The warm drop of blood on his neck slowly trickled down into the hollow of his collarbone, eventually soaking into the collar of his cotton pajamas.
Zack’s pinned right hand had completely given up resisting, his fingers splaying loosely across the light gray sheets.
The massive figure by the bed, towering like a black tombstone, remained hunched over him in a highly oppressive stance.
The matte blade of the high-carbon steel dagger hovered precisely less than a millimeter from Zack’s carotid artery.
Black Noir didn’t speak, and those dead gray eyes behind his mask betrayed no emotion.
Like a cold machine running a scan, he recorded every detail of Zack’s submissive body language.
The air in the bedroom felt thick, almost solidified.
Zack could hear his relatively weak heart pounding furiously, working overtime.
But he forced his vocal cords to relax and kept his gaze steady.
“You didn’t slit my throat.”
Zack spoke.
His voice was low and raspy due to the extreme tension and the blade pressing against his Adam’s apple, but he enunciated every syllable with absolute clarity.
“That means Ms.
Madelyn Stillwell doesn’t want a useless corpse right now.
She wants an answer.”
When the name “Madelyn” slipped from the mouth of an ordinary college student with no apparent background, Black Noir’s otherwise perfectly still shoulders tensed for a fraction of a second.
It was an almost imperceptible reaction.
But to Zack, that split-second hesitation confirmed all his deductions.
This silent killer wasn’t acting alone; there had to be a miniature communication device hidden inside his tactical suit.
Right now, the vice president sitting in her 99th-floor office in Manhattan was monitoring everything happening here in real time through Black Noir’s audio and visual feed.
Zack shifted his eyes slightly upward, staring at a reflection on Black Noir’s mask.
He knew exactly whom he was speaking to.
“Don’t waste your time searching this place,” Zack said, his tone growing steady.
“There are no chemical sprays here designed to control supes, nor any sonic dampening devices targeted at Compound V.”
The sharp edge of the blade sent a cold shiver across his skin.
Zack swallowed, raising the stakes.
“Your executives must have run a background check on me.
A file as clean as a blank sheet of paper.
You can’t figure out how a bug that could be crushed at any moment managed to make Vought’s prized asset land on this shabby balcony every night, like a taxi driver punching a clock.”
Black Noir’s left hand remained clamped like iron around Zack’s wrist, but his posture shifted ever so slightly.
He tilted his head a fraction more.
This movement meant the person on the other end of the line was either issuing a new directive or listening intently.
“The answer is actually quite simple.”
Zack’s lips curled into a cold, humorless smile, his eyes deep.
“Because you treat her as a god, a cash cow, a monster to be appeased with fake maternal love.
You analyze her every smile with data, and you use PR teams to cover up her every breakdown.
You gave her everything, but stripped away her right to be human.”
A breath of early autumn night wind drifted through a crack in the window, rustling the corner of the curtain.
“But I treat her as a human being.”
Zack’s voice echoed in the silent room, sharp enough to pierce the soul.
“When she dirties my floor, I make her clean it with a mop.
When she loses a video game and wants to smash the TV, I smack her head without hesitation.
In this tiny apartment, she doesn’t have to play the perfect American sweetheart.
She is just an ordinary girl who throws a tantrum because she can’t get a bite of tomato beef brisket.”
Black Noir’s hand holding the knife remained steady, but the atmospheric pressure in the room shifted subtly.
The pure, murderous pressure belonging to a killer was slowly being diluted by a growing sense of wariness.
Zack knew very well that Madelyn was an absolute control freak.
When a control freak realizes her puppet is being guided by someone else in a way she cannot comprehend, let alone replicate, her instinctive reaction is to destroy.
“Killing me would take nothing more than a flick of a finger for you, or for the vice president behind you.”
Zack’s gaze became as sharp as a blade, piercing straight into the eyes behind Black Noir’s mask.
“But this apartment is covered in her scent.
There are indentations on the carpet where she stepped, strands of her blonde hair on the couch.
She even has ice cream sitting in the fridge that she specifically demanded to eat tomorrow.”
Zack’s chest heaved slightly, his pace quickening with a resolve that set life and death aside.
“If she pushes open that glass door tomorrow night and smells the scent of my blood sprayed from my neck instead of a hot meal…”
“…if you were her, what would you do?”
The air completely froze.
Black Noir’s dead-gray pupils constricted slightly.
As a cleaner who spent years dealing with The Seven and handling Vought’s dirty laundry, he knew better than anyone the terrifying, apocalyptic destruction that the star-spangled woman could unleash if she went off the rails.
“She won’t sit on the floor and cry,” Zack answered for him, every word falling like a tolling death knell.
“Her fragile, warped pride will drive her into absolute madness.
She will hunt through every security camera in this city, following the faint scent of gunpowder or blood in the air to find the culprit who destroyed her safe haven.”
“And then, she will fly over Manhattan.”
Zack looked at Black Noir, his eyes holding a chilling pity.
“Your precious security systems won’t hold out for even a second against her two-thousand-degree heat vision.
She will burn right through the bulletproof glass of Vought Tower and slice those executives in their custom suits into ribbons.
She will drag Ms.
Madelyn by her hair and throw her off the ninety-ninth floor, just to avenge a dinner she’ll never get to eat in this crappy apartment again.”
The bedroom was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
Only Zack’s calm, highly provocative voice wove a gruesome, apocalyptic picture in the dark.
This wasn’t an empty threat.
It was the inevitable outcome based on Joanne’s attention-starved, yandere, and volatile personality.
Zack had bound his life directly to that of the woman sitting in the 99th-floor office in Manhattan.
Black Noir remained in that oppressive pose.
The high-carbon steel blade was still pressed tightly against Zack’s carotid artery, but the sharp intent to slice flesh had withered like a firecracker stripped of its fuse, incapable of detonating.
Daring not to act rashly for fear of collateral damage.
This was the only sliver of survival Zack had grasped when he realized Black Noir hadn’t killed him instantly.
Now, with his smooth psychological maneuvering, he had carved this hesitation deep into Madelyn’s bones.
Time seemed to lose all meaning.
The two remained locked in this highly dangerous standoff.
Zack could even feel the blade vibrating at an extremely high, micro-frequency due to the prolonged tension in Black Noir’s arm muscles.
Black Noir was waiting for his final orders.
Zack made no move to rush him.
Like a gambler who had pushed all his chips onto the table, he calmly watched the dealer, waiting for the cards to be revealed.
He knew that miles away, Madelyn was surely staring at her screen, gritting her teeth as she weighed the pros and cons.
Eliminating an uncontrollable ordinary human at the cost of unleashing a completely rogue, walking nuclear warhead capable of leveling the entire Vought empire.
Any rational capitalist could do that math.
In the prolonged silence, a faint streak of light crossed the night sky outside.
It was just a flight warning light from a plane passing through the New York clouds.
Black Noir’s head tilted slightly once more, as if listening intently.
A split second later, the iron clamp on Zack’s right wrist released without warning.
The crushing pressure that had sunk deep into his bones instantly vanished.
Blood rushed back into Zack’s hand, bringing a wave of intense numbness and pins and needles.
The high-carbon steel dagger pressed against his carotid artery was smoothly retracted.
As the blade parted from his skin, it drew a tiny bead of blood.
Black Noir stood up.
His massive black frame backed away from the bedside, melting once more into the shadows cast from the hallway.
He looked down at Zack lying on the bed, his dead-gray eyes entirely devoid of emotion.
Turning around, Black Noir stepped across the floor without making a single sound.
Just as he had arrived, he dissolved like a formless night breeze, gliding through the bedroom door and toward the living room.
Zack didn’t get up right away.
He remained flat on his back, drawing massive gulps of the freshly circulating air.
Cold sweat had completely soaked through his cotton pajamas, clinging to his back and sending a biting chill through him.
Zack raised his numb right hand and wiped the cold sweat from his face.
He knew Madelyn’s compromise was only temporary.
That old fox would never allow someone capable of steering Joanne’s emotions to remain in control of such leverage for long.
Tonight’s retreat was merely to buy time to find a safer, less provocative way to eliminate him.
Supporting himself against the mattress, Zack sat up with some difficulty.
He had to speed up his dark web capital deployment and fully activate the Frenchie lead before Vought made its next move.
Only by grasping power of his own could he truly establish a foothold in this dog-eat-dog world.
Just as he threw off the blanket, preparing to get out of bed and tend to the small cut on his neck—
The quiet night sky outside the balcony suddenly exploded with a deafening sonic boom.
It wasn’t the roar of a jet engine, but the terrifying kinetic energy of an incredibly massive object violently tearing through the air far beyond supersonic speed.
The entire high-rise apartment building seemed to shudder slightly from the sudden shockwave.
A tempestuous gale swept across the balcony like a category twelve typhoon.
A familiar, bone-chilling wave of intense heat, mixed with a violent aura capable of destroying everything in its path, was wildly hurtling toward the apartment with unstoppable momentum.