Chapter 212 Interviews.

Chapter 212: 212 Interviews.

"So glad you asked!" she beamed, her tail wagging fast enough to fan the welding smoke out of the air. "The Liquidator is my latest pride and joy! It’s a high-frequency molecular destabilizer.

"One pull of the trigger and bzzzt—instant bad-guy smoothie! No more renting woodchippers, no more buying industrial drums of acid, and zero awkward midnight trips to the river!

"Plus, the leftover slurry is packed with nitrates. You can literally hose your enemies straight into the flowerbeds. It’s eco-friendly homicide, Miles!"

Okay, as far as evil pitches went, that was top-shelf material.

If I were running a cartel or an actual doomsday cult, I’d have ordered a dozen on the spot.

Unfortunately for Rhea’s creative side, I ran a strictly non-lethal operation—turning applicants into mulch tended to scare off the corporate sponsors. Still, it was almost tempting.

The front yard looked like a moonscape after all the craters the heroes had left in the turf lately, and good fertilizer wasn’t cheap.

"Hold off on the human compost for now," I said. "Glacia is out front taking down names and numbers so we can run proper interviews. I just need you to throw together something that can vet their aliases."

"Oooh, running covert background checks?" Rhea wiggled her eyebrows, grinning dog ear to dog ear. "Very Big Brother of you, Miles. And here I thought only the feds got to play with spyware."

"Pretty sure the feds aren’t legally allowed to do half the stuff they do, either."

"Well, yeah, they aren’t supposed to. Big difference."

She had a point.

"Look, I don’t need their social security numbers or their middle-school report cards," I told her. "Just write me a scraper that pulls up news clippings, arrest warrants, or cape-forum threads attached to their names.

"If some guy sits across from me claiming he blew up the moon, I want to know if he actually did it or if he just got high behind a planetarium."

"Say no more, bossman," she purred, shooting me a massive, exaggerated wink. "One hundred percent above-board, totally-not-felonious digital dossiers coming right up!"

I narrowed my eyes. Whenever Rhea winked like that, a federal prosecutor somewhere felt a cold chill.

"Keep it simple, Rhea," I warned. "Basic public records. Don’t crash the Pentagon just to see if the Lobster guy has a parking ticket."

"Wouldn’t dream of it, Miles." Wink. "Strictly surface-level." Wink.

"Rhea—"

"Okay, out, out! You’re cramping my creative process!" she sang, practically shoving me backward into the elevator capsule and slapping the panel for the main floor. "I’ve got databases to pillage for my evil overlord! I’ll bring the tablet up when it’s ready. Love ya, byeee!"

The heavy doors slid shut on her manic grin before I could even get another word in.

Yeah, that was definitely going to blow up in my face later. Regardless, the clock was ticking. It was time to start the hiring process.

Saying I was dreading day one of villain recruitment didn’t even begin to cover it.

Unfortunately, unlike Clockblock, I couldn’t just mug the fourth dimension whenever I wanted to stall a deadline, so interview morning rolled around whether I was ready or not.

Thankfully, Glacia had already trimmed the dead weight off the roster before they even got through the front door.

She’d immediately flagged and bounced a few operatives she recognized from The New Order’s payroll.

I had zero illusions about them wanting an honest career change, the Order didn’t do two-week notices, and their retirement plan usually involved a shallow grave.

Anyone claiming to be a former member was guaranteed to be a mole.

She’d also cut a suspiciously dense cluster of rock-skinned bruisers and heavy-metal freaks—obvious plants from Arman’s crew looking to settle the score after a number of things.

Not like I was intentionally sabotaging his business, but shady shit and villainy ran in the same close circle.

Still, having Glacia eyeball the lineup at the gate only filtered out the obvious traps.

To weed out the rest, I needed to know what was actually rattling around inside these lunatics’ skulls. And who knew what kind of twisted garbage lurked in the minds of desperate supervillains?

Psyren.

Psyren knew.

Which was why my resident telepath was currently slouched in the seat to my right, serving as the ultimate bubblegum-punk lie detector.

She was wearing a shredded crop top and a miniskirt that barely qualified as clothing, lazily thumbing through her phone while humming a bassline under her breath.

Heavy spiked leather wrapped her throat and wrists, and her oversized headphones were crooked over her short pink hair.

I had a strict house rule against her peeking into brains uninvited, but today the safeties were off.

I couldn’t afford to bring a legitimate serial killer onto the payroll—or rather, I had reached my quota on resident psychos. If a new hire went rogue and leveled a kindergarten, the feds would drop the hammer straight on me.

With her free hand, Psyren was absently scratching Nibbles behind what passed for his ears. The mutant pet was curled up across her thighs, panting like a dog.

The thing was a genetic crime against nature that looked like someone had spliced a bullfrog with a table saw and a mako shark.

I still half-expected the ugly little bastard to take my hand off at the wrist, but he made Psyren happy, so he got a pass.

We had set up shop in the chalet’s main conference room.

Letting a parade of unstable strangers into my house went against every paranoid instinct I had, but if I was going to run a syndicate, I needed to set the tone immediately.

Nothing screamed ’untouchable crime lord’ quite like forcing applicants to walk down a fifty-foot mahogany boardroom table while I loomed at the far end in my full Polaris armor, lounging on a massive throne of welded black iron.

It wasn’t forged from the melted badges of dead cops or anything, but it did the trick.

The only missing piece was Rhea’s background-check hardware.

"She give you an ETA on that gizmo, boss?" Psyren asked, not looking up from her screen.

"Nope," I said, right as my magnetic field prickled. Down the hall, a very familiar constellation of steel-toed boots, belt buckles, and loose pocket-wrenches was sprinting toward us at breakneck speed. "Though if I had to guess... three, two, one—"

The heavy double doors flew open with a deafening CRASH as Rhea booted them off the latch.

"Behold!"