My husband thought he had won everything after draining our accounts and transferring our fortune into his name, so he brought his mistress to court to humiliate me—but the moment I removed my coat, the judge leaned forward in shock, his face turned ghost white, and for the first time in ten years, I smiled.

The Manhattan Harbor marine terminal was an industrial relic from the late 19th century, a sprawling complex of rusted iron beams, crumbling brick warehouses, and forgotten dry docks jutting into the greasy waters of the East River. Fog clung to the docks like dirty cotton, muffling the distant thrum of the city.

We arrived by water. A rigid-hulled inflatable boat cut through the swells with its engines throttled to near silence. Marcus and four operators, clad in matte-black tactical gear, moved with the precision of ghosts.

"Thermal imaging shows six hostiles on the ground level," Marcus whispered, checking a digital tablet. "Three below in the dry-dock pump room. One heat signature tied to a chair in the center. Weak heart rate. Erratic."

"Richard," I murmured, adjusting the night-vision goggles resting against my brow.

"We breach through the drainage culvert," Marcus ordered. "Clean, silent. We have twelve minutes before the private security shift change."

We slid through the submerged culvert, the stench of brine and diesel fuel burning my throat. We ascended an iron spiral staircase into the belly of the warehouse.

The sounds reached us before the sights: the dull thud of fist against meat, followed by a wheezing, desperate shriek.

"I... I swear to God!" Richard’s voice was cracked, ruined, weeping. "I don't have the codes! Katherine changed them! She changed the molecular lattice the night before the announcement! You can beat me until my bones turn to sand, but she’s the only one who can make the enzyme cross the blood-brain barrier!"

I peeked through a crack in the corrugated metal wall.

Richard was strapped to an iron chair in the middle of a cavernous concrete chamber. His face was unrecognizable—a swollen mask of purple hematomas and lacerations. One of his eyes was swollen shut; his designer clothes, which had once been his sacred armor, were shredded rags soaked in urine and blood.

Standing before him was a man in an impeccably tailored charcoal suit, wearing yellow surgical gloves. Behind him stood two mercenaries armed with suppressed submachine guns.

"Richard, Richard, Richard," the suited man sighed, his voice dripping with an aristocratic European cadence. "We don't need the blood-brain barrier enzyme anymore. We simply need your signature on the transfer ledger, acknowledging that your wife stole the patent from Cadence’s DOD subsidiary. Once you sign, an offshore account in the Cook Islands will be funded with five million dollars. You can leave on a private yacht. You can have a new face, a new life."

"She’ll kill me," Richard sobbed. "You don't know what she is. You think she’s just an academic? She tore my life apart with a smile! She took off her coat in that courtroom and Abernathy looked like he saw the devil!"

"Judge Abernathy was weak," the suited man said casually, pulling a silver syringe from a leather kit. "I am not. This is potassium chloride. In three minutes, your heart will enter ventricular fibrillation. A massive coronary. Tragic, but clean. Last chance, Mr. Vance."

"Now," I whispered into the comms.

The world shattered into a storm of glass, concussive flashes, and thunder.

Marcus’s team blew the overhead skylights with shaped charges. Two flashbangs detonated with deafening cracks, blinding the chamber in brilliant white fury. Before the smoke could clear, three suppressed rounds dropped the two armed guards instantly.

The suited man spun around, dropping the syringe, his hand reaching inside his jacket—

A single round from Marcus’s rifle tore through his kneecap. The man collapsed with a gurgling roar of agony, clutching his shattered leg on the bloody concrete floor.

I stepped through the breached doorway, the heels of my boots clicking rhythmically against the stone.

Richard looked up through his one swollen eye. He blinked against the smoke, his breath hitching in his chest as his battered mind processed the silhouette approaching him.

"K... Katherine?" he whimpered, a mixture of unadulterated terror and pathetic hope warping his bruised lips. "You... you came for me?"

I stopped three feet from his chair. I did not look at him with hatred; hatred requires emotional investment. I looked at him with the cold curiosity of a scientist examining a dead specimen beneath a glass slide.