Chapter 4 - Breaking the Syndicate’s Grip
Dustin backed away frantically, tripping over a rubber dumbbell and crashing hard onto his back. I walked toward him slowly, my boots clicking rhythmically against the mat. Every step I took felt like the closing of a coffin lid on his miserable little empire.
Before I could reach him, Bruno lunged at my back with a heavy steel gym chain, roaring like a wounded bear.
Without turning around, I listened to the whistling sound of the chain cutting through the air. At the exact millisecond it reached my shoulder, I pivoted, caught the chain with my left hand, wrapped it around my forearm, and yanked with the full explosive torque of my hips. Bruno was jerked forward violently off his feet. I stepped inside his guard, delivered a blindingly fast palm strike straight to his chin, followed by a devastating elbow smash to his collarbone.
The mighty head coach—the terror of the underground fighting circuit—collapsed like a house of cards, sliding unconscious against the base of the steel cage.
The entire gym went dead silent. The remaining fighters backed away into the corners, their hands raised defensively, trembling as they stared at me as if I were a monster disguised as a human being.
I stood over Dustin, who was scrambling backward on the floor like a crab, pressing himself against the base of the heavy bag rack, tears of sheer panic pricking his eyes.
"P-Please," Dustin stammered, his voice cracking. "Don't... don't kill me. My uncle... my uncle will hunt you down. He owns the cops, he owns the judges—"
"Your uncle is Viktor Vance, right?" I interrupted, my voice unnaturally calm. "The man who thinks he runs the West Harbor docks and the local protection rackets?"
Dustin stared up at me, completely paralyzed. "H-How do you know that?"
"Because men like your uncle think power comes from fear," I said, leaning down until my face was inches from his. I grabbed him by the collar of his expensive athletic shirt and hauled him up to his feet with one hand, effortlessly lifting his two-hundred-pound frame off the ground. "True power comes from discipline. And you just picked a fight with a man who spent his entire life teaching young killers how to dismantle guys exactly like you."
I didn't break his bones—though every fiber of my military training screamed at me to do so. Instead, I drove my fist straight into his solar plexus with just enough measured force to shut down his nervous system. Dustin gasped, his eyes rolling back, before collapsing unconscious onto the canvas at my feet.
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My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out. It was a text message from an unknown encrypted number: “Viktor Vance knows what happened at the gym. He’s sending his enforcers to your house right now.”
I looked around the silent, terrified gym, wiped a drop of sweat from my forehead, and smiled. Let them come.
