Let me just talk to you about how much I love teenage Talon, this homeless kid that’s so fucking determined to make it even though right now, he’s just a small time hitman for local gangs and the kids at school mock him for being poor.
He’s absolutely driven. He knows he’s going to be make it, he’s going to get out of this city and out of this country. He’s going to be an internationally renowned assassin who’s given a stupid nickname by the papers and hunted by Interpol. He’s going to have so much money and all the assholes who made fun of him for being a poor homeless kid in high school had better watch their fucking backs.
Even assassins take vacations - and Talon has a long memory.
He's so angry and aware of how unfair the world is. He goes to school with people who are no smarter than him, no more moral than him. They've had the advantages of private tutoring and getting to spend time reading instead of scrambling for survival. if he'd had those advantages, they'd be on even terms.
But he didn't. It's not even. It was never fucking even. What are you in this world depends so much on whose blood is in your veins and Talon can fix that by cutting throats and spilling all of that precious blood out.
It doesn't matter that they call it blue blood, it looks fucking red to him and it tastes just like anyone else's (it tastes like hate, it tastes like victory, it tastes like copper-steel-vengeance) and Talon laughs because rich people pay him to kill each other. And how dumb is that? Sometimes it's not rich people who are his targets, sometimes it's journalists or politicians (yes, poor politicians exist), but mostly rich people kill other rich people. They don't care enough about the poor people to waste money sending assassins after them.
Talon has a fortune in blood money and knowing what he's done for it makes the money all the sweeter to him. There was no way he should have succeeded, not when the statistics say he should have died on the streets or ended up spending his life behind bars, but he did. He won. And it's all because he followed one simple rule:
If the deck is stacked against you, kill the dealer.