CHAPTER IV - THE FIRST BLOOD
1695 Words
Six months after leaving Dante's training ground, Iris returned to the city that had stolen everything from her.
The skyline looked exactly as she remembered, but she no longer viewed it through the eyes of the frightened woman who had once fled in search for answers. Towering building reflected the afternoon sun, traffic flowed through crowded intersections, and thousands of strangers hurried along sidewalks without realizing that invisible wars were being fought around them.
For everyone else, it was another ordinary day. For Iris, every street carries another piece of the past.
She no longer walked with uncertainty.
Every reflection in a window, every parked vehicle, every stranger lingering a second too long—she noticed them all.
She automatically checked building entrances before stepping inside. She avoided predictable routes and changed direction without warning. Whenever she entered a café or restaurant, she chose seats that faced the exits. Dante's lessons had become instinct rather than habit.
She wasn't back for revenge alone.
She wanted the truth.
Before Iris left, Dante handed her a small notebook filled with names.
The notebook was old, its leather cover worn smooth big time. Several pages contained only initials, while others listed names followed by brief notes written in Dante's careful handwriting.
"They're not the people who ordered your parent's murder," he said. "They're the people who made it possible."
Iris looked at the first name.
A document forger.
The man had spent years creating false identities for powerful criminals. According to her father's journal, he had erased the identities of the assassins who attacked Iris's home.
His business appeared completely legitimate from the outside. He owned a small legal office specializing in immigration documents and identity verification. Clients entered and left throughout the day without suspecting what happened behind locked doors after business hours.
Iris watched him for three days.
She learned his routine without ever being seen. He arrived at exactly eight every morning.
He ate lunch alone.
Every evening he stayed long after his employees had gone home.
Twice each week, a black sedan briefly stopped outside his office without anyone entering the building.
Someone simply delivered sealed envelopes.
Someone else collected them later.
On the fourth night, she entered his office after everyone had gone home.
The lock yielded within seconds.
Darkness filled the room except for a single desk lamp still glowing inside his private office. The man looked up in surprise.
He reached for a hidden alarm beneath his desk.
Iris stopped his hand with a knife pressed against the wood.
"I don't want your money," she said.
"I want names."
At first, he denied everything.
His voice remained calm, insisting she had mistaken him for someone else.
Then Iris placed several old photographs on the desk.
One showed him meeting the leader of a private security company.
Another captured him accepting a briefcase outside an abandoned warehouse.
A third revealed him standing beside one of the men later identified as part of the team that had attacked her adoptive parent's home.
His confidence disappeared.
"They paid me to erase records," he admitted.
"I never knew who they were working for."
His hands trembled as he spoke.
Fear had finally replaced arrogance.
He revealed the location of a courier responsible for delivering encrypted messages between the assassins and their employer.
Iris memorized every detail before quietly leaving the office.
She never threatened him.
She didn't need to.
He already understood exactly how dangerous the people behind him truly were.
Iris left before the police arrived.
She never looked back.
The courier survived.
But by morning, every file inside his apartment had disappeared.
The rooms had been stripped with surgical precision.
Hard drives.
Documents.
Computers.
Even family photographs had vanished.
Someone had reached him first.
Only a broken coffee cup remained on the kitchen floor.
Someone else was always one step ahead.
The second target was different.
A corrupt customs officer.
For years, he had secretly allowed unregistered cargo to enter the country.
Official shipping manifests described food supplies, construction materials, or industrial equipment.
Hidden beneath those shipment were weapons, surveillance technology, and countless other items that never appeared on government records.
Iris followed the shipping routes until they led her to dozens of abandoned warehouses scattered across the harbor.
The docks remained active throughout the night
Cargo cranes moved endlessly above the water while trucks entered and existed secured areas without attracting attention.
Most were empty.
One wasn't.
Inside, she found crates filled with military equipment.
Assault rifles.
Explosives.
Encrypted communication devices.
Protective armor.
Everything had been carefully organized and labeled.
Every weapon carried the same symbol burned into its wooden packaging.
A black crown pierced by a single silver needle.
She had never seen the mark before.
Yet something about it felt familiar.
Almost intentional.
As though the symbol had existed for years while remaining invisible to everyone who wasn't meant to notice it.
When Iris confronted the customs officer, he laughed.
His laughter echoed across the empty warehouse.
"You still think this is about your parents?"
"They were only collateral."
The words struck harder than she expected.
Collateral.
As though the lives of the people who had raised her meant nothing.
Before Iris could question him further, a sniper's bullet shattered the window.
Glass exploded across the warehouse.
The office's body jerked backward before collapsing onto the concrete floor.
Dead.
The entire attack lasted less than a second.
Instinct took over.
Iris immediately moved behind cover, scanning rooftops and surrounding buildings exactly as Dante had taught her.
Nothing.
The sniper disappeared without leaving a trace.
Not even a second shot.
Only silence remained.
Iris searched the body.
The man's phone contained only one recent message.
"Loose ends must never speak."
No sender.
No number.
Only the symbol of the black crown.
The message had arrived only minutes before his death.
Whoever issued the order had been watching the conversation in real time.
The pattern continued.
Every person Iris tracked revealed another layer of conspiracy.
A banker confessed to laundering money through charitable foundations.
The donations had appeared completely legitimate on paper while secretly financing criminal operations across multiple countries.
A judge admitted to dismissing criminal cases in exchange for encrypted payments.
Every transaction had been disguised through shell companies that no investigator had ever connected together.
A former mercenary revealed that multiple syndicates had secretly shared intelligence for years through an unknown organization. Meetings occured in different countries.
Orders arrived through anonymous couriers.
No one ever met the true leadership.
None of them knew who truly led it.
Each believed someone else was giving the orders.
Each feared the same symbol.
The black crown.
Whenever Iris mentioned it, conversations immediately changed.
Voices became quieter.
Faces turned pale.
Even hardened criminals refused to speak further.
Some chose prison over answering another question.
Others simply disappeared before she could reach them again.
With every answer came another contradiction.
Her father had been described as the most powerful man in the criminal world.
Yet dozens of secret transactions had taken place without his knowledge.
Several alliances recorded in his journals had been altered and disappeared.
Entire operations had unfolded in secret while official records suggested they had never happened.
Someone had rewritten history while he was still alive.
The realization disturbed her more than anything else she had discovered.
If someone powerful enough had manipulated events behind her father's back, then his influence had never been as absolute as everyone believed.
Iris returned to the underground vault.
The familiar steel door opened once again, revealing the silent underground empire exactly as she had left it.
This time, she searched beyond the journals.
She examined every cabinet, every shelf, and every hidden compartment with greater patience than before.
Hours passed without success.
Then she noticed faint scratched beneath one of the storage shelves.
The shelf shifted slightly when pressure was applied.
Hidden beneath a removable shelf, she discovered a sealed envelope marked with a date.
It had been written only three days before her father's assassination.
Dust covered everything around it.
The envelope itself remained perfectly clean.
Someone had almost certainly overlooked it.
Inside was a handwritten letter.
The handwriting was unmistakably her father's.
"If you're reading this, then I was right."
"Someone has entered the council."
"Not to destroy it..."
"To replace it."
Iris frowned.
Council?
Her father had never mentioned any council.
Not once.
She searched every journal again.
Hours became another day.
Nothing.
The word appeared nowhere else.
Someone had deliberately removed every reference.
Then she noticed something unusual.
The pages weren't torn.
They had been carefully cut out with a razor.
Not years ago.
Recently.
The cuts remained clean and precise.
Several journals ended abruptly in the middle of sentences.
Entire sections had vanished without disturbing the surrounding pages.
Someone had entered the vault after her father's death.
Someone who knew exactly what they were looking for.
Whoever they were, they understood the vault almost as well as her father himself.
Iris finally understood.
The people who murdered her adoptive parents hadn't come searching for money.
They hadn't come for weapons.
They were searching for evidence their secret organization had ever existed.
Everything Iris had uncovered pointed to the same conclusion.
The assassins.
The corrupt officials.
The cartel leaders.
Even the mafia families.
None of them had been making the real decisions.
Someone hidden far above them had quietly guided every betrayal, every alliance, and every murder for years.
Her father's death hadn't created the war.
It had only removed rulers and complete control.
Iris folded the letter and slipped in into her jacket.
The underground vault suddenly felt much quieter than before.
Not because it was empty.
Because she now understood just how many truths had already been stolen from it.
For the first time since her journey began, she wasn't hunting her parents' killers anymore.
She was hunting the people who had manipulated everyone—including her father.
Somewhere in the shadows, a mastermind had been moving every piece across the board.
And for the first time, that unseen player had made a mistake.
Iris was still alive.
And she begun to see the pattern hidden beneath every lie.
- Writer
