The rage simmering beneath my skin was dangerous.
If I let it surface, I'd burn the world down.
I dressed slowly, methodically, as if habit were the only religion I had left.
In the closet, a row of suits hung in perfect order.
Sophia had always loved me in them.
"You look like the man I believe in when you wear one," she used to say.
She would've hated the man I'd become.
But the suits were the last thread connecting me to who I used to be—the man I'd buried beside her.
I slipped into one, buttoned the jacket, tightened the tie like a noose, and tucked a pistol beneath my arm.
My reflection stared back at me as I adjusted my cuffs.
A stranger.
Not Vicente, the quiet IT tech who woke up next to her every morning.
Not the man she thought I was.
I didn't want to see myself anymore.
I let the dead man I used to be fade into the glass, leaving what was left behind.
What I was now was a necessity.
Because the night was waiting.
Chapter Two — Vinny
The warehouse was a graveyard for steel and oil tanks.
It had once been a cigar factory some old-school mobsters owned back in the twenties, but now it reeked only of corrosion, rot, and decay. Overhead, the flickering fluorescent lights hummed low and cast jagged shadows across the cracked concrete.
The place felt wrong.
Not dangerous.
Wrong.
My pulse kicked up anyway, my fight-or-flight instinct flaring, but I kept walking.
Lady of Rage stood by a stack of crates, arms crossed. Her people were scattered throughout the warehouse, hands resting on weapons, eyes scanning the dark.
I glanced around, searching for Delilah.
She was always with her wife.
Tonight, she wasn't.
The absence gnawed at me longer than it should have, but I swallowed the urge to ask.
I didn't care.
