The call connected and a flood of curses came down the line like a thunderclap.
"You're courting death, kid. Who gave you the right to mention me?" Chen Zhenghao barked. "You want trouble? I'll make sure you can't set foot in this city again."
Chen's voice was all menace and grease—threat as ritual. Word of him had always bent the block's spine: gangs, blunt force, rumors no one dared check. Mention his name and people went quiet.
Zhang Yi smiled into the empty room and let the insult land. He'd been waiting for this. He'd rehearsed the moment in his head a dozen times—the man who'd swung the axe in the old life would come choking for vengeance now, and Zhang would be ready.
"You're a piece of trash," Zhang said into the phone, voice low and sharp. "Cut the act. Who are you barking at? Go eat shit."
Then he hung up and blocked the number. It felt good—like closing a tab on a bad show.
He walked to the wall of monitors. Zhanlong Security had wired the floor like an egg: cameras in every corridor, spotless coverage. He punched to the sixth floor feed. Chen's door was a dark slit. A moment later it exploded open.
Chen emerged, swagger first: a cheap down jacket half-zipped to flash tattoos, a baseball bat slung like a scepter. He wanted to look fearless. Cold slapped him in the face and his swagger shivered. He rubbed his hands and cursed the temperature, then kicked at the elevator button and stomped down the hall.
Zhang moved slow. He nodded at the coffee table and pulled out the crossbow he kept under there for practice—heavy, hunting-grade, bolts like small spears. He'd practiced until the mechanism felt like an extension of his wrist. At fifteen meters he wasn't perfect, but he never missed a head the size of a watermelon.
The security door to his unit had a firing port—custom, steel-lined, two meters up—only openable from the inside. Zhang stood on a chair, flipped the hatch, and set a bolt in the groove. He liked the cold snap of the string. He liked the quiet that came after.
Chen pounded the door with the bat and howled for blood. "Come out, you little bastard! Let me see the guts you talk with!"
Zhang cocked the crossbow and watched the feed. The corridor was empty but for the man who had spent a life scaring others into silence. Chen shouted and kicked the metal in a rhythm, but the door held. It was twenty centimeters of alloy and bulletproof plating—enough to make a bat feel like a toothpick.
Zhang aimed at the corridor and breathed out. For a blink he considered the head. He thought of the mob that had torn him apart before—how quick, how final. He felt a cold, blistering joy at the thought of making Chen suffer instead of ending him quickly. Killing now would be too simple. He wanted something slower. He wanted watching.
The bolt creaked free and sang.
It hit Chen's calf.
The sound was small but raw. Chen pitched forward, a high keening tearing out of him, clutching at his leg. Blood arced dark on snow, then froze to a rim of red ice. For a second the man's face was the face of panic—hot, unvarnished, human.
Zhang watched. The bolt had punched deep enough to ruin muscle and marrow. In this cold, with no immediate care, infection and frostbite would turn pain into a long ruin. That was the point. Not the spectacle of death. The slow, gnawing fall.
Chen crawled backward, packing bone against snow. He never saw where the shot came from. You don't notice the hand that shoots until you feel the hole.
He dragged himself to the elevator, swearing and bleeding, each step a slurp into the frozen floor. The jacket that had made him look menacing now flapped with shame. He'd been cocky; now he limped like a wounded beast.
Zhang set the crossbow down, slid a pistol into his pocket, but didn't go to the door. He didn't need to. He wanted Chen to keep a heartbeat ahead of death, to wail and wait and understand that he'd been made vulnerable in a world where only desperation had clarity.
The feed caught him looking at his own hands. He felt no thrill—only a precise, private satisfaction. The people who'd eaten him alive once would not get the same courtesy this time. He wasn't a murderer for sport; he was a man rearranging outcomes.
Word spread faster than Chen could cover his leg. Neighbors peered from windows at the man hobbling like a struck dog. On the screen Chen's pant leg was a ragged map of blood and ice.
He stumbled back into his apartment. Cold sweat froze on his forehead in a fine crust. For the first time, fear lived in his mouth. He tried to scream, but the heat had gone from his voice.
In the elevator, he swore to himself and anyone who would listen. He called numbers, barked into phones, tried to marshal muscle he no longer had quick access to. The building hummed with the small electric of gossip and immediate danger. Men who had liked to posture now checked their own shoulders.
Zhang logged the incident, wrote the time, the feed ID, the bolt's trajectory. He catalogued where Chen had been, where his men could muster—and how to make their routes expensive. He mapped contingencies: lock sequences, what to pull first from the pocket dimension, which neighbor posts to rig for noise. He thought not only of escape but of leverage.
Chen's leg would heal only with luck and care. In the weeks the cold bit on, the wound would rot if untreated. For a gangster used to walking through people, that was a new currency: immobility.
He might have chosen to end the man. He didn't. That would have been petty. Instead he'd given Chen a fate to chew on—slow, humiliating, equitable.
Outside, the wind pressed at the building and sharpened the world into edges. Inside, Zhang closed the hatch, slid a bolt into a rest, and sat back on the couch. The game was no longer about hiding. It was about who had cards left to play.
Chen would scream. Men would twitch. Power would show its thinness. Zhang lit a cigarette—an old, small vice—and watched his safe room blossom with a private calm.
When the calls flooded his handset again—men calling with threats and bluster—he let them ring. He had already answered the only question that mattered: if they came, he would not be the one to break first.