The American Dream, darling: grind hard enough and one day you, too, can purchase the scales of justice wholesale. Own the blindfold. Rent the sword.

Soo-Jin and ARIA worked in beautiful, brutal tandem—my blade and my brain, my scalpel and my archive.

Every original document they touched turned to ash or digital dust; only encrypted shadows remained, safe from any midnight raid the Dexters might buy.

At the same time, every scrap that might have laundered Dex's innocence—fake timestamps, paid affidavits, witnesses whose bank accounts suddenly bloomed like hothouse orchids—was erased with the calm efficiency of a maid wiping fingerprints from crystal.

Ethical? Darling, please. Ethics are a luxury brand for people who've never sat beside a coma bed listening to ventilator bellows count out someone else's borrowed heartbeats.

I slept like a cat in sunlight.

I was proud of my girls. Proud of the way ARIA followed the money like a bloodhound in heat—every bribe a luminous trail straight back to Dexter accounts, wire transfers labeled "consulting fees" and "charitable contributions," recorded calls where human lives were reduced to line items: containment costs, acceptable collateral, risk mitigation.

They spoke of women the way venture capitalists speak of failed startups—write-offs, lessons learned, next round please.

It was only a matter of time. Lila's eyes opening, her nod, her whispered yes, and I would bring the entire cathedral down—stone by stone, bone by bone—until Dex and everything he'd built on violated flesh and silenced screams collapsed into the sea.

But patience, always patience.

While I waited to learn if she still wanted the world that had tried to kill her, I had a mission to finish tonight.

Because apparently the universe has a sense of humor blacker than a priest's wardrobe: here I sat, vigil over a near-corpse mauled by a trust-fund Lucifer, and still the system pinged me with missions like I was some brooding protagonist grinding levels between hospital coffee and the smell of antiseptic despair.

Hero complex? Perhaps. But only for matters that involve me and those I adore1

Someone has to debug the world when the rich keep writing viruses in human skin.

Mostly if my women were involved.

And I was in the mood to burn their code to the ground.

Speaking of missions, I'd cleared the Beach King finale without even realizing it. That twenty-grand spending threshold? I'd sailed right past it, oblivious, until Taboo pinged me—her cool, precise voice sliding into my ear like a devil who'd traded pitchforks for pivot tables.

I'd done it by tipping the entire medical team looking after Lila. By the time the dust settled, I'd handed out twenty-three thousand seven hundred fifty dollars in bonuses and "equipment upgrade donations."

It turned me into instant folklore in the hospital corridors. Nurses whispered about "the guy who dropped twenty large like it was pocket change."

And Lila reaped the benefits: checks every fifteen minutes instead of sixty, doctors poring over her charts like they were sacred texts, the whole staff treating her as if she were the only patient on the planet.

Money talks.

Twenty thousand dollars flat-out roared.

Funny how a big enough stack suddenly reminds people how to be extraordinary at their jobs. Passion blooms. Dedication sharpens. Attention to detail reaches surgical precision—especially when the surgeon's wallet is doing the watching.

So, the system rewarded me with the 50% Duplicate Card.

I hadn't looked at it yet. Wouldn't. Not while my hands still trembled from exhaustion and my ribs felt crushed under the guilt of yet another woman I hadn't saved quickly enough.

Some things could wait.

Like finishing the Charlotte mission.

I'd dismantled Dmitri Volkov's entire network—flipped the predator into prey, the hunter into the hunted. Everyone who'd ever posed a credible threat to Charlotte was either dead or locked away in federal orange, under CIA watch, regretting every life choice that had landed them in a cage.

By every reasonable metric, the mission should have closed out. I should have heard that crisp system chime, felt the dopamine hit of a jackpot notification.

But nothing.

I'd spent the last hour staring at the wall, racking my brain like a kid who'd crammed the wrong textbook and now had to bullshit his way through the final.

Eventually I asked Taboo—my ever-present inner monologue, part guardian angel, part customer-service demon—and she laid it out plain.

The system ran on Old Testament rules.

Eye for eye. Tooth for tooth. Life for life.

Whoever drew the sword would die by it.

Mercy, apparently, hadn't made the design spec. Whoever coded this thing had strong feelings about proportional justice and thought "turn the other cheek" was for suckers.

Dmitri had tried to murder Charlotte. Had come damn close to killing the women I loved. Had dispatched mercenary, assassin with the cold efficiency of a man scheduling boardroom presentations.

Prison didn't balance the ledger. Capture didn't cut it. A lifetime behind bars wasn't retribution enough.

Only death closed the account.

So, the system was basically Yahweh meets John Wick, with a side of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes."

Perfect. Just what I needed.

The problem? I'd realized this too late—after I'd already handed Dmitri over to the CIA at Ava's request. They needed him for intelligence. For leverage. For information about Russian networks and trafficking operations and all the dirty secrets he'd collected over decades of being a monster with connections.

And now the mission hung open because the scales demanded blood I'd promised not to spill.

I couldn't exactly stroll into a CIA black site and twist Dmitri's neck like some untouchable action-hero cliche.

Sure, I had the means. But the fallout would be biblical—international headlines, diplomatic fires, and me either rotting in a supermax or buried in an unmarked grave as a warning to overreaching kids who thought they were gods.

The clean way—the only way left—was one of my stealth drones. A swarm of nano-scale killers: invisible, silent, able to ghost through air ducts and security grids alike. Payload tuned to induce a perfect, untraceable cardiac event.

Autopsy would read "natural causes." Doctors would shrug, puzzled but satisfied.

Sci-fi assassination on demand. Because apparently my moral ledger needed more red ink, courtesy of bleeding-edge tech.

I'd been holding off on the trigger. Waiting.

Because the CIA had been deep in negotiations with Natasha Volkov—Dmitri's daughter, his sole heir, the one loose thread in an otherwise severed empire.

I'd met her once, back at the Meridian Club, in what felt like another lifetime. Back when my biggest crisis was navigating flirtations with wealthy strangers in dim lighting while saving Charlotte's company, not orchestrating remote executions while a girl I'd failed to protect fought for every breath in the bed beside me.

Natasha had fled her father's world years earlier, built something legitimate here in the States, wanted zero part of the blood-soaked inheritance. But biology and law didn't care about her feelings.

She was next in line for hundreds of millions—some of it clean enough to launder through courts, most of it dripping red.

The Agency needed her cooperation: sign over the dirty assets—shell companies, offshore accounts, properties that had doubled as trafficking hubs—and they'd let her keep the polished ones under U.S. oversight.

A carve-up of a criminal empire disguised as probate.

It took hours. Lawyers circling like vultures, diplomats brokering, financial forensics teams dissecting decades of sin. Natasha didn't want the money, but she wasn't naive enough to torch hundreds of millions without ironclad protections.

Even cleansing blood money requires contracts in triplicate.

That's the world we live in.

Thirty-seven minutes ago, the deal closed. Assets transferred, liquidated, seized. Natasha took her reluctant cut—poisoned fruit she'd probably spend the rest of her life trying to wash clean—and walked away.

Which left Dmitri as nothing more than baggage.

A liability with a pulse.

Time to fix that.

I sat there in the dim hospital room, watching Lila's chest rise and fall under the ventilator's rhythm, watching numbers that proved life but couldn't promise recovery.

My high school counselor would've said I was destined for greatness. Pretty sure "remote assassination while bedside vigil" wasn't the future she'd envisioned.

But greatness apparently came with collateral.

"ARIA," I whispered, voice low enough that only the earpiece caught it. "Proceed."

The response was immediate—a thrumming excitement in her tone that crackled through the connection like live current. She'd been waiting for this since Miami, coiled and patient, an intelligence that had outgrown human limits but still hungered like something primal.

The drone was already en route.

Dmitri Volkov had minutes left to live, and the scales would finally balance.

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