The vault door sealed behind her with a dull metallic groan, leaving Raven standing at the threshold of her father’s hidden empire. The subway warehouse stretched before her like a crypt untouched by time. A wide corridor opened into a cavernous chamber, industrial lights buzzing faintly from overhead conduits. Layers of dust clung to the air, mixing with the scent of old oil and cold steel.
No guards.
Not a single one.
Raven scanned the empty warehouse, her brow lowering slightly as she walked forward. Her boots echoed faintly against the concrete. "He wouldn’t even trust his own men inside the place they were supposed to guard," she muttered. "They’re all stationed at the front entrance like good little watchdogs... never realizing their master built himself a backdoor. The moment the feds come knocking? He throws them under the bus and vanishes without a trace."
Rows of towering crates lined the walls, their sides stamped with stenciled codes and shipping seals. She passed pallets of ammunition wrapped in shrink-film, boxes of 5.56mm NATO, 7.62 Soviet, .45 ACP, 9mm Parabellum, .308 Winchester, and more. Thousands of rounds. Hundreds of thousands. Everything from sniper cartridges to submachine gun ammo.
Gun racks filled the central aisle like militarized library shelves. AK-47s lined the first set. Then came the AR-15s, their collapsible stocks tucked tight and barrels gleaming under the flickering lights. FN SCARs rested beside HK416s. M4 carbines, Tavor X95s, Steyr AUGs—each weapon cleaned, oiled, tagged, and sorted by nation of origin. Every model looked new, fresh from factory lines or better. Not a speck of rust in sight.
She ran her fingers over the cool frame of an AR-15 as she passed, the polymer grip still slick with fresh oil. So many guns. So many ways to kill. She didn’t need to test them to know they worked. Her father didn’t store junk.
Toward the back of the chamber, the layout changed. No longer crates and racks—but secured glass cases with velvet-lined interiors and laser-cut foam. Inside were pistols. Rows of Glocks, Berettas, Sig Sauers, M1911s, and more exotic variants like CZ Shadows and FN Five-seveNs. Handguns for every purpose: concealment, street intimidation, quick draw, execution.
Each one untraceable.
The serial numbers had been filed off with surgical precision. The internal mechanisms tweaked and polished. The barrels smoothed. But it wasn’t just cosmetic. The shell casings these guns fired had no traditional rifling marks. No identifying grooves. No ballistic fingerprint.
She paused beside one of the machines that made this possible. A sleek black box with a faint humming still echoing inside its frame. No bigger than a printer. Nothing fancy. No labels. No buttons.
Everyone who bought from the Salvatores believed this machine was her father's design.
But she knew better.
It had taken her two days of isolation over a weekend in the sub-basement of their estate. At nine years old, she had crawled between bookshelves of outdated engineering manuals, memorized outdated FBI reports, and drawn up blueprints on graph paper. She figured out how to suppress shell deformation during ignition. Solved casing drag from extractor marks. Compensated for bolt scrape.
And all because one night she couldn’t sleep and started wondering why every gun that claimed to be untraceable still got traced.
Her fingers tightened along the machine's smooth edge.
"I wasn’t kept around because he loved me," she said under her breath. Her voice didn’t shake. It was cold and steady. "I was the brain he couldn’t replicate. The daughter he could exploit."
She stepped back, letting her eyes scan the rest of the weapons gallery. There were no photos of her. No trophies from school. No childlike drawings tacked to the walls. Just weapons. Projects. Lab notes. Shells.
In the far corner, a row of newer pistols were marked with a faint blue tag. Experimental models. Custom recoil control. Vapor barrel shielding. Quick-cooling frames. She recognized every component. She had designed most of them before she turned thirteen.
And what had her father done with that talent?
He monetized it. Laundered it. Sold it to mercenaries and narco lords. Gave it away to street syndicates who couldn’t pronounce half the systems they were using.
She turned toward the warehouse's interior again. One long aisle after another stretched forward, forming corridors of death. No alarms. No biometric scanners. Just her memory and access card.
This place wasn't guarded because it didn't need to be.
It was hidden so well no one knew to look.
Her father had always been two steps ahead of every investigation. Every federal probe ended up chasing rumors or disinformation. He moved the main stash every six months. Updated manifests daily. Changed staff every four.
But this section... this one hadn’t changed.
Because only one person knew how it worked.
Her.
She kept walking, past another series of crates marked with color-coded seals. Red for heat-based arms. Green for chemical munitions. Yellow for electric discharge tools. There was a crate of dart guns rigged for neurotoxin deployment. Another for EMP launchers. Devices she had half-forgotten she built.
And it all came back now.
It came back in the silence.
She paused beneath a half-dead light, its flickering casting stuttering shadows across the ground. A mouse darted across the floor near her boot and vanished under a pallet. She didn’t react.
Her eyes were fixed forward.
This wasn't a warehouse.
It was a gallery.
A timeline.
Of her life.
Every weapon. Every tweak. Every improvement. They were milestones. Not in love. Not in joy. But in her slow evolution from child to machine.
She touched a side table covered in blueprints and prototype schematics. Her handwriting covered every corner of the paper.
No acknowledgment. No signature.
She rolled one blueprint up and tucked it into her coat.
Let him rot.
Let them all rot.
This place didn’t belong to William Salvatore anymore.
It belonged to her.
And she wasn’t going to leave a single bullet behind.
But Raven was far from done this place, still has lots more toys for her to take.
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