Chapter 4: Ophelia’s POV
The Gothic spires of Night City University pierced a leaden sky.
Arthur had paid a small fortune to package me as premium merchandise — enrolling me in one of the city's most prestigious institutions. To advertise the Hayes family's wealth, he'd even arranged a single-occupancy room, the kind with a price tag most students couldn't fathom.
That suited me perfectly.
No afternoon classes. I pushed open the door to my room.
The quiet was normal. My feet were not.
I stopped.
Something was off about the air.
I closed my eyes and drew a slow breath.
The scent was faint — almost nothing. Fir resin, and beneath it, the ghost of something metallic. Blood-adjacent.
Him again.
I moved to the desk. Before leaving that morning, I'd drunk half a glass of water and left the cup resting with its base aligned to a particular groove along the edge of the desk mat. It had shifted two millimeters to the left.
I lowered my gaze to the rim of the glass. The surface there looked slightly smudged, the way glass looks when a thumb has pressed and turned against it.
Stealing a strand of my hair. Leaving roses. And now drifting through my private space like a ghost — just to touch a glass I'd drunk from?
The depravity was almost impressive.
But I didn't feel disgusted. I ran my tongue slowly across my back teeth, and my heart picked up — not from fear. From something sharper.
I liked the feeling of being locked in a predator's sights. It meant my prey had taken the bait.
Still. I didn't have time to play hide-and-seek with him right now.
I walked to the sink and poured out what remained in the glass, then dropped the cup into the trash. From under the bed I dragged out a black metal case with a combination lock.
I needed money. A great deal of it.
My godfather taught me that the most expensive thing in the world has never been luxury — it's the kind of truth that can kill a person without leaving a mark.
I needed to synthesize a high-concentration compound: "liquid silver," a neurotoxin hybrid. Its raw components were controlled substances in Night City, available only through underground markets, at prices that reflected exactly how illegal they were.
I had to get them. Because fifteen years ago, when my mother died, the air in that room had carried the exact same smell — the volatile signature of that particular poison.
The official autopsy report ruled it a suicide. Depression-induced self-poisoning.
Absolute bullshit.
I still remember the thunderstorm that night. Three-year-old me, folded inside a wardrobe, watching through the gap as several figures forced the poison down my mother's throat.
Arthur wasn't just a coward. He was the kind of man who could watch his own wife be murdered and do nothing — as long as it meant a step up for him.
To identify the people who had been in that room, I first had to reconstruct the poison they'd used.
I reached into the metal case and pulled out a velvet box, which I slipped into my pocket. Sylvia had tossed it to me two days ago — a few pieces of old jewelry she'd wanted to show off at some socialite gathering before losing interest.
Good quality stones. More than enough to fund the first round of materials.
I pulled up my hood and stepped out into Night City's thin, cold rain.
"Rust Alley" was the most notorious black market in Night City's lower districts.
The air smelled like the inside of a sewer.
I pushed open the door of a pawnshop called Old Bones. A bell chimed overhead.
Inside, the light was bad and the air was thick enough to chew. Behind bulletproof glass sat a heavy man with a face full of flesh and a jaw full of stubble, filing his nails with a grimy metal file.
"We're closed. Get out." He didn't look up.
I stepped forward and slid the velvet box through the transaction slot cut into the base of the glass.
"Vintage Bulgari ruby brooch," I said, keeping my voice low. "No registration records. I want cash."
The fat man's hand went still.
He raised a pair of yellowed eyes and looked me over through the bulletproof glass — a slow, greasy scan that dragged across my chest and waist like something wet.
He opened the box, held a loupe to it for about two seconds.
"Decent enough. Stolen, yeah?" He showed me a row of yellow teeth. "Two thousand. Take it or leave it."
On the black market, that brooch was worth at least fifty thousand.
My expression cooled. "Two thousand? Is that a joke?"
"You little bitch — you think you know where you are?" The fat man lurched to his feet, fixing me with a stare that was mostly threat. "Here, I decide. Either you take two thousand and walk, or I keep you and the jewelry both and sell you to the perverts over in the red-light district."
He reached under the desk and hit a button.
Behind me, the metal door clicked shut. Locked.
I exhaled.
A shame. I hadn't planned on blood today.
I slid my hand into my pocket. A slow press of my thumb, and the micro-blade tucked between my fingers snapped open.
Colorless, odorless, high-concentration muscle relaxant. A half-millimeter nick on his neck, and within three minutes his heart would stop.
I put on a frightened face — shoulders hunched, voice pitched to a tremor. "Please — please, don't — take the jewelry, just let me go, please—"
While I begged, I edged toward the side of the bulletproof glass where the transaction window sat. All I needed was for him to reach out his hand—
Briiing—!
A phone screamed to life.
The fat man's brow creased. He snatched the receiver with a curse half-formed on his lips.
The words died there.
I watched from the other side of the glass as every drop of color drained from his face in the span of two seconds. Like something had reached in and pulled the blood out of him.
Sweat broke out across his forehead in large, visible beads. The hand holding the receiver was shaking badly.
"Y-yes, sir... I'm sorry, I didn't know she was... I truly had no idea..."
His voice cracked with something close to weeping.
"Right away. Immediately. I'll handle it right now."
The line went dead.
The fat man spun toward me, and the look in his eyes was the look of a man staring at a live grenade.
Thud.
He dropped to his knees — right there, behind the bulletproof glass.
"Ma'am — I'm so sorry — I had no idea who you were—"
Quietly, I retracted the blade.
He was already scrambling toward the safe, still shaking, yanking it open. Stack after stack of bundled old bills came out, crammed by frantic handfuls into a duffel bag.
A hundred thousand. Two hundred thousand. Three hundred thousand.
He forced the heavy bag through the transaction slot, the Bulgari brooch on top of it.
"Five hundred thousand — cash! If it's not enough, I'll get more! Please, take it back, take everything—" His forehead hit the edge of the desk. "Let me walk away from this. I'm begging you."
I looked down at the bag full of money.
The air pressure in the room felt wrong. Lower than it should have been.
That feeling again.
A thick, possessive gaze — so intense it seemed to pass straight through the bulletproof glass and pin itself to my spine.
I picked up the heavy bag without a word.
Click.
The metal door behind me unlocked.
I walked back out into the lower district's cold rain.
It was coming down hard now. Neon signs bled color into the standing water on the street, the reflections splintering into strange, lurid shapes.
At the corner, I stopped.
Fifty meters away, a fully blacked-out armored Rolls-Royce Cullinan sat at the curb like something that had crawled out of a dark place and chosen not to leave. No lights. Privacy film on every window. But I knew someone inside was watching me.
Watching me hard.
He was making a point. Showing me what he could do — that if he chose to, he could reach into every corner of my life, flatten anyone foolish enough to get in my way.
Lunatic.
A wealthy, powerful lunatic who was very much in love with his own gestures.
I stood in the rain, staring back through the downpour at the windshield of that Rolls-Royce.
Slowly, the corner of my mouth pulled into a smile.
Then I raised my right hand.
And, with great deliberateness, extended one finger.
"Fuck you," I mouthed.
I turned and walked into the dark of the alley without looking back.
