Seraphina POV
[ New York ]
Seraphina D'Angelo did not burst into her temporary lodging. She stepped in like a shadow returning to its source, the door clicking shut behind her with surgical precision. The lock turned with a flick of her wrist. One turn. Then a second. A third for good measure. Paranoia wasn't a flaw. It was preservation.
Their apartment was modest, forgettable. Beige walls. Threadbare carpet. A secondhand scent of mildew and overcooked pasta. The kind of place where secrets could die without echo.
She removed her blazer, folded it into a perfect square, and placed it on the armchair. Underneath, the black silk blouse clung to her lean form, sweat beading at the base of her neck. The mission had gone precisely as planned—which is to say, slightly worse than she expected and far better than the fools she manipulated believed.
Sitwell had been laughably easy. Men like him were predictable: They bled ambition and mistook it for power. She'd let him talk. Let him think. Let him think he was doing the thinking. And then walked away with the Obelisk tucked safely in her bag while he was still polishing the illusion of control.
In the bathroom mirror, Seraphina studied her reflection with clinical detachment. Her green eyes were bloodshot, framed by shadows not even concealer could mend. But weakness wasn't in the darkness under her eyes. It lived in inaction. She rolled her neck, letting each vertebra crack into place, then washed her face with freezing water. Rejuvenation by brute force.
She returned to the main room and unzipped the hidden compartment in her duffel. The Obelisk rested inside, swaddled in fireproof cloth. Elegant, obsidian, dangerous. She laid it on the towel-draped table with the same reverence a general might reserve for a war map.
From her side bag, she retrieved surgical gloves, a laser thermometer, a Geiger counter, and her modified EEG patch. She didn't fear death. She feared lack of knowledge. And the Obelisk—Kree-made, genetic-reactive, possibly lethal—was an unknown she intended to dismantle.
Gloves first. A careful brush against the surface. Then prolonged contact.
Nothing.
She removed the gloves.
Skin met stone. A mild warmth, not enough to be dangerous. A low vibration tingled at her wrist. The EEG patch flickered. Elevated neural activity. No threat response from her immune system. Compatible.
"Of course," she murmured. "Selective. Intelligent. Submissive."
She catalogued every reading, timestamped the data, encrypted it, and sent it to a private server housed in an offshore ghost domain. If she died, the secrets wouldn't.
The next phase was simple but deadly. Puerto Rico held secrets—the underground city, the obelisk's true resting place, the source of Terrigen. She would claim it before anyone else could.
Now came preparation.
Money was a problem. Her funds were scraped clean after the obelisk heist. $900 sat in her account like a ticking timer, an insult to ambition.
She needed funds. Real ones. Not the petty cash scraped from back-alley deals.
She activated the laptop's darknet partition and dropped into a high-level auction forum. A Belarusian syndicate had been seeking a polymorphic malware script designed to bypass NATO-grade firewalls. She delivered it in twenty-four hours. Payment: $25,000 in Monero.
It took three shell companies, a digital art front, and a Canadian cryptocurrency exchange to launder the money into usable currency. By morning, she held $17,800 in physical bills across five currencies. The rest was stashed for future leverage.
Weapons came next.
Seraphina didn't enter a gun shop.
She needed weapons, but more importantly, training for this body. Guns were simple to buy; using them was an entirely different matter for this.
Her research led her to an unexpected source: a Mossad operator hiding under layers of civilian cover in New York. The man was rumored to train elite agents in private. Approaching him was a risk—but risk was Seraphina's constant companion.
The meeting was arranged in a dim, nondescript shooting range beneath a forgotten strip mall. The operator, a man named Avi, sized her up in silence. She didn't flinch.
"I need training," she said, voice cold and unyielding. "I'm not just another civilian."
Avi's eyes flicked to the obelisk peeking from her bag. Curiosity sparked.
"Why help you?" he asked.
She leaned in, voice dropping to a whisper. "Because I'm about to start a war, and I want to make sure I'm the one who wins."
Avi nodded slowly. "One condition."
"Name it."
"You train on my terms. No questions asked, no alliances formed. If you survive, you owe me nothing. If you fail..." His eyes hardened. "Don't fail."
She agreed, sealing the deal with a look that promised no mercy would be wasted.
The training was brutal. Days blurred into nights of gunfire, hand-to-hand combat, mental endurance drills. Seraphina didn't just learn to shoot; she became a weapon.
She trained for five nights. No mercy, no small talk.
She practiced in silence, firing clip after clip until the gun felt like an extension of her wrist. Headshots at 25 meters. Rapid draw drills. Tactical reloads in low light.
The Glock 19 she acquired was unregistered, modified, and flawless. Two clips, one silencer, three throwing knives, and a vial of neurotoxin joined her travel kit.
When her preparations were complete, she fabricated a narrative for her school: going to Puerto Rico for finding her something about her parents. They ate it up with the same laziness she always counted on. Bureaucrats were just sheep in khakis.
The dead man's switch—her final contingency—was an unseen thread weaving through every move.
She wasn't naïve enough to trust a single ally, no matter how loyal. The switch was a kill code buried in the obelisk's interface, rigged to trigger a chain reaction if she were compromised. It wasn't just self-preservation—it was control.
If captured, the crystal would unleash destruction so absolute that no enemy would dare follow. The underground city, its secrets, the Terrigen power—it would all burn before falling into wrong hands.
She wasn't just defending herself. She was protecting her throne.
Insurance.
With training complete, a hardened resolve burned in her veins. Puerto Rico was no longer a destination; it was a battlefield.
Then she packed. Travel attire: slim-fit black trousers, breathable silk blouse, Kevlar-lined jacket. No makeup. Just sharp cheekbones and colder intentions.
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[ Puerto Rico ]
Puerto Rico was warm, humid, deceptively cheerful.
San Juan International was a disappointment of human inefficiency. She noted every exit, every blind spot, every security camera. It was an open book and she rewrote every chapter as she walked through it.
Her hotel was not chosen for luxury, but for elevation, line of sight, and clientele with criminal records longer than her itinerary.
She set up her mobile command center within the hour. Laptops. Signal jammers. Burner phones. She mapped the underground city using public geological records, cross-referenced with ancient Taino mythology and Spanish colonization documents. Dead ends were frequent. She made them bleed before moving on.
The locals were less useful. Archaeologists too frightened to speak. Tourists too drunk to care. But patterns emerged.
Disappearances clustered in San Sebastián. Old rumors of spirits. Singing stones. Earthquakes with no tectonic origin. She found a forgotten microfiche report from 1987—a private expedition funded by a vanished oil company. One line caught her eye:
"At 3:43 PM, the mountain hummed. The stone beneath us sang. Then it opened."
Coordinates followed. She transferred them to her map.
She leaned back in the chair, eyes fixed on the red circle on the screen.
Outside, the sun was dying behind a sheet of gold. Her Glock lay beside the laptop, cleaned and loaded. The Obelisk sat secured in its case.
Seraphina smiled. Not soft. Not kind. A curve of the lips sharpened by intent.
"Every throne begins in the dirt," she whispered.
And she was ready to dig.
The queen was moving her pieces—and the game had only just begun.
To be continued...
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