Three hundred guests watched the fiancée of New York's most feared mafia boss swing her jeweled heel toward my leg, trying to send me crashing into a tower of champagne glasses. But before she could touch me, I caught her ankle with one hand—and when an elderly man near the orchestra whispered, "That style is impossible," the mafia boss himself went pale, as though he'd just seen a dead man come back to life.

Three days had passed since the confrontation in the penthouse. My mother was resting comfortably in the private recovery suite at Presbyterian, her arthritis treatments fully funded, while Mateo spent his afternoons marveling at the vast library inside Alexander's private residence in Westchester.

Yet, despite the luxury surrounding me, my soul remained restless.

I needed to return to Astoria. My father’s practice sticks—two weathered rattan rods wrapped in an old wool blanket—were still hidden behind the false panel in my old bedroom closet. In the chaos of the hit squad's attack, I had left them behind. They were the only physical pieces of my father’s legacy I had left.

"I’m going with you," Alexander said, standing in the doorway of the Ashford Grand’s private garage. He was dressed down in dark jeans and a leather jacket, looking less like a mafia sovereign and more like the street-hardened brawler he had once been.

"You don't need to babysit me, Mr. Ashford," I said, checking the lace of my boots.

"I am not babysitting you, Sophia," he said, stepping into the passenger seat of an unmarked black sedan. "I am protecting my investment. And besides, I want to see where Miguel taught you."

The drive to Astoria was quiet, filled only with the low rumble of the engine and the rhythm of the windshield wipers. When we arrived at the tenement on 31st Street, yellow police tape fluttered across the entrance, waterlogged and neglected.

We walked up the creaking stairs together, our footsteps synchronizing naturally. The hallway still smelled of cordite and wet plaster.

Inside the apartment, the rain was blowing through the shattered window, soaking the floral sofa my mother had bought with three months of tips. I walked into my bedroom, knelt before the closet, and pried open the baseboard panel.

There they were.

Two thirty-inch rattan sticks, worn smooth by my father’s calloused hands, charred at the tips in the traditional Visayan fashion to harden the wood. As my fingers closed around the familiar grain, a wave of profound sorrow washed over me, followed immediately by an immovable pillar of peace.

"He used to tell me that the wood remembers," I whispered, holding the sticks against my chest. "He said that every strike, every block, leaves a memory in the grain."

Alexander stepped into the doorway, watching me with quiet reverence. "He was a philosopher."

"He was a man who wanted peace in a world that only spoke war," I replied.

Suddenly, the floorboards outside the room creaked.

It was not the random settling of an old building. It was the deliberate, distributed weight of multiple men moving in tactical formation.

Alexander’s hand moved inside his leather jacket, drawing a suppressed Heckler & Koch pistol with terrifying speed. He stepped in front of me, his eyes narrowing at the doorframe.

"They didn't leave," Alexander whispered. "Lane didn't hire regular cleaners. He hired the Kuroshio Syndicate."

Before he could finish the sentence, a flash-bang grenade rolled through the shattered living room window, bouncing off the linoleum.

"Eyes!" I screamed, dropping to the floor and pulling Alexander down with me.

The detonation blew out the remaining windowpanes with a concussive roar of white light and thunderous sound. My ears rang with high-pitched feedback, but my peripheral vision held. Through the doorway, three figures clad in dark grey ballistic armor entered, wielding short Japanese blades and tactical sidearms.

They were not here to capture. They were here to execute.

Alexander fired three rapid shots through the drywall, dropping the lead assassin, but a second operative rushed forward, swinging a heavy carbon-steel blade directly at Alexander's neck. Alexander raised his left arm to block, his ballistic jacket taking the brunt of the slash, but the force drove him against the closet frame.

The wood remembers.

I didn't reach for a gun. I stood, my hands gripping the twin rattan sticks.

The third assassin lunged at me, his blade thrusting toward my diaphragm.

I stepped diagonally, moving into the blind spot of his strike. My right stick cracked against his wrist with the force of a breaking bone, deflecting the blade into the doorframe. Before he could recoil, my left stick whipped across his temple in a whistling arc, shattering his visor.

*Agos ng Tahimik.* The Quiet Current was not a defensive retreat; it was an inescapable whirlpool.

I flowed through his guard, striking five points in under two seconds—elbow, collarbone, knee, ribs, and the base of the skull. The rhythmic *clack-clack-clack* of the rattan sticks sounded like rapid gunfire in the small bedroom. The assassin collapsed like an empty suit of clothes.

Alexander was grappling with the remaining swordsman, blood seeping from a shallow cut on his cheek. I spun, sweeping my left stick under the attacker’s lead ankle while driving the tip of my right stick directly into his solar plexus.

The man gasped, his grip faltering. Alexander seized the opening, driving his elbow into the assassin's jaw, knocking him cold against the floor.

Silence returned to the ruined apartment.

Alexander stood chest-heaving, staring at the two elite killers lying incapacitated on the floor, then down at the wooden sticks in my hands. Blood dripped slowly from his cheek onto his leather collar.

I lowered the sticks, my breathing steady, my pulse calm.

Alexander looked at me, a mixture of awe and profound realization washing over his face.

"You aren't just Miguel's daughter," he said, his voice husky. "You are his masterwork."