The warehouse was a cathedral of shadows and decay, but the only thing being worshipped here tonight was fear. It hung thick in the air, a metallic tang mixed with the scent of stale water and the coppery promise of blood. The mob bosses, three men who had fancied themselves kings of this concrete jungle, were on their knees. They weren't kings anymore. They were supplicants before a wrathful god.

And the Red Hood was fuming.

It wasn't a hot, wild anger. It was something far more dangerous: a cold, absolute, and meticulously controlled inferno. Every line of his body, encased in leather and Kevlar, was taut with it. The white streak in his hair seemed to glow like a warning under the single, flickering fluorescent light. They had tried to send a message by targeting his operation, his money. A foolish, but understandable, power play. But then they had made the one miscalculation from which there was no return. They had tried to get to him through you.

His voice, when it finally cut through the heavy silence, was deceptively calm, a low, gravelly rumble that vibrated through the concrete floor. It was the calm before the annihilation.

"You know..." he began, tilting his head as he paced slowly before them like a tiger sizing up its crippled prey. "While I'm not emotional about the money like others..." He stopped, his heavy boot coming down with a final crack that echoed in the vast space. "I am emotional about the fact that someone has laid hands on my spouse."

He turned fully towards them now, and the raw, unfiltered fury in his Lazarus-green eyes was enough to make the toughest of them whimper. He took a single, deliberate step forward, and the men flinched back as one. Slowly, with a terrifying reverence, he raised a gloved hand and pointed directly at the ring on your finger. The symbol he had put there. The promise he had made.

"MY SPOUSE!"

The roar was not human. It was the sound of a fault line splitting open, of a dam of carefully constructed control shattering into a billion pieces. The word exploded through the warehouse, shaking dust from the rafters. The men on the floor recoiled as if struck physically by the force of it.

He was in front of the lead boss in two strides, yanking the man's head up by his hair to force him to meet his gaze. The violence in the motion was absolute, yet his voice dropped back into that deadly, intimate calm.

"No amount of money on Earth can pay for that transgression." He released him with a shove of disgust. "And for that..."

He reached back, the sound of leather creaking the only noise in the dead silence. The twin pistols slid from their holsters with a smooth, oiled click that was more terrifying than any shout. He raised them, the barrels unwavering, a final judgment.

"...You'll pay it with flesh."