ONE
JUST ANOTHER TUESDAY NIGHT FELONY
KNIGHT
You ever watch a man eat chicken wings like he doesn’t deserve happiness?
That’s what I’m dealing with tonight.
Across the cracked blinds of Table 13 at Nolan’s Bar, our target—one Gregory “Wife-Beater” Dunn—is elbows-deep in a plate of nuclear buffalo wings, licking his fingers like he didn’t just embezzle half a mil from a non-profit and break his ex’s nose last Christmas. He's got sauce on his chin. Hellfire on his rap sheet. And zero idea he's about to be served a different kind of justice.
I adjust the burner phone in my hoodie pocket and glance at the time. 9:47 p.m.
Right on schedule.
“Anything from Lark?” I murmur into the mic clipped to my shirt collar. My voice is a whisper beneath the buzz of bad jukebox country and the sound of someone losing a game of darts behind me.
Static. Then Arrow’s voice crackles in my ear. “Nothing yet. She’s still ghosting the outer firewall.”
Classic Lark. When I tell herno, she hearstry harder.
“I swear,” I mutter, sipping flat soda from my sticky glass. “One day I’m gonna change all the passwords and lock her out for good.”
“You say that,” Arrow deadpans, “but last week she hacked your Nest thermostat and made your apartment play the Teletubbies theme every time you opened the fridge.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose.
“Don’t remind me.”
“Let me remind you of something else—our window’s closing. You’re sure this guy’s dirty?”
“Oh, he’s filthier than a Reddit comment section,” I reply. “I scrubbed his VPN trail last week. He’s been funneling charity funds into a shell company registered to a yacht namedAssets & Ass. No joke. He also buys fake reviews for his self-published crypto e-book. And the worst part?”
Arrow hums. “Tell me.”
“His ebook sucks bad.”
“Jesus,” Arrow whispers. “Take him down.”
I grin.
This is what we do now.
After Arrow helped Juno track her sister’s killers, and Gage brought down that HR creep at NovaPlay, we got… hooked.Somewhere between the late-night missions, burner phones, and Red Bull-fueled stakeouts, it stopped being revenge.
And became a purpose.
We’re not cops. We’re not mercs. We’re just pissed-off misfits with high-speed internet and a low tolerance for bastards in power.
And tonight? Gregory Dunn is next.
“Alright, I’m moving in,” I mutter, sliding out of the booth. My hoodie is zipped, my gloves are on, and my boots are blessedly silent on sticky linoleum.
I cross the bar. The lights are dim, the air smells like spilled beer and shame, and the bouncer is too busy scrolling TikTok to clock me.
Dunn doesn’t even look up. Just keeps licking wing sauce off his fingers like a psychopath.
I lean close, hand on the edge of the booth. “You ever think about what it feels like to lose everything in one night?”
