Chapter 4 — SSR
Stansfield had to go. No question about it.
Not just because he'd hit one of the Family's stash houses and killed a dozen men — though that alone was reason enough. The bigger problem was the trajectory. If Stansfield kept operating the way he operated, kept pushing, kept escalating, eventually he'd end up kicking in the wrong door. He'd find Léon. He'd find Mathilda.
And then everything would unspool exactly the way it had in the film.
Luca couldn't let that happen.
He'd be lying if he said it was purely altruistic. Léon was a rare card — maybe the rarest he'd encountered so far. A professional killer who worked clean, stayed quiet, and from what Luca could tell, charged his clients almost nothing because the middleman pocketed most of the fee anyway. The man lived on milk, houseplants, and whatever loose cash he kept in a tin somewhere. He was simple. He was reliable. He was extraordinarily dangerous.
And Luca was not going to let him get shot in the back in a hotel hallway because a pill-popping DEA agent with a Beethoven fixation got lucky.
He pulled up Stansfield's card while he waited for his coffee to cool.
[Norman Stansfield — Rank: S][Source: Léon: The Professional (1994)]
[Skill 1: Beethoven's Fury] While listening to classical music, combat effectiveness +20%. If the music is interrupted, combat effectiveness an additional +20%. After the piece ends, combat effectiveness -50%. Cooldown: 3 hours. Learning Requirements: Bond must reach Close Friend or above. Skill Fragments x50.
[Skill 2: Bloodhound's Nose] Drug detection efficiency +20%. Probability of identifying enemy disguise +20%. Learning Requirements: Bond must reach Close Friend or above. Skill Fragments x50.
Luca stared at the two skills for a long moment.
The first one required him to supply his own background music mid-fight, like he was a DJ who also killed people. He'd need to be carrying a Walkman and have Ode to Joy queued up just to get the bonus, and then he'd crash by fifty percent the second the song ended. It was the most inconvenient combat buff he'd ever seen on a card.
The second skill was more honest — that nose of Stansfield's was genuinely dangerous. In the film, Léon had been seconds from slipping out clean when Stansfield spotted him purely on instinct, called it out, and put a bullet in his back. The disguise-detection piece alone was worth something.
But none of it mattered, because there was a more fundamental problem.
Close Friend.
That was the bond requirement. Not Friend. Not Familiar. Close Friend — the tier that meant genuine trust, the kind that took years and shared history and real vulnerability to build.
With Norman Stansfield.
Luca thought about what it would take to get Norman Stansfield to look at him with warmth and genuine affection. He thought about it for approximately four seconds.
Yeah. Not happening.
There was already a conflict of interest baked in — Luca was Lucchese, and Stansfield had just declared open war on the Lucchese Family. Layer on top of that the man's paranoia, his volatility, his fundamental inability to trust anyone who wasn't one of his bought cops — and the math just didn't work.
Some cards you couldn't earn. Some characters were too dangerous to approach and too unstable to cultivate. For those, you had two options: keep your distance, or remove them from the board.
There was a psychiatrist in a federal facility in Pennsylvania that Luca had become aware of recently. Brilliant man. Absolutely monstrous. The kind of SSR card that would regard a friendship overture as an opportunity to study you from the inside out — possibly literally.
Luca had made a firm decision to never go within fifty miles of that particular individual, skills be damned. Some cards weren't worth the risk to your continued existence as a person who was not being served at a dinner table.
Stansfield wasn't quite that category. But he was close enough.
The call had been made. Stansfield was the job.
The next afternoon, in a pizza place on Arthur Avenue.
Luca worked through a slice of pepperoni while Henry and Jimmy sat across from him, still visibly pleased about the windfall from two days ago. Henry had the particular glow of a man who'd slept well for the first time in weeks. Jimmy was more contained about it, but the satisfaction was there if you knew where to look.
"Tell me about Stansfield's operation," Luca said. "What do you know?"
Jimmy leaned back. "DEA narcotics. Runs a small team — six, maybe seven agents, all dirty. They rotate stash locations every couple weeks so there's no pattern." He tore off a piece of crust. "Official side, he's a supervisor. Decorated, actually. Commendations. The whole thing."
"He's a goddamn drug dealer with a badge," Henry said, pointing his fork for emphasis. "You know what that is? That's the best racket in the city. You bust somebody's supply, you confiscate it, you log maybe thirty percent of it into evidence, and the rest goes right back out the door at a markup." He shook his head with something that was almost admiration. "I'm serious, if I'd known the DEA was hiring, I would've gone federal."
"Half the supply in upper Manhattan flows through him," Jimmy said. "Russians, some of the Dominican crews uptown, a couple of the smaller outfits in Queens. They all buy from Stan because buying from Stan means the DEA never shows up at your door. It's like paying for insurance, except the insurance agent is also your dealer."
Luca chewed thoughtfully.
The biggest drug dealer in New York is a federal law enforcement officer. He genuinely admired the audacity of it, in the same way you might admire a hurricane.
He thought briefly about a chemistry teacher in Albuquerque he'd become vaguely aware of through the system's peripheral awareness — a man who'd apparently decided that cooking methamphetamine in the New Mexico desert was a reasonable career pivot. That guy should've come to New York and partnered with Stansfield. Would've saved everyone a lot of trouble with the cartel.
Different story. Different problem.
"I need two things," Luca said. "First — which crews is he currently moving product through. Names, locations, schedules if you can get them." He looked at both of them. "Second — where's he keeping the seized goods. Not the DEA building, there's no way he's storing stolen product in a federal office. There's a private stash house somewhere. I want the address."
Jimmy nodded. "Give us a couple days."
Henry's eyes had taken on the particular gleam that appeared whenever a robbery was being conceptually assembled. "Are we going to hit the stash? Because I'm just saying — if we hit the stash — that's a significant amount of product we're walking out with."
Luca smiled at him warmly.
Henry Hill, who had once helped plan a robbery of Lufthansa cargo at JFK that netted over five million dollars, was looking at this situation and seeing an opportunity. Which was exactly the correct instinct, from a certain angle.
"I'll be in touch," Luca said pleasantly. "Just get me the information first."
Two days later. Morning.
An apartment building on the edge of Morningside Heights — the kind of building that had probably been decent in 1965 and had been slowly losing that argument ever since. The hallways smelled like cooking grease and old carpet. The elevator worked about half the time.
Luca had taken the apartment across the hall from unit 4B.
He already knew who lived in 4B. That was the whole point.
He'd sent movers in the day before — proper furniture, nothing ostentatious, just enough to make the place livable. The previous tenant, an older woman named Mrs. Kaminsky, had been quietly compensated to relocate to a nicer building four blocks away. She'd seemed genuinely pleased about the upgrade and had left a bag of rugelach for the neighbors as a goodbye.
Luca was unpacking a lamp when the noise started in the hallway.
Not a quiet noise. A door-slamming, voice-carrying, this-man-has-no-indoor-volume-setting kind of noise.
"—paying for school so you can sit around the apartment and smoke? You know what they told me? They told me you haven't been there in two weeks! Two weeks, Mathilda!"
Luca set down the lamp.
"—my money getting thrown away because you can't be bothered to walk six blocks—"
He opened his front door.
The hallway: a heavyset man in a stained undershirt, mid-forties, face flushed red, standing over a girl who couldn't have been more than twelve years old. She had a bruise above her left eye that wasn't new. A small cut on her lower lip that was.
Her expression was completely flat. Not afraid. Not even particularly reactive. The look of someone who had been through this enough times that they'd moved past the part where it registered emotionally and arrived at the part where you just waited for it to be over.
Her name was Mathilda. Luca knew that already.
The man raising his hand was her stepfather. He didn't deserve a more specific description.
The hand came down.
Luca caught his wrist.
The man spun around — and found himself looking at someone a full head taller who was holding his arm with the relaxed grip of someone who was not experiencing any physical effort whatsoever.
"Little quieter, if you don't mind," Luca said pleasantly. "First day in a new place. I'd like to settle in without a soundtrack."
The man sputtered. "What — who the hell are you? This is a private family matter, you let go of me right now—"
"Sure." Luca released the wrist. "Though I'm curious — she calls you dad? Or something else?"
Mathilda, standing two feet away, was watching this exchange with an expression that had shifted slightly. Not quite surprise. More like recalibration.
The man reached into his waistband — fast, confident, like he'd done it before — and came out with a folding knife.
He didn't come out with it for long.
Luca had the knife before the man fully extended his arm. The motion was barely visible — a quick deflection, a controlled pressure point on the wrist, and then the knife was in Luca's hand and its former owner was cradling his arm with an expression of startled pain.
Luca looked at the blade briefly, then looked at the man, and the warmth in his expression dropped about forty degrees.
He'd clocked the bruise over Mathilda's eye. The cut on her lip. The way she'd flinched slightly when the hand went up — not because she was scared of the hit, but because it was reflex. The kind of reflex that took repetition to build.
"I'm going to say this once," Luca said quietly. "I'm a light sleeper. I hear everything through these walls. And I have one rule about where I live." He let the knife hang loosely between two fingers, close to the man's face. "I don't watch people hit children. Not once. Not ever." His voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. "You do this again — any of it — and I promise you, you won't hear me coming."
The man had gone very still. When people got loud and aggressive, you could sometimes bluster through it. When someone got quiet like this — controlled, specific, completely unhurried — there was nothing to push against. It just landed.
"We clear?" Luca said.
"Yeah." The voice came out smaller than intended. "Yeah, we're clear."
"Good." Luca straightened up. He glanced at Mathilda — just briefly, just enough — then walked back across the hall and closed his door.
There was a pause.
Then the stepfather's voice started up again, quieter now, sputtering impotent anger that had nowhere to go. Luca heard him storm back into the apartment. The door slammed.
Silence.
Then, about ninety seconds later: a knock at his door.
He opened it.
Mathilda stood in the hallway, one hand on the doorframe, a cigarette hanging from her lower lip — unlit, because she'd evidently needed to borrow something.
She was twelve years old. She was carrying herself like she was thirty and had already seen most of what the world had to offer, and found it unimpressive.
"Got a light?" she said.
[You intervened in an act of domestic violence and protected a child from harm. You defended the peace of your neighbors.]
[+4 Skill Points][+1 Skill Fragment]
[Character Card Discovered: Mathilda][Rank: SSR][Source: Léon: The Professional (1994)]
[Skills: Scarred Survivor | Street Smart | Harmless Face | Forbidden Reliance | Advanced Lucky Star]
[Bond: Stranger]
Luca stared at the notification for a full three seconds.
SSR.
Five skills.
The twelve-year-old with the unlit cigarette was an SSR card with five skills.
He kept his expression completely neutral.
"Come in," he said. "I'll put some coffee on. You can tell me about the building."
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