Page 172 of BounBound By Scars

Yeah.

I’d planned to wait. Observe. Bleed him for more.

But fuck that.

If he made that call—if he touched them—they’d be dead before dawn.

I smiled. “Sounds like a plan.”

A quiet, icy smile.

That was the moment.

It was time.

“Oh, I almost forgot!”

I reached into my satchel and pulled out what he’d been salivating over for weeks: the fused prototype. The fake lovechild of Crazon v3 and Sentrix v5.4. Sleek. Streamlined. Deadly in all the wrong ways.

Romano’s eyes lit up like he’d just found God in a circuit board.

I placed it gently on the desk between us.

“There,” I said. “Partial Crazon neural sync. Overlaid on stripped Sentrix logic. I cleaned the memory ghosts, removed the backdoors, deleted the traceability. No more Blackthorn fingerprints. It’s yours.”

His breath hitched.

“You’re telling me this… this thing makes Sentrix obsolete?”

I nodded. “Sure does.”

Romano scooped it up like it was the Holy Grail. “Fucking hell. You’re worth every cent of that bullet they gave you.”

I gulped hard.

He was already flipping it over, inspecting the etchings, the ports. “Ling’s gonna cream himself when he sees this. He’d been wanting Sentrix for so long.”

I smiled again.

Phase 1: Done.

“Play with it,” I said, already rising from my seat. “Let me know what you break.”

Romano waved me off, too entranced to even register the fact that I was walking out of his mansion.

I stepped out into the hall. Cool marble floors. Expensive rugs. All about to become shrapnel.

Each bootstep echoed through corridors I’d memorized on the night of Blackthorn’s attack. That evening, while Romano’s cronies planned—I laid the groundwork.

Nine explosives. All low-profile. All hidden in plain sight.

Behind columns. Inside light fixtures. Laced into the reinforced data vault under the floor.

I reached the back garden.

The night was clean. Cool. Silent.

I walked casually down the manicured path, past the empty watchtower, past the unused fountain, past the kill zone he thought was secure.

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