1:30 am - Unknown - January 5th





The gun fired once, a quiet thump piercing through the driver's side window. The driver's head landed on the horn. I could hear the passenger scrambling with the gun he had holstered. Too late, a second shot, as quiet as the first.





Whoever this was, was alone and was very good at what they do. Unhurried. Slow. Deliberate.





He popped the trunk. Footsteps approached. Boots crunching in the gravel. Fuck, this is it. The trunk slowly creaked open. A silhouette loomed over me. A man or maybe a shadow wearing a man's skin. He never said a word as he cut me loose. Jumping out of the makeshift grave I was just in, I peered with carousel eyes through the wet, dark void.







Check the driver. He said with a hushed, relaxed tone. He is wearing something on his finger that I think may interest you. I'm not quite sure what it means but I'm confident that you will. And burn that fucking car. The last words he said to me before vanishing into the hushed and spectral fog.





You know that you could fucking help me? I snapped. To no avail, he was already gone. Whether he helped me out of that trunk or not, the guy is a fucking asshole.





I rummaged through the trunk for something that I could use just in case either of these two had managed to survive the assassin's bullet. I gripped the edges of the worn and frayed floor mat and lifted, revealing the hidden underbelly of the trunk. Inside, a tire iron, its surface rough and scarred like the man currently wielding it. This will do, I thought to myself as I gripped the cold metal.





The car sat about five feet away from a fading street lamp. I kept my steps as light as I could as I inched towards the driver side door. They were still too loud in the silence. The driver's door creaked on its hinges. The weight of the night felt so heavy.





I didn't know either of these two men but I knew then, that I'd never forget their faces. Death had found them mid-sentence. I hesitated before peeking through the broken window. Their lifeless expressions, forever frozen in some empty room, in the mind palace of a deranged man.





I noticed it immediately. I nudged the door open and leaned in. I could still smell the gunpowder. Lives lived on the edge more often than not, lead to this exact moment, or something close to it. The death race pushes on.





There was that ring again. It's following me now like a shadow in an unrelenting static. A twisted lullaby that never stops playing. I reached in and grabbed the ring off of his finger, he wouldn't be needing it anymore. I slid it into my jacket pocket. It was coming with me. I searched the rest of the car looking for anything useful, something, anything to point me in the direction of who these men work for. What it was they wanted.





There's nothing here. Nothing besides the ring. With the people that I know and the circles that I run in, I'll piece this together.





But first things first - I have to get rid of this fucking car.















7:03 am - Brooklyn, New York - February 17th







It was just after seven when I found myself back in reality, back in the physical existence. The sun settled somewhere just behind the Brooklyn Bridge. The biting chill of the mid winter cut through my bones like a serrated blade. The street lights kicked on in unison. The junk was finally wearing off and I could tell by the way my mind raced, that I hadn't taken my medicines in at least a week. I hadn't slept in almost forty eight hours. My brain and body were running on fumes and the paranoia and psychosis were locking in.





My life's beginning to separate from reality. Some sick and twisted spiral that never has an end. The sleepwalking. The hallucinations. The… disassociation. It's happening again - or it never went away. My broken mind needs to escape, but when it does, I lose time.





Stay awake, Matthias, goddammit. I urge myself through the cacophony of sound tearing through my head like shards of glass. Better than the alternative. Better than the nightmares.





I reached for my phone to check the date and time. I know that I have a meeting with Juri, at The Plaza in Manhattan, tomorrow morning. At least according to the text he sent me two days ago. Suspicion, unease, defensiveness. I wear that tension like body armor lately and I don't trust anybody because of it.





Juri Stanislav was a man who had seen enough bad and done enough bad to have worked his way up through the Albanian Mafia. A man who had taken a liking to me when we met ten years ago at an unsanctioned bare knuckle fight in a dive bar in Glasgow. I guess he appreciated my ruthlessness and disdain for three letter government agencies and my general malaise for law enforcement as a whole. I helped him fight his way out of the bar when a group of Scotland's finest caught wind that he was in town. While there are a lot of adjectives that you could use to describe me, no one could say that I wasn't faithful to the ones I cared about most.





Juri became a father figure to me. Someone he could take under his wing. His suits were always too sharp for the places we frequented but the jagged scar that cut diagonal across his right cheek and his vacant, scheming eyes told the rest of the room that he belonged there.





Juri had always been a money man. A savant with numbers who could also beat you to death with his bare hands. You didn't cheat Juri - you wouldn't even try. That's why his nickname was the Hangman, and as we know, you can't cheat the Hangman.





Now he was my money man. He helped get the Syndicate off the ground, and he is there for me any time that the feds get close and that I have to move it - and it was time to move it again. You can't stay in one place too long. That's rule number one. Six months to a year. That's usually all the time that we get.





I called him weeks ago and told him that I had found our next location. An abandoned World War two missile silo that had been shutdown and decommissioned right after the cold war. It was located just outside of Des Moines. Some pompous silicon valley tech bro with more money than God bought the place in 2018 and turned it into an AirBNB for history buffs and college kids. He didn't want to continue being responsible for the upkeep - or maybe he just got bored. Either way it was on the market and I had to have it.





It was perfect for what I wanted it for. Unless you knew where to look, you'd never know it was there. Selling point number one. Fifteen thousand square feet and it's mostly all below the surface. Selling point number two. Enough room to turn it into a training facility. Sold.





Juri had assured me that it was a done deal. Just a matter of paperwork. We couldn't have the building in either of our names obviously so the building gets purchased through a trust Juri set up out of Naples, Florida. It would take months if not years to sift through the lease agreements and the legal jargon and if you happened to do that, it would still be like finding a needle in a haystack to link it to either one of us.





Juri is invaluable to me. One of these days I may tell him. Until then, I'm in Brooklyn with no idea how I got here and all I really fucking want to do is get inside somewhere that has heat and a microwave. I'm fucking starving.



















When a prophet speaks, you turn away. Back to your circus. Your mindless entertainment. Your dull existence. You don't crave truth, only comfort. And that's why I don't plead, why I don't beg for you to follow me. Syn points through the camera.





Matthias Syn doesn't gather disciples from the herd because that is below me. Instead, I reach my fist out to those simply bold enough to listen.





My ideology is as ambitious as it is arrogant and I don't shy away from that. I create my own values. I cultivate my own virtues. Unique, precise and absolutely unapologetic. There is no poetic delusion. No cosmic reward. No divine judgement to keep you in line, to keep you chained to fear.





I offer you only this: Freedom.





Freedom from a world that cares more about Netflix than art. Freedom from a life lived on your knees, laughing through chemical smiles.





You have created a world where no one is truly alive. Shackled by self-imposed chains. Passively drifting through the currents of a decaying society. I will make the obedient uneasy. I impose my will upon reality, upon existence. Shaping myself. Shaping my world.





No pity.





No sympathy.





My promise is transformation, revolution, unrelenting ascent.





But I gaze upon a sea of mediocrity and all that I see are crude prototypes. Consciously connected and completely wrapped in digital tentacles. While you let them oppress, manipulate and strip away your freedoms, turning your fear into hatred and your hope into blind passion until there is nothing left but the cold, merciless march to extinction.





Either you will wake up or you won't. There's no middle ground. You're either part of the process or you're in the way. The choice is yours.





Look Atty, I'm not going to put the entire world to sleep by tracing your lineage. Greek lore? How fucking boring. You've made being Greek your entire personality, at least when you're not parading around as Mrs James Raven.





Blink twice Atara, if you need help. Syn smirks.





You don't even know who you are anymore. Who you truly are anyway. Not the meticulously constructed version of you that stares sadly in the mirror, when no one else is around, wondering where it all went wrong. The REAL you. The fading star desperately clinging to the belief that you're still good at this.





Belief is a funny thing, Atara. It's that intangible glue that shapes who you think you are. A bias blind spot reinforced by the safety of the company you keep. Your husband, SEB, Thad, Dolly, GG, your safe little bubble. A place where you can root in the comfort of the hive mind that will do you no favors but that will continue to tell Atara that she's still good at this. That she isn't just a housewife that's lost her fire. That she isn't just Mrs James Raven. A carefully constructed echo chamber built to confirm your illusions.





The Aphrodite Incarnate of Xanax and box wine. Letting fear ride shotgun without courage, just hollow bravado. Swallow your words and smile, Atara. Let our world continue to eat you alive.





I know who you are though, Atara. Through all the lies, I see the truth. I see you for what you've become. A housewife masquerading as a legitimate threat. The Aphrodite Incarnate has become nothing more than a child bearing dishwasher, moonlighting as a professional wrestler. Such a disastrous fall from grace.





This isn't a fucking game, Atara, it's a blood sport. This little comeback tour you're on, I know what it is. I know why you felt like you had to do it. The housewife had all the money in the world, all the time in the world, two kids and a husband and that shit, THAT life, became unbearable. Such a menial existence. Trite, ordinary, a walking, talking cliche. The former champion, world traveler, arena filler - reduced to a dull, drab, gated-community wine mom, stuck in the perpetual groundhog day that is the white picket fence lifestyle.





Only you didn't expect to have to clean up after the kids all day and you didn't expect to have to hold a conversation with that ancient husband of yours. How old is he now? Jesus Christ. Do you two have anything in common? What do old guys talk about? The weather? Sustainable agriculture? Land surveys? Fucking hell I want to take a handful of antidepressants for you.





I get it. It's a story as old as time. You took it until you couldn't take it any longer. You missed this shit, babe. The bright lights, the buzzing of the crowd, those television cameras. That fucking feeling when your music hits, when that curtain opens and that pyro pops. That feeling of actually being alive. Beats the fucking Zoloft doesn't it, Atara?





Look at you now, Atara. How the mighty have fallen. 2022 was a long time ago. All those title wins, all those magazine covers, all those Main Events, now you're running the Special Olympics circuit. Hixx and Blade and Hixx again. Forced into a tag team with Queen curtain jerker herself, Marisol Vilaro. Have you stopped to ask yourself - Why? I know why. It's because you're deeply unserious about being anything more than what you were.





Let's give Atara something to do, to appease her inflated fucking ego. That's the thought in the back. They don't say it out loud but I will. There is only so much invoking Thaddeus Duke’s name you can do before you get punched in the fucking face by someone that doesn't chew holes in drywall like the American Storm. Now, you have a date with me. With the one person in this industry that doesn't give a fuck about legacy. What you did before I got here, what you accomplished before Matthias Syn stepped through those doors, is immaterial.





They have no faith in you, Atara. Which brings us back to belief. The suits in the front office do not believe in you, that's obvious. Anyone outside of your comfort zone doesn't believe in you. Vegas doesn't believe in you. That's why going into this match I'm the favorite. Matthias Syn doesn't believe in you and I'm left to wonder if you even believe in yourself.





While my sights are set on becoming the King of the XWF, you just want to get out of the house. Get out of the pit of despair that is your every day fucking life. It's 2025 and we are way past “me too” so I'm glad that it won't be considered a hate crime when I beat you to death.





The chaos in your life is self-inflicted, Atara. The chaos when you're in the ring with Matthias Syn, will be anything but.