Chapter 2

What family bonds? What sense of belonging? All fucking bullshit!

Uncle Andrew arranged for him to enter the coroner's office not to give him a stable job - there was something behind it dirty enough to destroy the entire Thomas family. How ridiculous that he had endured two and a half years in the autopsy room like a dog, all to repay a debt!

After being dug out, Steven went straight back to his rental apartment that night.

Uncle Andrew's threat completely awakened the "Child of Disaster" that had been sleeping inside him for so long. Swallow his anger? A beast who dared to kill at age eight didn't have those words in his dictionary.

Over the next month, through the unlicensed doctor's channels, he pieced together a batch of raw materials bit by bit.

Over twenty pounds of high explosives lay quietly in a moisture-proof box under his bed.

He even made the detonator, just waiting for the next family gathering. He would personally send that hypocritical Uncle Andrew and those bloodsucking relatives to heaven together!

However, fate always seemed to love cruel jokes.

Two days before he was ready to act, the hospital called. His adoptive parents had both fallen ill, diagnosed with a rare genetic disease.

Regular medical treatment couldn't suppress the bone-marrow-tearing pain at all. The elderly couple banged their heads against the wall in their hospital beds from the agony. The doctor said there was an imported targeted drug that could greatly reduce the pain and slow the disease progression, letting them die with dignity.

But the medicine was expensive. So expensive that draining all of Steven's savings wouldn't even cover one treatment cycle.

With a weak spot, even a beast gets shackled.

Reality wasn't a movie, and the Thomas family weren't lambs for the slaughter. These gangsters had laundered their dirty money clean and stored it all in hidden overseas accounts.

Only Uncle Andrew knew the password to that account.

Steven looked at himself in the mirror, his fists clenched until his knuckles turned white. His shooting was terrible, his intelligence was average - pulling some dirty tricks and making a bomb was already his limit. He had no ability to capture Andrew and torture the password out of him.

If he blew Andrew to pieces, all that overseas money would become a dead account, and his adoptive parents would die in agony in their hospital beds.

"Hah—"

Steven let out a long breath and crushed the cigarette butt viciously against the metal cabinet, sparks flying.

"Andrew," he stared at his blood-stained fingertips, his eyes full of murderous intent, "I won't quit. But you better pray that money is enough to buy your whole family's lives."

Two years ago, Uncle Andrew had accidentally let something slip.

At that time, he had forced Steven into the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office and set a "three-year agreement." The exact words were: as long as Steven cooperated and endured those three years, and completed a certain "objective" for the family at the critical moment, the Thomas family would fully cover his adoptive parents' bottomless pit of medical expenses.

Now, the three-year deadline was just around the corner.

Whatever Uncle Andrew's ultimate goal was, Steven had already made up his mind. The money—he wanted it. The people—he wouldn't let them off either.

Between his past and present lives combined, he had tasted enough of being an orphan, which made him value hard-won family bonds more than anyone else. That was the softest, most precious reverse scale in his heart. But the Thomas family had trampled and crushed that reverse scale in the most brutal way, using it to blackmail him.

Except for the cousin who had secretly helped him back then, everyone else in the Thomas family had to die.

"Dong—Dong—Dong—"

At dusk, the evening bells from the Catholic church tower outside echoed dully through the cramped apartment.

Steven jolted awake from the worn-out sofa, instinctively wiping the cold sweat from his forehead and letting out a long yawn. He glanced at the wall clock—time to get ready for his next part-time job.

Lately, his mental state had been getting worse and worse, with hallucinations occurring at an alarming frequency.

When he closed his eyes, the twisted, agonized faces of those scumbags he had personally sent to hell through "accidents" years ago would flash crazily through his mind. Not only that, but the thousands of corpses he had personally autopsied at the coroner's office over the past two years would also line up at his bedside, flashing eerie smiles at him, their bloodless lips moving in silent accusation.

Whenever these hallucinations receded like a tide, Steven's hands would become desperately hungry.

It was some kind of destructive urge deeply carved into his bones—his palms itching as if millions of ants were crawling on them, desperately craving to cut something open or destroy something.

He had only managed to suppress this crazy impulse until now by constantly taking on part-time jobs and running himself ragged under high pressure.

"Bang bang bang!"

Suddenly, deafening pounding came from outside the door, making the entire door frame shake violently.

Before Steven could get up—

"Crack—Bang!"

A teeth-grinding sound of twisting metal suddenly rang out. The old lock was forcibly blown apart from the outside by brute force, with flying screws hitting the wall and bouncing into corners.

The door opened.

A dark-haired white middle-aged man, nearly two meters tall with a build as massive as a North American brown bear, stepped inside carrying an intense oppressive aura. In the hallway outside, two bodyguards in sharp suits with cold expressions could be vaguely seen standing.

The middle-aged man strode over to Steven and heavily dropped himself into the single-seat sofa opposite him.

"Creak—" The sofa let out a pained groan under the unbearable weight, as if it might fall apart at any moment.

The visitor was none other than the current patriarch of the Thomas family, the boss of Los Angeles's largest Italian gang "The Blood Bath Gang"—Andrew Thomas.

"Steven, my dear nephew." From Andrew's deep-set eye sockets, a hawk-like gaze shot out, his voice rough and low. "You've missed several family gatherings already."

Steven lowered his eyelids.