Demonic Encounter

PROLOGUE: SUBTLE MARKING

Before she became the name whispered in vaults and behind encrypted firewalls...

Before her hands learned how to lie, cheat, and bleed in silence...

Amethyst Deltore was a girl who believed in right and wrong.

She was twenty-three, brilliant, and bound for greatness. A scholar with ink-stained fingers and sleepless eyes, hailed as the brightest mind her university had seen in a decade. Professors called her a genius. Her classmates called her untouchable. She had her future laid out like chess pieces—calculated, precise, inevitable.

Then one phone call cracked it all.

The orphanage—the only place that had ever felt like home—was on the brink of being shut down. No more donations. No government funding. Political chaos had dried the lifelines that once kept the children clothed, fed, and safe.

She returned that night, not as a prodigy, but as a girl with empty hands and a breaking heart.

She saw them: wide-eyed, hollow-cheeked children pressed to windows, clinging to toys held together by stitches and prayers. Some of them wore the same secondhand jackets she had once worn. Some already knew how to say goodbye without words.

That night, Amethyst made a promise.

Not to save the world. Just their world.

And salvation, she soon learned, didn't come dressed in angel's robes.

It wore black gloves, hacked surveillance, and whispered in codes.

She found them in the corners of the deep net and half-lit lounges of underground clubs—a collective of dropouts, prodigies, and misfits. Each one brilliant. Each one broken. Each one surviving by robbing the very architects of greed and corruption: corrupt billionaires, politicians, CEOs with blood-polished smiles.

They didn't steal because they needed to.

They stole because no one else dared to.

Amethyst became one of them—not by accident, but by choice.

She honed her gifts: sleight of hand, social manipulation, neural-mapped memory. She studied people the way surgeons studied anatomy—where to press, where to cut, where to bleed. She was elegant, lethal, untouchable.

Until the night that changed everything.

The ballroom was a world dipped in gold. The world's most powerful men and women gathered under chandeliers like vultures wearing diamonds. Amethyst had just pulled off her cleanest switch yet—a three-million-dollar pendant lifted without a single camera blinking—when something... shifted.

A silence, sharp as a blade, slid into her senses.

She looked up.

Across the rooftop of a tower adjacent to the ballroom stood a figure cloaked in shadow. Tall. Still. Watching. His eyes glowed like molten coal—burning, ancient, wrong. She blinked, and he was gone.

But in the echo of his absence, something whispered—not in her ear, but in her soul.

"The last of the hunters."

Amethyst didn't understand what it meant.

Not yet.

But something had noticed her. Marked her.

And from that night forward, fate would no longer let her disappear into the dark.

It would drag her into something deeper.

Darker.

And not even her clever hands would be enough to steal her way out of what was coming.