?Chapter 172:


    The metallic crack echoed through the room just as Merritt crumpled, dead before he hit the floor. Crimson blood gushed from the neat hole in his forehead, sttering across the gleaming marble floor and pooling beneath his body.


    His eyes, still open in death, were frozen wide with terror and disbelief. Once just a lowlife from the docks, he’d wed his way through countless bloody brawls and near-death scrapes, carving out a name for himself on the wrong side of thew. All those years, he’d epted that a violent end was waiting—just not like this. He’d braced himself for a hail of bullets from rival gangs, a knife in the dark from a hired killer, or maybe a ss of poisoned whiskey served up by a backstabbing friend. But thest thing he ever expected was to be taken out by a coin—something so small, yet lethal in Cole’s hand.


    A coin, flicked with the speed and force of a bullet—he’d only heard of such things in pulp fiction. Now, Cole had brought that impossible story to life.


    Merritt, a man who thought he’d seen it all, had finally witnessed something that defied every rule of the streets—and it was thest sight he’d ever see.


    Shock rippled through the room. The masked man standing at Merritt’s side stood rooted to the spot, frozen by the sudden, surreal violence. The scan had indicated that Cole and his men hadn’t brought any weapons. However, Cole had needed nothing more than a coin to send Merritt to his grave.


    With Merritt dead, the men in ck descended intoplete disarray, their hierarchical structure crumbling around them.


    These hardened criminals, ustomed to living precariously under Merritt’s ironmand, now stood directionless. Who would fill the leadership vacuum?


    All eyes instinctively turned toward the second-inmand—the masked man whose authority had ranked just beneath Merritt’s. A henchman sidled up to the masked man, voice tight with tension. “What should we do now?”


    The masked man snapped from his momentary stupor, scanning the room as a calcting smile twisted his features.


    History would repeat itself. Just as Merritt had once betrayed his employer to make his fortune, so too would the masked man seize this opportunity. If he could navigate today’s chaos sessfully, Merritt’s entire empire would fall into his hands.


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    “Kill them all! Avenge Mr. Carman! Leave no survivors!” the masked man bellowed, his voice reverberating through the hall. His n crystallized with brutal simplicity—ughter everyone present, sink the yacht into the ocean’s depths, and bury the truth forever. Then, he would return to im Merritt’s legacy as his own.


    Decision made, the masked man retreated strategically toward the edge of the hall as his subordinates raised their assault rifles, targeting Cole and hispanions.


    Yet, the bloodbath the masked man anticipated never materialized.


    Cole’spanions moved with astonishing precision, diving behind pirs with fluid grace while simultaneously disarming the nearest gunmen and appropriating their weapons.


    What began as an ambush against unarmed targets transformed within seconds into a bnced firefight.


    Throughout the first-floor hall, men in ck copsed in rapid session. Those positioned on the second floor were picked off methodically, their bodies tumbling to the level below.


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