THE STORY CONTAINS A HUGE LOAD OF BULLSHIT. BE ADVICED BEFORE CONTINUING.
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The Wynn Palace, Macau. The high-roller room smelled like money, sex, and expensive regret.
Khan V. Sokolov was winning at all three.
He had just wired 270 million dollars into his Cayman accounts after shorting a Biotech firm into the dirt. The company's so-called miracle cancer drug was nothing more than sugar water mixed with industrial rat poison that killing people faster than cancer ever could.
Thousands of desperate patients were already dying in agony, coughing up blood and begging for mercy that would never come. Khan didn't lose a single second of sleep over it. He had made a career out of profiting from other people's corpses without knowing or giving a single fuck.
Tonight, he was celebrating the only way he knew how.
Top-floor VIP blackjack table. Three high-class escorts draped over him like living jewelry. A Cuban cigar the size of a baby's arm burning between his teeth. And enough 1982 Macallan to drown the whole floor.
Sofia, the tall Russian blonde, sat on his lap, grinding slowly while she fed him caviar off a mother-of-pearl spoon. Her other hand worked under the table with practiced skill. Linh, the Vietnamese beauty on his right, kept his glass full as her fingers tracing circles on his thigh. The third girl — some TukTak influencer whose name he'd already forgotten — was bent over the felt, enveloped in the faint, metallic scent of illicit chemistry. She tapped her nose, eyes glittering with manic euphoria, and laughed way too loud at every filthy joke he cracked.
Chips worth millions were scattered everywhere. Khan had already won another 2.3 million tonight, but who gave a fuck? He was drunk, high, horny, and for once in his miserable life, the numbers were on his side.
"Double down, baby," Sofia purred, grinding against him. Khan grinned, the wolfish trader grin that had closed a thousand dirty deals, and pushed another tower of black chips forward.
He won again. The girls cheered. He laughed — the laugh of a forty-eight-year-old man who had divorced twice, buried a liver, and sold his soul to the markets long ago.
BANG!
"Let me go– Kyaa!!!"
Something happened outside the blurred glass doors of his quarter. Khan squinted his eyes. A woman with faint rose-gold pink hair was being dragged toward the service exit by three thick-necked triad thugs. The exact shade. The same soft, washed-out pink that little Yuna - His long lost childhood friend and his first love - had when they were kids.
'Impossible… She vanished without a trace more than thirty years ago. How could this be…'
Khan's heart actually stuttered. For one stupid second, the burnt-out trader felt something dangerous: Hope.
He tried to convince himself that it's not her, that he mistook someone else as Yuna. Still, when one of the thugs slapped the girl hard enough to make her cry out, something ancient inside Khan snapped awake.
He stood up so fast the girls nearly fell off his lap. "Stay," he told them, already walking away from a small fortune in chips like it was pocket change.
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The service alley behind the Wynn palace was dark, humid, stank of piss and rotting garbage. The three thugs had the woman pinned against the wall, one already tearing at her dress.
"Hey," Khan called, voice calm and bored like he was declining a bad trade. "She said no."
"Ah?" The largest thug snarled as they turned around and look at the drunk man trying to steady himself. The thug's bloodshot eyes indicate that he's already high on some unknown narcotics.
"The fuck is this pig yapping about?" Their knives flashed, gleaming dangerously under the neon light of the street.
"...This 'pig' happened to be your biggest customer tonight, 'kay? Let's just settle this down and talk— !!!"
The first dagger grazed Khan's cheek, leaving a trail of hot blood before he even realized what was happening. He felt the sting before he saw the blade. A thin red line dripped on his face.
Khan, who called himself the next wolf of Wull Street, who had ruined empires with a few keystrokes, found himself paralyzingly slow. In this dark, humid alley, all his genius trading models, his algorithmic strategies, were laughable. The cruelest markets are simple: A blood-red transaction.
Thud! A brutal kick straight to his gut doubled him over, threatening to send all the alcohol in his stomach spewing out. The thug with the broadest shoulders grabbed his hair, slamming his head hard against the grimy brick wall. A ringing filled his ears and his vision blurred, dyed in a bloody red hue.
He was completely helpless, his body was treated like a punching bag enduring a frantic barrage of kicks and punches from sides. His ribs cracked with agonizing snaps under their heavy leather boots.
The moment Khan was kicked sprawling into a dirty puddle, he saw it. The flickering neon lights from the main street illuminated the alleyway. The pink-haired girl was cowering, looking at him with absolute terror in her eyes.
Khan's pupils shrank.
Under the stark light of the streetlamp, the features of her face were clearly revealed. There was no small mole under the left eyelid, no gentle doe eyes. Aside from the rose-gold hair, this girl was absolutely, definitely not Yuna!
A bucket of ice-cold water seemed to pour straight into Khan's soul. He had just gambled all of his remaining life... because of a stupid misunderstanding.
"You piece of trash! Want to play hero?!" The largest thug spat, stepping forward and crouching low, intending to use the cold blade of his knife to pat Khan's cheek in humiliation.
His arrogance and carelessness were his only flaws.
Khan ignored the blade right next to his face. With his last ounce of strength, he shot both hands out like a coiled spring, locking onto the thug's wrist that held the knife, and used his entire body weight to twist it back in a violently brutal arc.
CRACK!
The crisp sound of breaking bone echoed, accompanied by the thug's agonizing howl. The knife clattered to the ground.
But that was Khan's limit. The two remaining thugs froze for a split second, then their sheer fury morphed into cold-blooded ruthlessness.
"Son of a bitch!!!"
A sharp, freezing and deep pain pierced straight into Khan's left chest. The second thug had made his move. He pulled the knife out and stabbed again, frantic and ruthless in retaliation for his comrade.
Khan dropped to the filthy concrete. Blood filled his mouth instantly. The woman screamed. Not Yuna's voice. Just another terrified stranger with the wrong shade of pink hair.
'Ahh, all those time, and your last trade was still a bad fucking position…' His vision faded into pitch black as his one hell of a fucked up life started flashing back before his eyes.
...
It was 1990. The dry well behind the abandoned factory. Pouring rain hammering down five terrified children trapped at the bottom as black water rose to their necks.
"KHAN!!! HELP ME!!! HELP US!!!" Little Yuna — pink pigtails soaked and plastered to her skull — clawing desperately at the slippery stone walls, looking straight up at him with pure terror.
The scream tore through thirty-six years of dirty deals, divorce papers, and self-hatred like it had been waiting for this exact moment.
His old childhood scar on his left palm — the one he and Yuna had cut with a rusty nail when they were twelve — suddenly burned white-hot for one final second… then disappeared forever.
*Rattle*
The world ripped open with a sound like reality tearing apart. Black-purple lightning crawled across the alley walls, causing the triad thugs to backed away in horror, the pink-haired woman screamed to her lung as the vortex swallowed Khan whole.
The last thing he felt was something ancient and hungry latch onto the faint trace of some unknown energy still sleeping in his vein and yank.
"Khan… Help us…"
His consciousness completely sank into the void.