Chapter 4 Chapter 4
Jax sat in a cracked red-vinyl booth at the South Side 24-hour diner called Mama June's, wearing a dead security guard's coat that still smelled like cordite and fear.
The waitress was a tired Black woman in her fifties with a name tag that read "Delores." She didn't blink at the blood on his knuckles or the fact that he was barefoot in January. She just poured coffee black as tar and said, "You want the lumberjack platter, baby?"
Jax said, "Three of them. And keep the coffee coming until I float."
While he waited, he counted what he had left in this world:
One body, the original, miraculously.
Forty-nine lifetimes of muscle memory and murder.
Zero dollars, zero ID, zero phone.
One mission: burn every name that ever paid to watch him die.
Delores slid the first mountain of pancakes, eggs, bacon, sausage, and hash browns in front of him. Jax ate like a starving wolf. Between bites he stole a pen from the check holder and started writing on a napkin.
The List.
1. Anastasia "Ice Queen" Volkov – alive, location unknown
2. Ivan "The Bear" Volkov – status unknown after core explosion
3. Dr. Evelyn Voss – last seen in the fire, presumed crispy
4. Vincent Moretti – already dead, but his money men still breathing
5. The Investors – eight shell companies that funneled billions into Project Lazarus
He underlined number one twice.
The diner TV was muted on the morning news. Breaking footage showed a massive explosion at an abandoned meatpacking plant. Cause unknown, no survivors expected. They showed aerial shots of the crater. Nothing left but twisted steel and steam.
Good.
Delores came back with platter number two. "You famous or something?" she asked, eyeing the TV.
"Something," Jax said.
She studied him for a long second, then slid a butter knife across the table. "Case anybody asks questions you don't like."
Jax grinned for the first time in fifty lives. "Thank you, Delores."
By the time he finished platter three, the sun was fully up and he had a plan.
Step one: clothes and cash.
He walked six blocks to a laundromat with an ancient ATM in the corner. He kicked the machine exactly once where the camera couldn't see it. It coughed up eight hundred dollars in twenties like a broken slot machine. An old trick from loop twenty-three when he needed seed money.
Next stop was an Army-Navy surplus store on Sixty-Third Street. He bought black cargo pants, steel-toe boots, a hoodie, tactical gloves, and a beautiful cold-weather trench coat that hid everything. He looked like a homeless mercenary. Perfect.
Step two: weapons.
He took the L train north to a pawn shop he remembered from loop eleven. The guy behind the counter recognized the look in his eyes and didn't ask for ID. Forty minutes later Jax walked out with a Glock 19 with three magazines, a sawed-off twelve-gauge coach gun, a Ka-Bar knife, two bricks of double-ought buckshot, and a burner phone still in the plastic. All for eleven hundred dollars cash and the promise he'd never come back.
Now he was dressed, armed, and dangerous.
Time to hunt.
Jax started with the one place Anastasia would never expect him to hit first: her penthouse.
During the loops he'd memorized every safe house the Volkovs kept in Chicago. The penthouse at the top of the Aurora Tower was supposed to be impregnable. It had biometric everything, a private elevator, and ex-Spetsnaz on payroll.
He took the stairs. Seventy-eight floors. It took him thirty-two minutes at a sprint. By floor sixty, the guards watching the cameras were already panicking.
He kicked the rooftop door off its hinges.
Four Spetsnaz in winter camo waited with suppressed rifles.
They opened fire.
Jax walked through it.
Bullets sparked off the trench coat like rain on tin. The Defiant title was still active. Ninety percent resistance to everything.
He took the first guy's rifle away and used it as a club. He painted the snow red with the second. He stabbed the third with his own knife. He choked the fourth unconscious with his own sling.
Thirty seconds.
He dragged the unconscious one inside, zip-tied him, and woke him up with a slap.
"Where's Anastasia?"
The guard spat in Russian. Jax broke his pinky. The guard gave him the code to the private elevator.
Jax rode it down one floor to the penthouse.
The doors opened into a palace of black marble and glass.
Anastasia stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows with her back to him, looking out over the city like a queen.
Ivan was there too. Bandaged and burned, but alive. Half his face was melted from the explosion and one arm hung in a sling, but he was still seven feet of hate.
He saw Jax and roared, charging like a wounded bear.
Jax let him come.
Ivan swung a haymaker that could have killed an elephant.
Jax ducked under it, came up inside his guard, and drove the Ka-Bar through his knee from the side.
Ivan dropped screaming.
Anastasia finally turned.
There was no fear in her eyes this time. Just cold calculation.
"You're supposed to be dead. All of you."
"Disappointed?" Jax asked.
She reached for the panic button. He shot it off the wall.
Ivan tried to crawl toward him, leaving a trail of blood. Jax put a boot on his neck.
"Tell me who the investors were."
Anastasia smiled. "You think this ends with us? Project Lazarus was one lab. There are six more. Tokyo. São Paulo. Marrakesh. Moscow. Dubai. London. They all have their own Subject Zero now. You were just the prototype."
Jax's blood went colder than the wind outside.
She kept talking. "You burned one anthill, Jax. The colony is global. And every single one of them is watching this feed right now."
She gestured to the corners of the room. Tiny red lights. Cameras.
"They want to see what the original does when he's finally free."
Ivan laughed through the pain. "You are still in the cage, American. Just bigger."
Jax looked at Anastasia. "Last chance. Names."
She lit a cigarette with shaking hands. "Go to hell."
Jax looked at Ivan. He spat blood at his boots.
Jax nodded once.
Then he put two rounds in both their heads.
No hesitation.
The cameras kept recording.
Jax walked to the window, looked straight into the nearest lens, and spoke to every hidden billionaire watching.
"My name is Jax Harrow. I died forty-nine times so I could live long enough to do this."
He held up the napkin list, now covered in fresh blood.
"I'm coming for every single one of you. There are no more loops. No more resurrections. Just me. And I have nothing left to lose."
He shot the camera.
Then he burned the penthouse down on his way out.
By noon he was on a Greyhound headed east with four hundred dollars left, one duffel of weapons, and a new list.
Six cities.
Six labs.
Six more versions of himself suffering in tanks right now.
He leaned his head against the cold window and watched Chicago disappear behind him.
The war wasn't over.
It had just gone global.
And this time he wasn't fighting to become champion.
He was fighting to make sure no one ever built another cage again.
