Seraphina D'Angelo didn't know she'd been tagged as a vigilante in Chief George's private dossier. Not that she cared. Labels were just the desperate attempts of lesser minds to categorize what they couldn't control. Let them try. She had no intention of playing by their rules.
Seraphina D'Angelo didn't wait for permission. She never had, and she wasn't about to start now.
As she sat across from Chief George, watching him chew over her presence like a man trying to decide if the wolf sitting at his table was tame or merely digesting dinner, she allowed herself a smirk. It wasn't arrogance. It was prophecy.
"We move tomorrow. I'll assign someone to protect Miss Johnson," Chief George finally said, his voice grave. The weight of authority. Or perhaps performance art. He sounded like a general pre-siege, only less competent.
Seraphina tilted her head, the crimson strands of her hair catching the overhead light like threads of fire. "How thoughtful. Will he cry when the bullets start flying or just play dead?"
She didn't wait for a response. Sarcasm was her love language.
The NYPD was laughable. A paper tiger with half its stripes rubbed off. They couldn't handle a jaywalker with a bad attitude, let alone the underground empire of Madame Gao. Seraphina had the faith of a pigeon in a lion's den when it came to police protection.
"Can I get a gun license, then?" she asked dryly, folding one leg over the other with deliberate elegance. "Because trusting my life to someone who wouldn't survive the opening montage of a B-movie is... optimistic."
George, to his credit, didn't bristle. That alone bumped him slightly above average in her mental ledger. He nodded, the kind of nod a man gives when he signs off on a parking permit, not a deadly weapon. "You'll have it within the week. I'll authorize immediate carry."
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[ Next Day ]
The next day, she ghosted the police escort entirely. No sirens. No blue uniforms. Just her, shadows, and purpose.
Hell's Kitchen by night was familiar. Feral. The kind of place that swallowed hope and spat out bodies. She moved through it like smoke—silent, suffocating, unseen.
This wasn't a Marvel comic. There was no teenage hero in tights swinging from rooftops with cheerful quips. This was war. And war didn't wear capes. It wore blood.
The target: a warehouse turned factory, a dystopian cathedral of sin. She had tracked the shipments, the routes, the guards. This was no corner-shop drug den. This was industrial.
Chief George, for once, played it smart. He didn't risk the local precinct—what she privately called "First To Die PD." Instead, he called in backup from across the boroughs. Five hundred officers, moved like chess pieces around the site.
Officer Brett Mahoney, poor soul, was given an all-expenses-paid vacation. Seraphina suspected it was more a survival tactic than a reward.
When night fell, the show began. A blind man stepped out, bag in hand, calm as a saint. But Seraphina had seen saints die. Calm was no indicator of innocence.
"Take him," George barked. The blind man was swarmed. The bag held three bricks of refined product.
Powdered poison.
"Case cracked," George declared. The smugness in his tone made Seraphina arch a brow. "Premature," she muttered under her breath.
The assault began. Snipers took the guards. Officers stormed the gates. The inside was chaos—a grotesque assembly line manned by the blind, overseen by brutes.
Gunfire. Screams. Blood. Seraphina didn't flinch.
She watched it all unfold from a nearby rooftop, crouched like a gargoyle in designer silk. The factory fell, slowly, but it fell. Over 130 gang members arrested or dead. 7,000 catties of product seized.
But the queen? Madame Gao?
Gone.
A ninja ghost, vanishing like breath on glass. The woman was a myth made flesh, and she played the long game.
The aftermath was worse.
The public learned the truth: the workers had been blinded—some from birth, some by design. A humanitarian nightmare masked as enterprise. The city howled. Hashtags bloomed. Talk shows bled performative tears.
Even Matt Murdock, still a law student, was harassed by well-meaning classmates and confused activists. Somewhere in Queens, a retired blind swordsman was nearly kidnapped by social workers and forced into five days of unsolicited therapy and foot rubs. He eventually escaped through a laundry chute.
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[ Two Weeks Later ]
Two weeks later, Seraphina sat across from George again. This time, the balance had shifted.
He handed her a black card and a license. The gun permit glinted. The card? Loaded with $100,000.
"Compensation," George said quietly. "And... gratitude."
Seraphina took it, inspecting both like she was choosing weapons at a gala. "And here I thought NYPD had budget cuts."
George exhaled. "You were right about Gao. She slipped away. But you gave us something."
"I always do," she replied.
That night, she dined at the George residence. The food was pleasant. The company—sincere. But Seraphina lived in the spaces between trust. She left with a smile and a list of vulnerabilities. Not to exploit. Yet.
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[ Next Day ]
The next day, a call came.
Angela. Breathless. Eager.
"You're not going to believe this. The school's not being demolished anymore. United Construction's entire financial chain snapped. Lawsuits everywhere. They paid the damages. The whole thing's cancelled."
Seraphina sipped her espresso. "Hmm. Sounds like divine intervention."
"Or karma," Angela offered.
"Darling," Seraphina drawled, "karma wears heels and carries a silenced pistol."
United Construction, a shell company for Gao's investments, had imploded overnight. The criminal ecosystem was eating itself. Greedy school administrators, once smug and untouchable, were now probably curled under desks with calculators and unpaid invoices.
And now, she had capital.
No more scraping. No more anonymity. Seraphina D'Angelo was about to introduce herself to the world—not as a shadow, but as a sun.
Real estate? Too volatile. And with the 2007 subprime crash incoming, it was a fool's playground.
But data? Data was eternal.
She understood patterns. Chaos. Numbers. The very language of power. And while the world still played checkers, she was about to write the code for chess.
Big Data. The world hadn't even coined the term yet. But she would.
She opened her laptop, fingers dancing over the keys. Not out of habit. Out of purpose.
The company name was obvious. A mirror. A monument.
S.E.R.A.P.H. Data Analytics Co., Ltd.
Strategic Extraction, Retrieval, and Analysis of Predictive Heuristics.
It wasn't just a company. It was prophecy.
Seraphina D'Angelo would own the future. One algorithm at a time.
To be continued...
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[ POWER STONES AND REVIEWS PLS ]