Can't get enough? Why not read ahead?
Visit my P@tr3on or K0‑fi ''Isopuff'' page and unlock +20 extra chapters and daily updates!
Your support means the world to me. Check it out and enjoy the story even more!
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
"If you are screwing with me right now," Tony Stark said, his voice dropping to a jagged whisper that was sharp enough to slice straight through solid steel, "I promise you, your death is going to be slow. It's going to be painful. And it is going to be unbelievably, catastrophically messy."
The threat didn't just hang in the air; it completely suffocated it. For several long, agonizing seconds, Tony did nothing but stare a hole straight through Simon Boren. His white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel tightened so hard the carbon fiber practically cried out for mercy.
Simon, fucking terrified but determined to keep his cool, looked entirely unfazed by the promise of bodily harm. He casually brushed an imaginary speck of dust off the sleeve of his expensive, tailored suit, a smug, self-satisfied grin slowly returning to his face.
"Look, Stark, I know exactly what kind of radioactive information I'm sitting on," Simon replied smoothly, leaning back into the leather passenger seat. "So... are we actually going to negotiate here in the hypercar, or would you prefer somewhere a little more private?"
*SCREECH!*
Tony's answer didn't come in words. It came in raw, unadulterated horsepower.
He slammed his foot flat against the accelerator, and the hypercar roared to life, its tires screaming bloody murder against the dark pavement. The vehicle shot forward into the night like a heat-seeking missile.
Within seconds, the heavy late-night traffic on the highway became nothing more than stationary obstacles for Tony to slice through. He weaved between lanes at entirely reckless speeds, turning the open desert highway into his own personal, high-stakes racetrack.
But this insane speed wasn't just a physical outlet for the rage currently bubbling over in Tony's chest. It was entirely deliberate.
If this stranger's story contained even a microscopic fragment of truth, then Tony wasn't just looking at a tragic family mystery anymore. He was staring down the barrel of a massive, deep-state conspiracy. It meant decades of hidden files, stolen lives, and buried truths that some of the most dangerous, powerful people on the planet had spent half a century keeping in the dark. For a conversation that heavy, standard privacy wasn't just an option. It was mandatory.
Fortunately, there were very few places on Earth more heavily fortified or secure than Tony Stark's legendary Malibu estate. Perched precariously on the edge of a jagged cliff overlooking the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean, the sprawling mansion wasn't just a home for a billionaire playboy. It was an absolute fortress disguised as high-end luxury, locked down by some of the most sophisticated, bleeding-edge security algorithms ever coded. If the real answers to his parents' deaths actually existed out there, this was the only place safe enough to uncover them.
"Wow," Simon muttered, stepping out of the car as the butterfly doors hissed upward. He let out a low, impressed whistle as he took in the sheer, overwhelming scale of the cliffside estate. "I'm not going to lie, I honestly never thought I'd snag an official invitation to the Stark residence." He looked around at the sleek architecture with an appreciative grin. "Seriously, just standing here is enough bragging rights to last me a lifetime."
"Cut the crap," Tony snapped, his heavy boots clacking against the polished stone floor as he stormed past Simon without even slowing down. "You aren't a guest here."
He strode directly toward the heavy, reinforced glass doors that sealed off his private underground workshop. "The only reason you're currently inside my property line is because this happens to be the most secure room on the face of the planet. I don't have the patience, or the desire, to listen to your running commentary."
Tony stopped dead in his tracks right in front of the lab entrance, turning around so fast his jacket whipped through the air. His dark, intense eyes locked onto Simon like a pair of laser sights. "Let's get right to it. Show me the evidence."
"Of course, of course," Simon said, following him into the lab without missing a single beat. "That's exactly why I'm here."
The two men stepped into the pristine, hyper-futuristic laboratory, where countless glowing holographic displays hovered in the air, and cutting-edge machinery stood perfectly synchronized, waiting for a command.
"But before we start opening up classified files and digging through memories," Simon continued, his tone shifting into something casually business-like, "I think we should probably settle the financial side of this little arrangement."
Tony's expression remained an unreadable wall of cold stone. "What do you want?"
"My payment."
"Name your price," Tony shot back instantly.
To a man like Tony Stark, money had long since stopped feeling like actual currency. It was just a string of digital numbers shuffling from one offshore bank account to another. It held zero emotional value.
Simon studied the billionaire's face carefully, trying to gauge just how desperate the man was. Then, he took a deep breath and made his ultimate play.
"One billion dollars."
The massive number landed heavily in the space between them like a live grenade. Simon wasn't expecting the sheer size of the amount to shock a guy who built weapon empires; the Stark fortune could swallow a billion-dollar hit without Tony's accounting department even blinking. What Simon actually wanted to see was the look in Tony's eyes; he needed to know whether the genius believed the truth about his parents was worth the price.
Tony didn't hesitate for a single millisecond. He didn't blink, he didn't twitch, and his expression didn't even soften.
"Done."
For a split second, a sharp stab of pure regret hit Simon right in the gut. 'Damn it!' he thought, practically screaming at himself internally. 'I should have asked for two billion! The guy didn't even flinch.'
"Well?" Tony snapped, his voice echoing off the high-tech walls of the lab. "What are you waiting for, a drumroll? Every single second you stand there playing mute is another second of my time you're wasting."
The smug amusement instantly vanished from Simon's face. He took a slow, deep breath, bracing himself, and finally let the real bombshell drop.
"Your parents didn't die in an accident, Stark."
The entire room went dead silent, the soft hum of the holographic computers fading into the background.
"That crash on the side of the road?" Simon continued, his voice dropping into a serious, uncharacteristic gravity. "It wasn't some tragic mechanical failure. It wasn't a bad turn. It was a perfectly planned operation. A targeted, cold-blooded execution."
Tony didn't blow up. He didn't scream. In fact, he didn't react outwardly at all. Instead, his entire expression became eerily, terrifyingly still, every last trace of his usual expressive emotion disappearing behind a heavy mask of absolute, frozen control.
"Who ordered it?" Tony asked. His voice was calm. Entirely too calm. It was the kind of quiet that usually came right before a Category 5 hurricane. "And what was the actual objective?"
"Hydra," Simon answered instantly, not wanting to stretch Tony's fuse any longer. "The mission was incredibly simple: eliminate Howard and Maria Stark, and recover a highly specific asset."
Tony's eyes narrowed into dangerous slits. "What asset?"
"The Super Soldier Serum," Simon said, holding the billionaire's death-stare without backing down. "The exact version your father successfully managed to recreate."
A heavy, oppressive silence fell over the laboratory, thick enough to suffocate. Then, Tony spoke again, his voice dangerously low.
"Give me one good reason," he said quietly, "why I shouldn't drag you by your expensive collar to the edge of this cliff and hurl you straight into the ocean for making up a twisted story like that."
The threat wasn't dramatic or loud. It was deadpan, and that was exactly what made a shiver run down Simon's spine. He knew Tony meant every single word.
"Because I'm not guessing, Stark," Simon replied, quickly folding his arms and laying out his golden credentials before things got physical. "Look, everyone in the world knows you as the genius who snagged the Arms-Arms Fruit. But you aren't the only guy on this planet who decided to invest in Devil Fruits."
Tony remained perfectly still, listening.
"I possess the power of the Memo-Memo Fruit," Simon explained, tapping the side of his own head with a finger. "I can extract memories like film strips. I can separate them, edit them, erase them, and totally reconstruct them. If the human brain is a computer, then I'm the high-end technician people call when they need the hard drive permanently wiped clean."
A small, arrogant hint of professional pride slipped back into Simon's voice. "Half the ultra-powerful people in this city have hired me at some point to deal with their most sensitive, dangerous information."
He took another careful step forward, making sure his hands were completely visible. "Two weeks ago, a very high-profile client brought someone into my secret facility."
Tony's eyes sharpened to a point. "A very important someone."
"Exactly. My job was supposed to be simple: complete memory erasure. Strip away everything he'd ever known, delete his past, and rebuild his entire behavioral profile from scratch. Total brainwash."
Tony was a certified genius; it didn't take him more than a second to connect the dots. "And while you were digging around inside this person's head," Tony said, his voice tightening, "you stumbled onto evidence completely related to my parents' deaths."
"Bullseye," Simon nodded. "Specifically... I accidentally uncovered the killer's exact memories."
The atmosphere inside the massive laboratory instantly dropped several degrees, the air practically freezing over. Tony's jaw tightened, the muscles clenching hard. Still, Simon could see the thick wall of skepticism in the billionaire's eyes. A man like Tony Stark, who literally lived by data and science, wasn't just going to accept a life-altering claim like this without hard, undeniable proof.
"Look," Simon said, throwing his hands up in a peaceful gesture. "If you want direct, 100% verification right now, I can give it to you."
Tony's left eyebrow twitched. "Meaning what?"
"I can actually use my ability to temporarily transfer the memory itself directly to you. Like a digital recording. You'll experience the whole event firsthand, seeing it exactly as it went down."
For the first time all evening, Tony actually let out a laugh. It was a short, bitter, entirely humorless sound.
"Let me get this completely straight," Tony said, pointing a rigid finger at Simon. "You just spent the last five minutes bragging to me that your entire professional career revolves around altering and faking people's memories."
The billionaire leaned forward, his eyes turning to steel. "And now you're casually asking me to let you poke your fingers around inside my brain? What exact part of that pitch sounds trustworthy to you?"
Simon paused, processing the logic. "Okay. Fair point."
Without missing a beat, Simon reached deep into his inner jacket pocket. "Luckily for both of us, I came prepared for the skepticism."
He pulled out a thick, heavy, bound manuscript and placed it carefully onto the glass console right between them. "I already went ahead and manually converted the raw memory data into a visual format."
Tony frowned, staring down at the thick book. "A visual format?"
"Think of it as a highly detailed storyboard," Simon said, sliding the heavy volume across the smooth table. "Every single detail from the memory is perfectly preserved inside."
Tony didn't hesitate any further; he immediately snatched the manuscript off the table.
The exact moment he flipped open the very first page, the entire room fell into a suffocating, dead silence. Page after page turned rapidly beneath his fingers. Tony's eyes darted frantically across the detailed illustrations, taking in the images. Then, suddenly, his frantic movements slowed down.
The color gradually drained from Tony's face, leaving him looking ghostly white.
Each beautifully drawn frame depicted Howard and Maria Stark's final moments on Earth with horrifying, agonizing precision. Their luxury vehicle being violently intercepted. The brutal attack. The desperate struggle for survival. The severe injuries. The final, merciless killing blow. Nothing was left out, and nothing was softened.
Every single frame was documented with an almost clinical, chilling accuracy, as if the artist had been standing only a few feet away from the concrete, watching the murder happen in real-time.
No. It was worse than that. The perspective wasn't from a bystander standing nearby. It was drawn directly through the killer's own eyes.
The sheer level of raw detail was absolutely impossible to fake. The specific vehicle damage, the panicked facial expressions of his parents, the exact positioning of every violent movement.
And right there, standing at the absolute center of the tragedy, was the man responsible. The executioner, his face had been drawn with absolute, crystal-clear, terrifying precision.
"Who is he?" Tony's voice came out rough, a dangerous cocktail of raw grief, disbelief, and a simmering, toxic rage trembling beneath every single word. His eyes remained absolutely glued to the illustrated face of the killer.
The long, messy, dark hair. The hard, unyielding jawline. The piercing, soulless stare. Something about the man's features tugged violently at the very back of Tony's mind. A strange, deeply unsettling sense of familiarity lingered there, like a half-forgotten nightmare that refused to fully surface.
Simon hesitated for a fraction of a second, feeling the sudden drop in air pressure inside the room. Then, he decided it was time to drop the second nuclear bomb.
"You're really not going to like the answer," Simon warned quietly.
Tony slowly lifted his head, his gaze burning right through him. "Try me."
Simon exhaled a long breath. "The man in those memories is Bucky Barnes."
The entire workshop seemed to instantly freeze over.
"Former member of the legendary Howling Commandos," Simon pressed on, speaking quickly before the billionaire could completely lose his mind. "A highly decorated World War II hero. And Steve Rogers' absolute closest friend."
For the very first time since he'd opened the booklet, Tony's stoic expression completely cracked. Pure, unadulterated disbelief flashed across his face.
Simon didn't give him a single second to interrupt. In a rapid, intense summary, he laid out every single dark secret he had uncovered from the memory stream. He told Tony about Bucky's tragic fall from the train during the war, his miracle survival, and the ruthless Hydra recovery operation that had dragged his broken body out of the snow.
He explained how they replaced his missing arm with a terrifying cybernetic prosthetic, and detailed the decades of brutal brainwashing, memory tampering, and psychological conditioning that had systematically shattered a celebrated American hero, rebuilding him into the perfect, unfeeling assassin.
A weapon. A phantom. A human machine built entirely for murder.
When Simon finally finished speaking, a heavy, suffocating silence filled the high-tech laboratory.
Then, Tony laughed. It wasn't a sound of amusement or humor. It sounded more like a piece of glass dropping onto concrete and shattering into a million jagged pieces.
"So, let me make sure I've got this completely straight," Tony said, his voice dropping into a low, terrifying growl as he stood up slowly from his chair. "You honestly expect me to believe that Captain America's childhood best friend personally murdered my parents? Because he somehow survived falling off a snowy mountain?"
He took a menacing step forward, his eyes locked onto Simon. "And then he got picked up by a rogue Nazi offshoot?"
Another heavy step. "And then he spent the next seventy years getting rebuilt into some kind of high-tech cybernetic killing machine?"
*BANG!*
Tony slammed the manuscript down onto the glass desk hard enough to rattle the surrounding holographic equipment.
"And that's not even the craziest part of this little fairytale," Tony yelled, pointing a rigid, shaking finger at the illustrated pages. "You're also casually telling me that this guy is somehow still alive, perfectly operational, and running around out there today? Do you have any actual idea how completely insane that sounds?"
"Of course I do!" Simon shot back, refusing to back down. For the first time since they'd met, his own voice rose to match Tony's explosive intensity. "Because it sounded completely insane to me, too!"
The two men stood chest-to-chest, staring each other down in the glowing light of the lab.
"But think about it logically for a second, Stark," Simon pressed, his chest heaving as he fought for his billion-dollar payload. "If I wanted to pull a scam on a guy with your endless resources and genius intellect, would I seriously invent a story this ridiculous?"
Tony didn't say a word, his jaw clenching tightly.
"You have access to the absolute best technology on the planet," Simon argued, spreading his hands wide. "The best databases, the smartest AI, the top analysts in the world. Every single thing I just told you can be tracked and checked. Run the numbers. Follow the historical records. Verify every single detail yourself. If I'm lying to you, you'll find out within a couple of hours."
The raw confidence in Simon's voice wasn't forced at all, and that was exactly what bothered Tony the most. Liars usually try to make their fabrications sound neat, clean, and easily believable. This story sounded completely, utterly impossible. Yet Simon was willingly betting a billion dollars, and his literal life, that it was the absolute truth.
Not long afterward, Simon Boren was swiftly escorted off the massive cliffside property, the heavy security gates clicking shut behind him.
A deep, heavy, and oppressive silence settled right back over the Malibu workshop. Tony remained seated, completely frozen in front of his massive primary workstation, doing nothing but staring at the hand-drawn image of the man who had torn his family apart.
From a purely logical standpoint, the chances of Simon faking something like this were incredibly low. No con artist with a functioning brain cell would ever target Tony Stark using a lie that could be easily dismantled by a few quick database searches. The story was simply too bizarre, too specific, and way too easy to verify, which was exactly why it was so terrifyingly difficult to just dismiss as a prank.
Still, Tony Stark wasn't the type of guy to accept life-altering, universe-shattering revelations on blind faith alone. He needed facts. He needed cold, objective, undeniable proof.
"Jarvis," Tony called out, his voice cutting cleanly through the heavy darkness of the room.
"Yes, sir?" the calm, refined AI voice replied instantly.
"Run a full, unrestricted background investigation on Simon Boren. I want you to cross-reference his biometric records with the Home of the Devil Fruits databases. Verify his identity, his past certifications, and his exact claimed abilities."
A few agonizing moments ticked by before Jarvis responded. "Sir, the investigation is officially complete."
Tony's eyes never left the drawing of the dark-haired assassin. "Give it to me."
"The subject's biological profile fully confirms he is the registered, authentic user of the Memo-Memo Fruit," Jarvis reported smoothly. "His entire professional history, high-tier certifications, and identity records have all been completely authenticated through the primary Home of the Devil Fruits databases. No discrepancies or red flags have been detected."
Tony's jaw tightened so hard it ached. The very last thread of comforting, easy skepticism had just snapped.
Slowly, his intense gaze shifted back toward the chilling illustration of the metal-armed monster, the ghost called Bucky Barnes. The man who had taken Howard and Maria Stark away from him.
"Jarvis," Tony said, his voice completely hollow, ice-cold, and deadly quiet.
"Yes, sir?"
"Initiate a Level Four intrusion protocol."
A brief, heavy pause echoed through the system, as if even the advanced AI was stunned by the command. "Target, sir?"
Tony's eyes burned with a dangerous, dark fury. "S.H.I.E.L.D."
"Bypass their external security layers immediately," Tony ordered, his fingers flying across a holographic keyboard as the screens around him began lighting up one by one in brilliant blues and whites. "I want every single encrypted file connected to the Howling Commandos."
More massive screens flickered to life, bathing the dark workshop in a cold glow.
"Project Rebirth," Tony barked out, as massive streams of classified data began flooding across the room. "And the Winter Soldier. Find it all, Jarvis."
Tony leaned forward in his chair, the glowing blue light reflecting in his eyes. There was only one thing left in the entire world that mattered to him now.
The truth.
And he was going to burn down whatever it took to get it.
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
Next Chapter: Some Debts Can Only Be Paid in Blood
Next Next Chapter: Iron Man Storms the S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Black Site
Next Next Next Chapter: Iron Man VS The Winter Soldier
Visit my P@tr3on or K0‑fi ''Isopuff'' page and unlock +20 extra chapters and daily updates!