Los Angeles isn't asleep.
It's wired — throbbing through the bones of the city, neon lights flickering like faulty nerves. Down in the industrial wasteland east of the river, past warehouses tagged with names no one remembers, there's a place with no sign, no cameras, and no rules.
They call her Nyx tonight.
She steps into the ring without fanfare. No entrance music. No warm-up dance. Just the scrape of boots on concrete and the subtle ripple of anticipation from the crowd. She wears black from throat to toe, and her face is hidden behind a smooth, carbon-black mask — featureless, matte, perfectly cold.
No one knows who she is.
That's the point.
Across from her, a man twice her size paces like a caged dog. He has a broken nose that never healed right and a tattoo of a serpent coiled around his throat. He's here for blood. He's seen what she's done to others, and he doesn't care. That's fine. He won't walk out the same.
The bell clangs.
She doesn't move.
For three full seconds she watches, calculating, measuring him like a surgeon eyeing a tumor — no wasted motion, no wasted breath. Then she's off the ground in a blur of muscle and precision, ducking a wide swing and slamming her knee into his ribcage. Bone cracks. He grunts, stumbles. She's behind him before he turns, lands an elbow to the back of his neck. He drops to his knees.
She finishes it with a strike to the temple—clean, sharp, merciless.
Twelve seconds.
The crowd explodes.
She doesn't react.
Her chest rises, breath steady. Not a scratch on her. No victory pose, no gestures, no words. She slips out of the ring before they can throw cash or questions. The crowd parts instinctively. Even in a pit of violence, there's a difference between rage and precision. She is the latter—shaped into something quiet and lethal.
She disappears through a rusted side door into darkness, moving like someone born in it.
⸻
Rain on glass.
Soft, steady, like a lullaby out of time.
The memory claws its way in like it always does after the fight — uninvited, brutal, vivid. She's eleven again, crouched in the space behind the piano where the scent of lemon oil mixes with the metallic edge of fear. Her heart hammers too fast. She's not sure if it's hers or her mother's.
There's shouting in the hallway. Boots on tile. Her mother's voice — a sharp command. Then her father's. Then another, deeper voice, colder, smooth as smoke.
She bites down on her tongue, willing herself to be small.
The hand clamps over her mouth suddenly, firm but not cruel. Someone's with her in the dark — someone she doesn't recognize, whispering against her ear.
"Don't move. Just watch."
The living room is a perfect frame through the narrow gap between piano and wall. Her parents are there — both standing, bruised, blood at the corner of her mother's mouth, but still upright. Proud. Defiant.
"You were warned," the smooth voice says.
He stands in a long coat. Military, maybe. Or something worse.
Her father doesn't answer. He reaches for her mother's hand. They find each other in that final second, eyes locked.
The shots come in threes. First her father. Then her mother. Then silence so heavy it crushes her lungs.
She screams, but only inside. Her tongue is bleeding. The man holding her tightens his grip.
"Now," he says softly, "you'll never forget what loyalty costs."
⸻
Across the city, hours later, a man sits alone in a room with no windows.
The only light comes from the three monitors glowing on the desk. Footage from a private feed plays on a loop — angled from above, grainy, color-drained. The ring. The fight. Her.
He watches her move again and again. Slowing it. Freezing the frame where she drops her opponent with surgical precision. Not just a fighter. She reads like someone trained to dismantle — not react, but analyze, adapt, destroy.
There's something in the way she stands after it's over. Still. Tense. Like she's waiting for another fight to start.
He leans forward, elbows on his knees, eyes narrowed. "Who the hell are you?"
The file next to him is thin but heavy. Most of it's redacted. But one word isn't:
NYX
Unconfirmed identity.
Location: Downtown LA, 02:17AM.
Affiliations: Unknown.
Threat level: Pending.
He exhales slowly, brushing his thumb along a scar just beneath his jaw. The deeper part of him — the one that hasn't slept well in years — knows this isn't random. She's not just a ghost in the underground.
He doesn't know it yet, but the woman he's watching is the daughter of the people he helped kill.
And she remembers his voice.