The sharp, authoritative rapping at the apartment door came in a distinct three-beat cadence: two firm knocks, a half-second pause, and a final, softer tap.
Inside the living room, Marina instinctively pulled Katie behind her, her knuckles whitening as she gripped the back of the sofa.
Nicholas didn’t reach for a weapon. He walked to the entryway with calm, unhurried steps, checking the digital peephole monitor before releasing the deadbolt.
The door swung open to reveal Selena standing in the hallway alone.
She wasn’t wearing her formal supervisor suit or the association’s ceremonial vestments. Instead, she had thrown on a high-collared charcoal trench coat over dark tactical slacks, her hair pulled back into a ponytail.
She carried no visible sidearm, but the tight, exhausted set of her jaw betrayed the immense pressure she had navigated to reach his doorstep before the strike teams mobilized.
Her sharp eyes swept over Nicholas, taking in his relaxed posture, his plain black shirt, and the steam rising from the coffee pot in the kitchen behind him.
"You’re having breakfast," Selena said, her voice dry and quiet as she stepped past the threshold.
"Coffee," Nicholas corrected, locking the door behind her and resetting the perimeter sensors. "You’re early for an execution squad."
"If I had waited for the tactical directorate to finish their preliminary brief, you’d have two heavy-assault gunships hovering outside your balcony right now," Selena replied, unbuttoning her coat.
She glanced toward the living room, offering a subtle, reassuring nod to Marina and Katie.
"I came alone because I knew the footage was garbage the moment I saw it."
Katie peered out from behind Marina, her eyes lighting up with fiery validation. "See?! Selena knows it’s fake too! Big brother made chicken last night and he didn’t leave the apartment!"
"I know, Katie," Selena said softly, the edge in her demeanor softening for a brief second before she turned her attention back to Nicholas.
"The problem isn’t whether I believe you. I watched you break Vance’s squad on the platform. You calculate every risk down to the fraction of a cent. Slaughtering four rent-a-cops and an executive in an alleyway for zero payout and posing under a surveillance camera like a theatrical amateur contradicts your entire psychological baseline. You don’t do sloppy work."
"I don’t do charity work, and I certainly don’t perform for municipal cameras," Nicholas said flatly.
He walked over to the kitchen counter and tossed an encrypted flash drive across the marble surface. It slid to a halt right in front of her.
"My personal building logs," Nicholas stated, gesturing toward the drive. "The building’s secondary power bus records my biometric lock engagement from 11:50 PM through 6:15 AM. Zero fluctuations. Furthermore, my tactical ordnance case is in the hall closet. Feel free to count the rounds. Not a single nine-millimeter casing or carbon-steel edge has left the foam since St. Jude’s."
Selena didn’t even pick up the drive. "The board won’t care about electronic logs or ammo counts, Nicholas. They’ll claim you spoofed the sub-grid or used untraceable contraband."
"Then look at the tape," Nicholas replied, pulling up the news broadcast frame-by-frame on his handheld terminal. He paused the video on the killer’s initial lunge. "Look at the lead foot."
Selena leaned in, her supervisor’s analytical eye scanning the frozen pixels.
"When he closes the distance to sever the first guard’s throat," Nicholas explained, his tone clinical and detached, "he plants on his heel and rotates his hip inward by four degrees. It’s a standard close-quarters assault style taught in private corporate academies. When I move, my weight is perpetually suspended on the balls of my feet to allow zero-delay directional pivots. Watch his blade release—he drops his shoulder half an inch before throwing the steel. He’s telegraphing. And when he breaks the executive’s neck, he uses wild, brute leverage rather than a simple, clean carotid compression."
He swiped the screen off, his lone visible eye cold and piercing.
"The face is an exact composite. The hair and coat are identical. But the motor control belongs to an amateur playing dress-up."
Selena let out a long, heavy exhale, running a hand over her face. "You don’t have to convince me, Nicholas. I saw the biomechanics the second time I watched the playback. But the truth is irrelevant to the High Council right now."
"Vance’s leaks," Nicholas deduced without missing a beat.
"The public is tearing the association apart," Selena admitted, her voice dropping into a harsh whisper. "The data drops are unearthing twenty years of buried scandals, illegal black-ops, and corporate kickbacks. The protests outside District 1 are turning into full-scale riots, and the media is treating our top heroes like pariahs. The council is in absolute panic mode. They need a distraction—something massive, violent, and morally clear-cut to unite the public and shift the narrative away from the archives."
She looked straight into Nicholas’s eyes.
"You’re the perfect scapegoat. The mysterious Hero who loves operating in the dark, slaughtered the Master, and vanished. If they paint you as a rogue butcher who went mad with bloodlust, they can claim the moral high ground, deploy emergency laws, and hunt you down to play the heroes again."
"Are warrants out?" Nicholas asked, his voice disturbingly calm.
"Not yet," Selena said. "Eric and Dana are fighting tooth and nail in the council chamber right now, trying to buy time and demand a full forensic review. But the political factions are moving fast. An emergency containment order could be authorized within the hour."
A heavy, suffocating silence settled over the room.
Marina’s face went completely pale, while Katie looked between Nicholas and Selena, sensing the sudden, dangerous shift in the atmosphere.
Nicholas reached into his pocket, pulled out the digital flight itinerary for the Azure Archipelago, and glanced at the departure timer.
"We leave in three hours," Nicholas said.
Selena frowned. "Did you hear what I just said? If you try to cross the transit hubs, the association’s automated tracking will flag you immediately. You need to lay low in a secure safehouse while Dana and I—"
"I don’t hide in safehouses, Selena," Nicholas interrupted, his voice dropping into a register so frigid it seemed to drop the ambient temperature of the room. "And I don’t negotiate my schedule around the association’s public relations disasters."
He stepped closer, his solitary eye locking onto hers with the lethal, unyielding presence of a man who had stood at the absolute pinnacle of death in a previous life.
"I took their contract. I cleaned their mess at St. Jude’s. I was paid, and my leave of absence was approved. My sisters have spent two weeks without me, while i was fighting in a tournament and then trapped in a city choking on tear gas and media vans, and we are going on vacation."
Nicholas paused, his tone shifting from dismissive to absolute, chilling certainty.
"If the association sends their tactical units to this building, I will consider it a breach of contract. If they try to stop me at the gates, I will treat every operative in a uniform as a hostile combatant. Tell Eric and Dana to keep their dogs on a leash, because if they get between my family and that plane... I won’t be using rubber bullets."
Selena stared at him, feeling the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. She had seen top-tier ranked champions threaten armies, but none of them possessed the terrifying, bone-deep certainty radiating from Nicholas.
She swallowed hard, nodding slowly.
"I’ll buy you as much time as I can," Selena said, turning back toward the door. "Get your sisters out of the district. And Nicholas... whoever is wearing your face isn’t done. If they hit another target while you’re in transit, not even Eric will be able to hold the council back."
"Let them try," Nicholas said quietly, unlocking the door for her. "I’ll be waiting."
~Ring~
Nicholas picked the phone from his pocket, glancing at the caller ID.
[Noisy Peach]
As he picked the phone, her voice came in a panic, "Phantom! Watch the news!"
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