Seraphina POV
[Three Days Later]
She spent three more days in recovery. Enough to gather data. Enough to plan.
The doctors said the stress caused her collapse. The tests were inconclusive. But she knew better.
She was a goddamn queen reborn.
And now?
She had questions. About why this body. About who brought her back. About why she remembered now.
But above all, she had plans.
This world didn't know who Seraphina D'Angelo was.
But it would.
And this time, she had a second chance.
With every lesson from her past.
And a universe full of superheroes, secrets, and sins to conquer.
"Trust once. Test twice. Betrayal is paid in blood," she murmured with a ghost of a smile.
Time to sharpen the knives.
The hospital gown had been traded for worn jeans, a hoodie, and a mind sharper than any scalpel. Skye—no, Seraphina—walked out of Metro General Hospital with discharge papers. Her footsteps were measured, calm. On the surface, she was just another released patient. But beneath the skin, behind those green eyes, something far more dangerous stirred.
The Queen of the Underworld had been reborn.
She walked two blocks, ducked into an alley, and accessed a street-level maintenance box behind a store. Inside, a signal junction. Ten seconds later, local security cams were looping stale footage. The cameras would show her turning left down a different road, not the alley she now ghosted through.
Control the board. Always.
She reached her destination: a dingy cybercafé nestled between a pawn shop and a shuttered deli. The neon sign buzzed faintly overhead like a dying mosquito. Perfect.
She chose the farthest corner booth, seating herself with a subtle scan of the room. One exit, two cameras, three possible witnesses. The man behind the counter was half-asleep, the only other patron too engrossed in World of Warcraft to notice her.
She powered up the terminal, fingers already dancing. Layers of security unfolded before her. Onion-routing, VPN tunneling, MAC address spoofing. It felt like slipping into silk.
Within minutes, she was inside the black-market hacker forums.
It was a dive bar of the digital underworld — usernames like ByteReaper, DeadPing, and StuxLux floated in chatrooms. Skye entered as "V1ceQueen." A relic of her old life, but altered enough to avoid trace.
She began probing.
Search: Terrigen.
Dead leads. Science fiction blogs and obscure alien mythology.
Search: Obelisk. SSR. Whitehall. S.H.I.E.L.D. Asset 084.
That got hits. Not many, but enough. Most were fragments: rumors about S.H.I.E.L.D.'s relics, chatter about vaults sealed off even to high-clearance agents, and ghost entries from hacker logs that had since vanished. One thread, buried deep, spoke of a device labeled SSR.084 — unstable, alien in origin, fatal to touch.
Seraphina leaned back. There it was.
A piece of her new puzzle.
She shifted gears, pivoting toward organizational data. She began parsing S.H.I.E.L.D.'s hierarchy, cross-checking leaked files from whistleblowers and defunct Hydra nodes.
Jasper Sitwell.
He popped up more than once — tagged in half a dozen places under different aliases. Always in the periphery of vault transfers and Level 7 clearance zones.
Mid-level. Smart. Corrupt. Greedy. Perfect.
Her fingers moved faster.
Within the hour, she had tracked his schedule, rerouted satellite cameras to feed her his movement, and compromised his personal burner phone. Every keystroke she executed was invisible, coated in layers of misdirection and camouflage. By the time she'd extracted his contact data, even the NSA wouldn't have been able to trace her.
Still, she wiped her session clean. No crumbs. No trails.
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[Later That Night]
Burner phone in hand, she walked to an all-night convenience store. She purchased two cans of Red Bull, a chocolate bar, and a prepaid sim card. Behind the building, crouched in shadow, she cracked open an abandoned laptop pulled from a trash heap.
Not trash anymore.
She rewired the motherboard, swapped in stolen RAM from the hospital's IT closet, and used her phone to tether a stealth connection. The machine purred like a resurrected corpse.
Then she placed the call.
"Agent Sitwell," she said, voice modulated, digitally filtered to a smooth male baritone, clinical and cold.
"Who is this?" he answered, suspicious, already glancing over his shoulder.
"Mr. Whitehall has a task for you."
A beat of silence.
"You've got the wrong number."
"1945. Austria. Obelisk. Whitehall's research wasn't destroyed. He wants it back."
Another pause. This one longer.
Sitwell's breathing changed. His voice dropped half a register. "Obelisk?"
"Don't play dumb. S.H.I.E.L.D. labeled it SSR.084. You can get access. Retrieve it."
She fed him just enough to ignite the hunger. Not orders. Not threats. Just knowledge.
And for men like Sitwell, knowledge was power — and power was irresistible.
"Where's the delivery?"
"You'll be contacted."
She cut the call.
Then smiled.
Sitwell had taken the bait. Hook, line, and ego.
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[Several Days Later]
Her surveillance grid lit up as Sitwell's GPS pinged within a S.H.I.E.L.D. vault. He wasn't subtle. He didn't need to be. Bureaucrats like him moved behind shields of paper and protocol. And now, he was hunting the obelisk — the very device that could awaken the quake inside her.
Angela noticed the change.
"You look like you're plotting world domination," the roommate said.
Skye offered a lazy smile. "Not domination. Just...redecorating."
That night, she called again.
"Efficient, Agent Sitwell," she said, amused.
"Retrieving and transferring the obelisk requires Level 10 clearance," he huffed.
"Borrow Pierce's authority. No one will question it."
The name-drop chilled him.
"Do you want to meet Whitehall in person?" she asked, letting the words settle.
He flinched, audibly.
"You've read the files. Researchers turned to stone trying to touch it. Still think you should play delivery boy?"
"…What do I get out of this?" he asked finally, greed pushing past fear.
"Security. Mobility. Survival. Choose wisely, Jasper."
He did.
The drop was simple. A trash bin in an alley near the East Side Docks. Sitwell left the box. A homeless man retrieved it five minutes later. She met the man two blocks away, slipped him a hundred-dollar bill, and vanished.
She opened the container in a sealed room beneath an abandoned warehouse. Gloves on, cameras off.
The obelisk gleamed in the dark — alien, angular, humming faintly with energy that didn't belong on Earth.
She didn't marvel. She didn't hesitate.
With pliers, she extracted the relic, placed it in her backpack, and left. She dumped the metal container into a drum of sulfuric acid at a nearby chemical plant.
No evidence. No trace.
The obelisk couldn't be tracked. That was the irony. It was ancient, incomprehensible, and immune to modern surveillance. It was danger incarnate.
And now, it was hers.
She ducked into a cab, face obscured beneath her hood.
The driver didn't speak. The streets were silent. Neon lights blurred past her window like blood trails on glass.
Her fingers tightened around her backpack strap.
"I survived a world of monsters once," she whispered.
She looked out into the darkness.
"Let's see what I can do when I become one."
The cab pulled into Hell's Kitchen.
She stepped out, fading into the night.
As night fell, Skye stood atop a rooftop, the city's lights stretching out before her. The wind tugged at her jacket, but she remained still, the weight of her decision settling in. She was no longer just Skye or Seraphina; she was both, and more. A fusion of past and present, ready to face the challenges ahead.
"Time to play nice... until I don't," she murmured, a smirk playing on her lips.
Hell's Kitchen had a new devil.
And she wasn't asking for a throne.
She was taking it.
To be continued...
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