Talk clear, or die.” “I’d advise you to lower the gun before we talk.” Trist’s voice stayed mild.
“Otherwise you won’t be leaving a whole corpse.” Privately, a small landmark: first time in two lives anyone had pointed a gun at him.
So this was the famous thug etiquette.
“HAHAHA!
A whole corpse?” The man threw his head back, ferocious and delighted.
“Kid, I’ll kill you and feed you to the dogs.” Bang.
The moment stretched.
The conical round left the barrel, the watching thugs’ faces already curling into sneers at the little idiot’s overreach, and behind the pillar the two intruders winced on his behalf, having troubles enough of their own; they’d badly underestimated Frank’s security, and their assault had stalled into a trap.
Clang.
The floor went silent in a single beat.
Eyes bulged in every direction.
The bullet had struck Trist square in the forehead and failed.
Not ricocheted: failed, its tip crushed flat against skin that simply did not give, and the spent slug dropped to the carpet with a sound like a coin.
The tattooed man got out one word.
“Mutant!” Trist didn’t bother with a response.
His fist snapped out, buried itself in the man’s abdomen, and the force went through him in one muffled concussion.
There was no scream, because there was no time for one; the body simply came apart, a red bloom opening in mid-air, and what had been a gunman scattered across the floor he’d owned ten seconds earlier.
“I did say.” The words came out ice-flat and carried across the whole level.
“Pity you didn’t listen.” Scalps crawled the length of the floor.
One punch.
He’d burst a man with one punch.
Behind the pillar, the girl in the purple wig let out a breath that was mostly delight.
“Big Daddy.
He’s so strong.” “Mm.
Mindy, don’t forget.” The big man, Damon, shifted only slightly, his read of the room adjusting by one careful degree and no more.
“Frank keeps a mutant too.” To Damon’s mind, strong was relative, and the kid hadn’t met the house’s real asset yet.
As he said it, his eyes went to the rear of the gang crowd, where a mountain of a man had begun to move.
The thugs parted for him with visible relief.
He came forward rolling his neck, joints crackling down his whole frame like popping beans, and his mass arrived ahead of him, a pressure you felt in the floor.
More than that: degree by degree, the temperature of the room began to climb.
Heat rolled off him in slow waves, thick and smothering, until the whole level sat under it.
“Some moves, kid.” The enforcer looked down at Trist and grinned wide.
“Pity…”