[ Few Days Later ]
The location of her new empire mattered. Perception shaped reality, and Seraphina D'Angelo--no, Daisy Johnson understood better than anyone that an address could be armor—or a noose. Hell's Kitchen? Filthy, feral, and swarming with desperation. No place for a her to plant her flag. You didn't establish dominion from the gutter—you built from marble and steel, even if the foundation was faked.
So she bit down on her disdain and leased two sterile offices in Midtown Manhattan. Glass boxes suspended in sky, rented at a cost that would make lesser mortals weep into spreadsheets. Daisy didn't flinch. Power cost money, and power cloaked in legitimacy was the most seductive kind.
Her fingers bled ink from the contracts. She paid in advance. If this crumbled, it wouldn't be from default—it'd be because she burned it to the ground herself.
Then came the recruits.
She'd posted job listings masked in corporate-speak, written with the subtlety of a scalpel. Buzzwords for the sheep: data science, real-time analytics, decentralized systems. But behind the code and jargon was something simple and brutal—she needed minds sharp enough to shape her algorithm, but docile enough to be discarded if needed.
The results? Disappointing.
Most applicants were students from nearby universities. Bright-eyed. Mediocre. All fire, no steel. They dragged themselves into her office with dreams of bean bags and casual Fridays.
She watched them work for three days. The code was a mess. Sloppy logic. Inefficient queries. Like watching toddlers try to sculpt a cathedral with wet sand.
Daisy didn't scream. She didn't throw things.
She dismissed the worst with a smile sharp enough to cut glass, their contracts voided with a flick of her wrist. She was building a fortress, not a playground.
Then the inbox pinged.
David Lieberman.
The name clawed at her memory.
She opened the résumé. State University of New York. Assisted with various government IT projects. Married. Two children. Adequate skillset. Too modest for what she needed.
And yet...
The name rang bells. The kind that echoed down the corridors of the future.
David Lieberman.
Micro.
In another life—one she hadn't yet disrupted—he would become a digital ghost. NSA analyst turned whistleblower. Betrayed. Hunted. Frank Castle's reluctant ally. A man who endured humiliation, heartbreak, and surveillance with the patience of a saint and the eyes of a corpse.
What was he doing applying to her?
Curiosity twisted into calculation.
She arranged a meeting.
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The café was quaint. Midtown chic, overpriced, and buzzing with the shallow pulse of caffeine-addled executives.
David Lieberman showed up early. Of course he did.
She studied him through the window before entering. He looked older than twenty-six. Not in years—but in mileage. Lines etched from stress, not time. A man who carried too much, smiled too little.
She walked in like a storm in heels. No handshake.
"Mr. Lieberman," she began, sliding into the chair opposite. "Your résumé says you're twenty-six."
He blinked. "That's... correct."
"You look like you've been through two divorces, a war, and a mid-life crisis."
He laughed nervously. "Young kids. Not much sleep."
Daisy raised an eyebrow. "How many?"
"Second on the way. My wife's due in three months."
There it was.
Leverage.
A man with a growing family, desperate for stability. Loyal by necessity. Predictable. Tired. And very, very useful.
She leaned back, her eyes cold and amused.
"You've got experience. Not brilliance, not yet. But raw potential. Tell me, why this job?"
David hesitated. "Your listing... it was different. You talked about building an engine for data prediction. It reminded me of something I'd been sketching for years but never had the resources to build."
He looked almost embarrassed by his own sincerity.
"I thought maybe this was fate."
Daisy smiled. Not warmly. Like a cat playing with a bird.
"Oh, Mr. Lieberman. Nothing about me is fate. I'm a choice people make when they're tired of losing."
She hired him that evening.
----------------------------------------------------
David became her technical director. Not in title—titles were for shareholders and fools—but in function. He was the architect beneath her blueprint.
Maki Matsumoto handled the rest.
Her retainer, her blade in the shadows, her spy.
Maki had been saved from something hellish in Hell's Kitchen, and what emerged from that crucible was something Seraphina respected. Paranoid. Skilled. Dangerous.
She put Maki on contracts, legal loopholes, and counter-surveillance. Seraphina trained her personally, in between coding sessions and corporate espionage.
The girl learned fast. Faster than most.
With Maki watching her back and David building her vision, Seraphina turned to infrastructure.
Computers—rented. Servers—leased through backchannels. Every expense was temporary, deniable, disposable. She didn't believe in permanence, only results.
And the money? Scarce.
That $100,000 windfall from the NYPD bounty was evaporating. Office rent. Hardware. Student wages. Network fees. A thousand small cuts to the jugular.
So she lived simply—on the surface.
A second-hand car. Local diners. Cheap suits tailored to look expensive. No jewelry. No obvious wealth.
But in private, she trained in the basement of her office building. Target practice in the woods upstate. Every week, she carved time to keep her edge honed and her hands dangerous.
It paid off.
After weeks of sleepless nights, lines of code piled like bones, the algorithm was complete.
It wasn't beautiful. Not yet. But it worked.
She ran it once—on a test set—and watched it devour terabytes of data like a starving predator. Patterns emerged. Hidden trends. Predictive models no corporation had thought to build.
She'd created an oracle, fed not by magic, but by code.
Now came the hard part.
Selling it.
She had no network. No board of directors. No press.
She needed someone to believe.
Or... someone to manipulate.
Seraphina returned to what she did best: surveillance.
She stalked corporate targets like prey, hacking into security cameras and watching hours of footage. Executives in their glass towers, blind to the predator in the digital trees.
She found her mark.
She tracked his routine for two days, learned his patterns, studied his apartment layout, security flaws, eating habits, and browser history. Then she made her move.
No calls. No emails.
She climbed into his apartment through a second-story window, disarmed the motion sensors, and sat in the dark on his Italian leather sofa like a bond villainess.
Cue the tension.
To be continued...
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[ POWER STONES AND REVIEWS PLS ]