Chapter 1 — Good Guys!
1996. The Bronx, New York City.
Inside a corner grocery store on Arthur Avenue, the Bronx.
A guy had just bolted out the front door with an armful of unpaid merchandise, a cocky grin still plastered across his face — when a gun appeared from nowhere and pressed hard against his temple.
"Whoa, whoa, bro. Easy. Don't shoot."
The man froze, hands shooting up. Out of the corner of his eye, the guy holding the gun was tall, sharp-featured, with a Roman nose and the kind of easy confidence that came from never losing a fight.
Luca Greco's expression was completely relaxed — almost bored. He tilted his head back toward the store entrance, motioning for the man to walk. Then he prodded him with the barrel all the way to the register. "You know how this works, right? You take something, you pay for it. You gonna settle up yourself, or do I break your hand and do it for you?"
The man blinked. "...That's it? This is about paying?"
He'd figured it was a rival gang thing. A debt. A territory beef. Something serious.
Not this.
"I'll pay, I'll pay right now." He frantically dug a crumpled wad of bills out of his jacket and shoved it toward Luca. "Here, man, that's everything I got."
"I told you to pay the store. Why are you handing it to me?"
"..."
The man stared at him. "You some kind of cop? What's your deal?"
Luca just smiled — warm on the surface, dead behind the eyes. The man swallowed hard, fished out his wallet, and laid a pile of bills and change on the counter under the cashier's utterly unfazed gaze.
"Keep the change," the man muttered.
"Next time you come in here," Luca said pleasantly, "you pay. This store is Lucchese Family territory. I catch you pulling this stunt again, you can save that money for your funeral. We clear?"
"Yeah. Crystal. Sorry, man."
"Get out."
The man scrambled out of the store, only exhaling once he'd put half a block between himself and that lunatic with the gun. He glanced back at the storefront and made a silent, solemn promise to himself: never again.
[You stopped a theft and defended the peace of the neighborhood.]
[+3 Skill Points]
In the back office of the store, Luca pocketed his phone — where the system notification had just pinged — and settled back into his chair across from Frank Calabrese, the shop's owner.
Frank was a heavyset Italian-American guy in his late fifties, the kind of man who'd been grinding in this city since before Luca was born. He wore the look of someone perpetually calculating whether the next headache was worth it.
"Luca." Frank leaned forward, clasping his hands on the desk. "I mean it — I don't know what I'd do without you checking in on this place. Since you scared off those freeloaders two months back, I've barely had a single incident. One. A whole month with one incident." He shook his head slowly. "That's a miracle on this block."
He'd been seriously considering selling the store. Move somewhere quiet. Maybe upstate. Get out of the city before the city got him.
Until Luca had walked in one afternoon and, without being asked, put the fear of God into a crew that had been systematically emptying his shelves. After that, word spread fast.
"I want to pay you," Frank said, his voice carrying the careful tone of a man who knew he was threading a needle. "I can't just keep letting you do this for nothing. It ain't right."
He'd brought this up before. Luca had refused. And that refusal, oddly enough, was what made Frank trust him — because if Luca had said yes, it meant he wanted the store. Wanted leverage. But the refusal meant maybe he just actually... liked doing this.
Which was somehow more unsettling, but in a way Frank had made peace with.
"Frank." Luca waved a hand. "We start talking money, we ruin what we've got. My old man raised me on the idea that how you treat your neighbors is how the neighborhood treats you back. I've kept that with me. You want to be my friend? Then drop it."
Frank studied him for a long moment. "You're a Sicilian kid from the Bronx. Don't give me fortune cookie wisdom."
But he judged people by what they did. And what Luca did, consistently, over the past two months, was show up. Kept the troublemakers off the block. Paid for his own coffee every single time. Never shook Frank down, never asked for a cut, never implied the store owed him anything beyond friendship.
More reliable than the NYPD, frankly. Those guys barely returned calls.
"Alright," Frank said finally, a slow smile breaking through. "No money talk. But I'm buying you dinner tonight. You pick the place, I'll book the table. We drink until neither of us remembers our own names."
Luca raised his coffee cup. "I'll hold you to that."
A prompt lit up on the panel in Luca's mind.
[Character Card Unlocked: Frank Calabrese][Frank Calabrese: D][Source: Original][Skills: None][Bond: Close Friend]
[LUCA GRECO — STATUS]
Skills: Firearms Mastery LV5 | Assassination Mastery LV6 | Combat Mastery LV5 | Driving Mastery LV4 | Fishing LV2
Skill Points: 5
Skill Fragments: 18
Luca had awakened the [Peace Ambassador] system about a year ago — right around the time he'd finally cracked the mystery of where he'd come from, and why certain memories felt like they belonged to someone else entirely.
The system was exactly what the name implied: defend the peace, earn rewards. The most common payout was Skill Points, used to level up any of his existing abilities.
The rarer currency was Ability Fragments. Collect enough, and you could unlock and learn the abilities from a Character Card.
Cards were ranked D through SSR. D-cards were basically worthless in terms of learnable skills. SSR cards were the crown jewels.
Luca didn't know many SSR-tier individuals yet. But Frank's nephew — the one who worked out on the West Coast, from what Frank had mentioned — that one had SSR written all over him.
Which was the real reason Luca had cultivated this friendship so carefully.
The bond had to reach a certain threshold before a Character Card's abilities could be unlocked. He'd been working on that threshold for two months.
He was looking forward to finally meeting the man.
After wrapping things up at the store, Luca stepped outside into the mid-afternoon Bronx air.
As he did, a tall figure passed him going the other direction — moving into the store without a word. Long wool overcoat. Small-brimmed hat pulled low. Sunglasses despite the overcast sky. Carrying a hard-sided case. The kind of face that wasn't blank so much as deliberately empty, like a man who'd long since learned not to leave expressions where people could read them.
The man moved like a shadow.
Luca watched him disappear inside without breaking stride.
Interesting.
He spent the next couple of hours making rounds — collecting on high-interest loans from a handful of degenerate gamblers who owed the Family money. Standard work. The kind of thing that paid the bills between bigger jobs.
On the drive back, he cut through Midtown, and his route took him past a building on the corner of a quieter block that most people walked by without a second glance.
The New York Continental Hotel.
Clean facade. Discreet signage. Doorman who looked like he could bench-press a sedan.
From the outside, it was nothing remarkable. From the inside — if you were the right kind of person — it was the only truly neutral ground in the entire criminal ecosystem of New York City. A one-stop sanctuary and service hub for professional assassins, operating under the strict governance of a body known as the High Table: twelve seats, twelve crime lords, absolute authority over every organization that played in the underground space.
The Continental was their church. The rules were their scripture.
And the rules were kept. Because the consequences of breaking them were absolute.
No business conducted on Continental grounds. No exceptions.
No exceptions, that is, for anyone except the man they called Baba Yaga — but that was a story for another day. For now, John Wick was still somewhere out there living a quiet life with a dog and a wife, and the world was temporarily safe from the particular brand of chaos he represented.
John Wick. Baba Yaga. The Boogeyman. You kill his dog, he kills your whole organization. The Bronx had no shortage of urban legends, but this one had receipts.
SSR card. Without question.
And then there was Wick's old associate — Caine. The blind one. The man who allegedly threw ten punches per second and made it look like a slow afternoon.
Almost certainly SSR-tier as well.
Both of them were on Luca's list.
He parked outside a bar on a side street in the South Bronx.
This place belonged to the Lucchese Family — specifically to one of its capos: Maurizio Conti. A capo sat at the middle tier of the Family's structure, above soldiers but below the administration. He commanded his own crew, ran his own earns, reported up the chain.
Luca had been operating as an associate — a peripheral member — for the past several years. He wasn't made. Not yet. But his track record was clean, his numbers were good, and he had something more valuable than either: his father's name still meant something in these halls.
His father, God rest him, had been a soldier in this Family his whole life. Went to prison when Luca was ten. Didn't survive the experience. Before he went in, he'd sat Luca down with Maurizio and said: take care of him.
Maurizio had.
The bar was dim and smelled like cigarettes and beer. Luca navigated through the room by memory and took the corner booth with the sightline to the entire floor.
Maurizio was already there — slightly overweight, mid-fifties, with the permanently tired look of a man who'd been doing this work long enough to lose his enthusiasm for drama. He watched Luca sit down, let him get settled, then looked at the pile of cash Luca set on the table.
He didn't count it. Just lifted it, felt the weight, and peeled off Luca's cut.
"You're late," Maurizio said.
"Stopped a shoplifter on Arthur Avenue."
Maurizio stared at him.
"...You stopped a shoplifter."
"Didn't feel right to drive past."
Maurizio pressed two fingers to his temple. "Luca. Luca. You know you're the only guy in organized crime in this city with a reputation for being a good neighbor, right? People call you. Civilians call you. To mediate disputes. You know what they call you out there?"
He'd heard the nicknames floating around the Bronx. The Peace Ambassador. The Mediator. The Conciliator. Small gangs brought their beefs to Luca because he actually resolved them without turning the block into a war zone. Shop owners paid their protection not just out of fear but because paying the Lucchese Family meant Luca actually showed up when something went wrong.
Which was — Maurizio had to admit, against every instinct he had — very good for business.
"I've been in this life for thirty years," he said slowly, "and this is the first time my crew's been popular."
He shook off the weirdness of that and reached into his jacket. "Which is part of why I wanted to talk to you."
He slid a photograph across the table. "How long have you been with me, Luca?"
"Twelve years. Since I was ten."
"Twelve years." Maurizio nodded, like he was calculating something. "You've put in the work. You've been loyal. You've been smart, even if your methods give me a headache. Point is — you've earned it. I'm ready to sponsor you. You handle this one job right, and I'll bring you in. Officially."
Made man. Full member.
Luca kept his expression neutral, but something tightened in his chest — the good kind. Once he was official, he had the full weight of the Family behind him. Anyone who wanted to move against him wasn't just moving against one guy — they were moving against the whole structure. The same protection the Continental's rules provided to its guests, but on the street.
That was step one.
Step two was moving up within the Family. Step three — eventually — was a seat somewhere near the High Table itself.
Defending the peace of the entire underworld? That still counted, right?
If you weren't powerful enough, your voice didn't carry far enough to matter.
"Who is he?" Luca asked, looking down at the photo.
Round face. Small eyes. The particular expression of a man who'd never been told no and had started to believe he never would be.
"Cain Jones." Maurizio's jaw tightened. "Out-of-town dealer. Figures he can run product in our territory because he's got someone backing him from out of state. Sent a couple guys to have a conversation with him last week. He laughed them out of the room."
"You want him dead?"
"I want him reasonable." Maurizio shrugged. "He's got outside connections — killing him becomes a whole thing. I just want to sit across a table from this guy and have a civilized conversation where he understands the geography of the situation. But he won't take the meeting." He looked at Luca. "He'll take it from you."
That was the other thing Luca's reputation bought him: even people who'd never met him had heard the name, and they tended to sit down.
"There's a reason I'm sending you specifically," Maurizio added. He stretched back in his chair and called across the bar: "Jimmy! Henry! Get over here."
Two guys at the bar set down their drinks and walked over.
Luca turned.
Both were white, lean, somewhere in their late thirties. One had the eyes of a guy who'd spent his whole life running angles. The other looked like he was already calculating whether the beer he'd just abandoned was worth going back for.
The panel in Luca's mind lit up.
[Character Card Discovered: Henry Hill (Unlocks Soon)][Henry Hill — C][Source: Goodfellas (1990)][Skill: Street Operator][Bond: Stranger]
[Character Card Discovered: James "Jimmy" Conway (Unlocks Soon)][Jimmy Conway — C][Source: Goodfellas (1990)][Skill: Greedy Bastard][Bond: Stranger]
Luca stared at the two men for a half-second longer than was polite.
Goodfellas. Of course it was.
Boss, you just handed me the two guys most likely to stab me in the back the moment something profitable showed up.
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