The chapter opens with Alex Volkov on a phone call with Andrew, the CEO of Gruppmann Enterprises, who pleads with Alex to call off a hostile takeover that will destroy his company and harm his family and employees. Alex dismisses Andrew's personal appeals with cold indifference, viewing them as irrelevant in the corporate world, and hangs up. Alex reflects that Gruppmann Enterprises is merely a stepping stone in his broader plan to expand Archer Group—currently a real estate development company—into telecommunications, e-commerce, finance, and energy. He also notes that Andrew has quietly settled sexual harassment claims, further justifying the takeover in his mind.

After the call, Alex makes a mental note to fire his assistant for allowing his personal cell number to leak to Andrew. The assistant, hired as a favor to her congressman father, has made repeated errors, and this is the final straw. Alex then settles onto his couch and begins his nightly ritual: replaying a specific memory from his past, which he describes as his own form of therapy.

The memory takes Alex back to October 29, 2006—his first birthday after his family's murder. He recalls how his parents used to make birthdays special: trips to Six Flags, surprise breakfasts of blueberry pancakes with bacon and hash browns, his mother tickling him awake, and his little sister climbing over him. All of that ended when his family was killed. His Uncle Ivan, his father's brother with whom his father had a falling out, took Alex in rather than letting him enter the foster system. On Alex's birthday, Ivan brought him to an arcade, but Alex refused to play. Instead, he sat at a table, haunted by images of three gunshots and three bodies falling—memories he could not escape due to his eidetic or near-perfect memory, which he calls his "gift."

Alex recalls that since his family's murder, adults instinctively feared him when they looked into his eyes. When Uncle Ivan asked what he wanted, twelve-year-old Alex answered with a single word: revenge. Back in the present, Alex reflects that this moment gave him his life's purpose, and he has replayed it every day for fourteen years. Multiple therapists tried to redirect his obsessive focus on the past, suggesting art or sports, but Alex rejected them all. He doesn't want to heal—he wants to burn and bleed, and he intends to make the person responsible for his family's death suffer a thousandfold.