[ Some Time Later ]
The apartment was quiet—too quiet for someone who used to sleep through gunfire and wake up with knives in her hand.
Seraphina D'Angelo—no, Daisy Johnson, she corrected herself—stood by the window of her Brooklyn apartment. A cheap place with wooden floorboards and walls thin enough to hear a neighbor sneeze. It was nothing like the marble halls, crystal chandeliers, or ten-digit offshore accounts that once framed her reality. No servants here. No poisoned wine to test. No assassins lurking in the drapes.
Just her.
Alone.
Staring at a city that didn't know her name.
She sipped burnt coffee from a chipped mug and wondered, not for the first time, if this entire world was just a hallucination. A cruel one, built inside the fractured echo chamber of her dying mind. Maybe this wasn't real. Maybe she was back in that destroyed mansion which she rigged and her brain had conjured up a fantasy where she had a second chance.
Maybe this was her punishment.
Or maybe—just maybe—this was mercy disguised as mundanity.
Seraphina had clawed her way to the top of a criminal empire with bloodied hands and a smile sharp enough to slit throats. But now, the Queen of the Underworld lived on black coffee and knock-off Wi-Fi, wearing thrift store sweaters over a body still built to kill. It should've felt like a fall from grace. Instead, it felt like falling into something softer. Stranger.
And yet, she hadn't embraced the name Daisy. Not really. She'd recovered the memories of her previous life months ago—Daisy Johnson, hacker, orphan, SHIELD asset in another timeline—but still introduced herself as Seraphina. Out of habit? Out of pride? Or was it fear? Because the moment she let go of Seraphina, she would be forced to admit that the Queen was gone.
Gone. Dead. Buried.
Sometimes she whispered it to herself in the dark.
"Seraphina is dead."
But it always rang hollow.
Because Seraphina had never been allowed to die. She'd simply gone into hiding—deep within her psyche, lounging on a velvet throne in the recesses of her mind, legs crossed, waiting. Watching.
And Daisy… poor, sweet, reborn Daisy… was just starting to peel away the armor.
She set the mug down, ran a hand through her fire-red hair, no, now platinum blonde hair and looked at her reflection in the glass. Same face. Same eyes. Different soul? That was debatable. Because truth be told, she didn't feel like Daisy. Not the naive hacker from the orphanage, not the girl desperate for a name.
She still felt like Seraphina.
She still thought like Seraphina.
She still expected the world to bow.
Old habits died like traitors—slow, bloody, and screaming.
There was an arrogance in her bones, a righteousness that came from ruling shadows. She had ordered deaths with the same ease others ordered coffee. She had broken men just to prove she could. And yes, she had justified it. Always. Because power required cruelty. Because kindness was a weakness you buried with the rest of your mistakes.
She used to call it necessity.
Now she called it… addiction.
Power was her drug. Control, her high. She had manipulated lives, nations, and networks. And for what? For safety. For vengeance. For the illusion that if she controlled the world, it couldn't hurt her again.
But this world didn't know her.
This world didn't kneel.
This world… was free.
And it terrified her.
Because for the first time, Seraphina wasn't needed. There were no empires to run, no war councils to summon. No one to fear her. No one to worship her. No one to need her for anything more than paying rent on time.
And in that terrifying vacuum, Daisy had room to breathe.
She walked back to the couch and sat down, legs curled under her, pulling a tattered notebook onto her lap. No encryption. No blackmail notes. Just… thoughts. Raw. Honest. Or as close as she allowed.
Page after page was filled with conflict.
"I am still the Queen. But what is a Queen without her court?"
"Is this freedom, or exile?"
"I don't miss killing. I miss being necessary."
"I said I would live this life differently. But I still want to conquer. Is that so wrong?"
She laughed bitterly and flipped the page.
There, in handwriting messier than usual, were the words she kept avoiding:
"I don't know who I am."
Silence again. She hated silence. It gave the ghosts room to speak.
She closed the notebook and leaned back, eyes on the ceiling.
"I'm not Seraphina anymore," she said aloud. "Not really."
The words felt like betrayal.
But she had made a vow. When her memories return—when the Terrigen crystal had kissed her skin and made her more—she had promised herself she would use this life to be something more than what she had been.
Not a queen. Not a killer. Just… a person.
And maybe even happy.
She scoffed. "Happy-go-lucky. Yeah, right. I'd rather get shot."
Still, there was a shift inside her. Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just a small tectonic crack.
She didn't want to reform the underworld anymore. She didn't want to rule it.
She wanted to build something.
Something hers.
Not born from revenge, not soaked in blood. Just… born from curiosity. Ambition. Maybe even hope.
That's why she started the company. Not a front for illegal weapons, not a laundering operation. A real company. Cybersecurity. Data systems. Predictive threat models. Clean. Legal. Dangerous in a good way.
It was the first thing she'd done purely for herself. Not for power. Not for reputation.
Just because she wanted to.
The thought made her chest tighten, and she wasn't sure if it was pride or grief.
Maybe both.
Seraphina would've mocked her.
But Daisy? Daisy smiled.
She stood again and looked in the mirror. Tilted her head. Practiced a smile.
"Hi, I'm Daisy," she said.
The smile faltered. She rolled her eyes.
"Hi, I'm Sera," she tried instead. That one… felt better.
It wasn't Seraphina, but it wasn't Daisy either. It was a bridge. A compromise.
"Sera."
A name she might give to someone who loved her. If she ever let herself have that. A partner. A child. A family. The idea felt foreign. Dangerous. Exquisite.
If anyone ever got close enough to her heart, maybe they'd call her Sera. Not the Queen. Not the Hacker. Just… Sera.
Soft. Dangerous. New.
She smirked at her reflection.
"I'm still a queen," she murmured. "I just don't need to remind the world every five minutes."
She let that settle.
Then walked to her laptop.
Time to draft her new company's pitch deck. No blood. No threats. Just clean code, clean strategy, and maybe a subtle threat hidden in the footer. Old habits and all.
As she typed, she found herself humming.
The melody was familiar. Italian. A lullaby her mother used to hum before everything went to hell.
The Queen was dead.
But she'd left behind a kingdom of lessons.
And Daisy—Sera—was ready to build something better atop the ruins.
Not as a tyrant.
Not as a ghost.
But as a woman who remembered everything, and chose something new anyway.
The foundation was Seraphina.
The future… was Daisy.
And maybe, just maybe, this time she wouldn't burn it all down.
To be continued...
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[ POWER STONES AND REVIEWS PLS ]