CHAPTER 34: THE WAREHOUSE
The warehouse sat at the edge of the Meatpacking District like a forgotten tooth.
Ben's source had been specific: the building on West Thirteenth, the one with the rusted loading dock and the security cameras that never seemed to point at anything important. Fisk's people stored evidence there—documents, files, the kind of paper trail that could bury a man if it ever saw daylight.
I knew I shouldn't go alone. Claire's voice in my head, Karen's warnings about Fisk's reach, the memory of Matt's measured advice during training. All of them pointing toward the same conclusion: this was a stupid decision.
I went anyway.
The streets were quiet this late—past midnight, the restaurants closed, the clubs winding down. I approached from the west, staying in shadows that felt too welcoming. The light sensitivity had gotten worse over the past week. Even the dim streetlamps made my eyes water.
Two guards at the main entrance. More inside, probably. I circled the building, found a service door with a padlock that looked newer than the rest of the structure. Important things usually had new locks.
The padlock came off with a crowbar I'd brought. The noise was louder than I'd hoped—metal screeching against metal—and I froze, listening. Footsteps inside. Someone coming to check.
The door opened. A guard stepped out.
Twelve of them.
I didn't know until I was inside, until the service corridor opened into the main warehouse floor and every instinct I had started screaming. Men emerging from between storage racks. Men dropping from a catwalk overhead. Men blocking the exits with military precision.
Twelve opponents. Trained. Armed. Radiating threat like heat from a furnace.
My power roared.
The enhancement hit me like a freight train. Not the moderate boost from three attackers, not even the significant surge from six elite Russians. This was something else entirely—a transformation that reshaped my entire being in the span of a heartbeat.
The world slowed. Every detail crystallized: the gun coming up in the nearest guard's hands, the tactical formation they were trying to establish, the weak points in their coordination. I could see all of it. Understand all of it. Respond to all of it with speed and strength that seemed impossible even as I was using them.
The first three went down before any of them could fire a shot.
I moved through them like water through stones. No wasted motion. No hesitation. Every strike precisely calibrated to neutralize without killing—a distinction that felt increasingly arbitrary as the fight stretched on. A throat punch here. A shattered kneecap there. The wet crunch of cartilage and bone beneath my enhanced fists.
Seven down. Five still standing.
The power pulsed through me, demanding more. Faster. Harder. End them.
Something was wrong.
My thoughts were thinning. The clear tactical awareness of moments ago was fading, replaced by something simpler. Purer. Just targets and responses. Just violence.
A guard came at me with a knife. I caught his wrist, twisted, heard something snap. He screamed. The sound was distant, irrelevant. Just noise. Just—
Stop.
I was on top of him. My hands were around his throat. He'd dropped the knife, was clawing at my fingers, eyes bulging with terror. Surrendered. He'd surrendered.
Let go.
The power didn't want to let go. The power wanted to squeeze until the struggling stopped, until the threat was eliminated, until there was nothing left but silence and victory.
This isn't me. This isn't—
I released him. Staggered back. The man collapsed, gasping, alive.
Twelve bodies on the warehouse floor. Some groaning. Some unconscious. Some staring at me with the kind of fear that would give them nightmares for years.
I ran.
The alley was six blocks away.
Far enough that no one would connect the noise to the warehouse. Far enough that I could collapse against a dumpster and shake apart without witnesses.
My hands trembled in front of me. I stared at them—these hands that had almost killed a man who'd already given up. The enhancement was fading, crashing, leaving me hollow and weak and terrified of what I'd almost become.
The berserker edge. I'd read about it in the fragments of knowledge that came with this body, these powers. The risk that too much enhancement would suppress higher brain functions, turn a fighter into a killing machine. I'd thought I understood.
I hadn't understood anything.
The power wasn't just strength. It was a hunger. A simplification of everything complex about being human—conscience, mercy, restraint—reduced to a single burning imperative: eliminate the threat.
I'd stopped this time. Barely. But what about next time? What about the time after that?
The crash hit harder than any before. Waves of exhaustion rolling through me, muscles cramping, vision swimming. I curled against the cold brick wall and let it happen. Nothing to do but ride it out.
The clouds overhead drifted past, visible in the narrow strip of sky between buildings. I watched them move, trying to remember what it felt like to be human. To have thoughts more complicated than target and kill and finish it.
I'd won. Twelve trained guards, and I'd beaten all of them.
But the thing that won—that brutal, efficient, merciless thing—hadn't felt like me.
I needed help. Claire. Matt. Someone who could help me understand what I was becoming before I lost myself entirely.
The crash deepened. I closed my eyes.
Tomorrow, I'd tell Claire everything. Tonight, I just had to survive.
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