Chapter 6 : First Blood
Midnight came cold and quiet.
We'd killed the lights hours ago. The warehouse existed in shades of gray—moonlight through dirty windows, shadows pooling in corners, the loading bay a rectangle of deeper darkness against the back wall.
I crouched behind a stack of wooden pallets near the center of the floor, chain wrapped around my right fist. Not a real weapon. Not elegant. But it would hurt someone, and that was enough.
Terry was somewhere to my left, invisible in the shadows. Big Pat lurked near the loading bay doors. Julio had the side entrance, his nervous energy channeled into rigid stillness.
"Seven hours ago, I was eating a gas station sandwich and pretending I had a future. Now I'm waiting to ambush armed men in the dark."
The system pulsed in my peripheral vision.
[COMBAT SCENARIO DETECTED]
[ESTIMATED HOSTILES: 7-10]
[RECOMMENDED STRATEGY: Ambush, divide and conquer]
[HOST CONDITION: Injured but functional. Adrenaline compensation active.]
I dismissed the notification. The system could analyze all it wanted. The fighting would be up to me.
The front door exploded inward.
Not literally—just kicked, hard, by someone with a lot of frustration. Light flooded in from the street, blinding after hours of darkness. Silhouettes poured through: one, two, five, seven figures spreading out into the warehouse.
"Find him!" A voice—Marco, presumably. Italian accent, thick with anger. "Tear this place apart!"
They spread out. Flashlight beams swept the darkness, creating pools of visibility that moved like searchlights. The men stayed loose, confident. They expected to find homeless squatters or a scared kid hiding behind crates.
They didn't expect Big Pat.
The first one went down without a sound—just a meaty thump as Pat's pipe connected with the back of his skull. The man crumpled. Pat dragged him behind a support pillar and melted back into the shadows.
"Tony?" Someone called. "Tony, where—"
Julio took the second one. Screwdriver to the shoulder, not deep enough to kill but enough to make the man scream and drop his flashlight. The beam spun crazily across the floor, throwing wild shadows.
Chaos erupted.
The remaining five bunched together, back to back, sweeping their lights across the warehouse. Professional, I noted distantly. Or professional enough. They'd done this before.
"Come out!" Marco's voice had lost its confidence. "Come out and we talk like men!"
I stayed hidden. Talking was losing.
One of them broke from the group—either brave or stupid—and headed toward the loading bay. Big Pat was waiting. The sound of the impact echoed off the walls, followed by a grunt and the clatter of a dropped weapon.
Four left. Still too many to take head-on.
"Screw this." One of them headed for the side door.
Julio was there, but Julio was small, and the thug was armed with more than a screwdriver. They collided in the darkness. I heard Julio cry out—pain or fear, couldn't tell—and then nothing.
Three.
I moved.
The chain whistled through the air, wrapping around the nearest man's arm. He yelled, tried to pull free. I yanked. He stumbled forward, off balance, and I drove my knee into his stomach. He went down, gasping.
Two.
One of them had a knife out now, blade catching the scattered flashlight beams. He came at me fast, blade leading. I dodged—barely—and the chain swung again. Missed. He was faster than the others.
"You the one who touched Rosaria?" The knifeman circled me. "Marco's gonna cut you apart piece by piece."
"Your friends were shaking down an old vendor." I matched his movement, keeping distance. "She tried to stop them. They got rough."
"Bull—"
He lunged. The knife grazed my forearm—fire and ice simultaneously—but I got the chain around his wrist and twisted. Bone ground against bone. He screamed and dropped the blade.
I didn't stop.
The chain came down again, and again, and the man crumpled. I stood over him, breathing hard, blood dripping from my arm onto the concrete floor.
One left.
Marco Santini stepped into a beam of light. He was shorter than I'd expected—five-seven, maybe—with the compact build of someone who'd grown up fighting. His face was handsome in a sharp-featured way, marred by a scar that ran from his left eyebrow into his hairline.
He held a knife. Longer than the other one. Better grip.
"You got stones," he said. "I'll give you that."
"Your sister wasn't being robbed. Your own men roughed her up."
Something flickered across Marco's face. Doubt, maybe. Or just more anger.
"Rosaria doesn't lie to me."
"Did you ask her? Or did you just assume?"
He didn't answer. He came at me instead.
The fight was nothing like movies. No elegant choreography, no perfect timing. Just two men in the dark trying to hurt each other. Marco was faster than me, more experienced. My ribs screamed with every movement. The cut on my forearm was bleeding badly.
He caught me with the knife—a slash across my shoulder that opened the skin and made my left arm go weak. I stumbled back. He pressed the advantage.
The chain saved me.
I swung blind, desperate, and felt it connect with something solid. Marco grunted and his next slash went wide. I closed the distance—inside the knife's effective range—and drove my forehead into his face.
His nose crunched. Blood sprayed.
He fell back. I followed, wrapping the chain around his wrist and yanking. The knife clattered away. I hit him again—fist this time, then knee. He went down.
I didn't stop.
[COMBAT VICTORY]
[BOSS DEFEATED: MARCO SANTINI]
[INTIMIDATION: +5]
[FEAR INDEX: +100]
[LEVEL UP: 1 → 2]
The notifications were distant, meaningless. My ears were ringing. My hands were covered in blood—mine and his—and Marco Santini lay at my feet, beaten, broken, barely conscious.
I could kill him.
The thought arrived cold and clear. One more blow to the head. One twist of the chain around his throat. It would be clean. Professional. Send a message to anyone else who thought about challenging me.
"This is who I am now. This is the game I'm playing."
My hands shook.
"You have two choices." My voice came out rough, barely recognizable. "Work for me, or leave the Narrows tonight. Forever."
Marco's eyes opened. One was swelling shut. Blood covered his mouth and chin.
"I work for nobody."
"Then leave. Tonight. Take whoever's loyal to you and go." I crouched, bringing my face close to his. "But if I ever see you in the Narrows again, I won't give you another choice."
He stared at me for a long moment. Calculating, even through the pain and humiliation.
"You're dead," he whispered. "Maybe not tonight. But you're dead."
"Maybe." I straightened. "But not by you."
He crawled toward the door. One of his men—the one with the knife wound—helped him up. They limped into the night.
The warehouse was quiet.
Terry emerged from the shadows, a bruise forming on his cheek but otherwise unharmed. "Julio?"
"I'm okay." Julio's voice came from near the side door. He was clutching his arm, but he was standing. "Guy got a hit in but Pat took him down before he could finish."
Big Pat appeared, pipe bloody, expression unchanged.
I looked at my crew. My people. Four men in a warehouse full of unconscious bodies and the smell of violence.
"Someone check the wounded," I said. "Anyone who wants to join us, we talk. Anyone who doesn't, they walk."
Terry nodded and moved to comply.
I walked to the back room. Closed what passed for a door. Found a corner away from the windows.
And threw up.
The turkey sandwich. Whatever was left in my stomach. My body heaved until there was nothing left, until I was spitting acid and shaking against the wall.
"I beat a man half to death. I wanted to kill him. Part of me still does."
The system notification pulsed again.
[TERRITORY CONTROL: UNLOCKED]
[Marco Santini's territory available for claim]
[Estimated value: 2-3 blocks, protection income]
[Network expansion possible: 2 of Marco's men willing to join]
I stared at the floating text until my vision blurred.
"Three days. Three days since I woke up in this body, and I've already become someone who beats people with chains in the dark."
A knock on the door. Terry's voice: "Boss? Two of Marco's boys want to talk. Say they'd rather work for someone with rules than go back to that mess."
I wiped my mouth. Straightened my spine. Pushed down the nausea and the shaking and the sick horror of what I'd done.
"Give me a minute."
"Take your time."
The back room had a cracked mirror above a rusted sink. I looked at my reflection. Danny Malone's face stared back—bruised, bloodied, exhausted. A stranger wearing another man's skin.
"This is who you are now. Darek Hale. Criminal. Survivor. Killer, if it comes to it."
I splashed cold water on my face. The shaking stopped. The nausea faded.
When I walked back onto the main floor, my crew was waiting. Terry, Julio, Big Pat—and two new faces. Marco's former men, watching me with a mixture of fear and something else.
Hope, maybe. Or just the recognition of strength.
"You want to work for me?" I addressed the new ones. "Same rules as everyone else. No touching women who aren't in the game. No hurting kids. Break these rules—"
"You kill us yourself." One of them—young, couldn't be older than twenty—finished the sentence. "Terry told us. We're good with that."
I nodded.
[NETWORK: +2]
[TERRITORY CLAIMED: 1 block, estimated]
[FEAR INDEX: 120]
Dawn was coming. Gray light crept through the windows, replacing the darkness with something almost hopeful.
"Terry," I said. "Find out who Marco was collecting from. We're taking over his protection business. But we're doing it differently."
"How's that?"
"We actually protect them."
Terry's smile returned. "I like the sound of that."
The warehouse began to stir—men moving, tasks being assigned, the machinery of a criminal operation grinding to life.
I stood in the center of it, my arm needing stitches, my body aching, my soul carrying a weight it hadn't expected.
But alive. Still choosing. Still building.
That was enough. For now.
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