Alcatraz Island…
Domino, staring down into a grimy prison sink, turns on the water. As the water begins filling the bowl, she grunts in pain—several times. Blood begins to mingle with the swirling water. She grunts again, and drops a bullet into the water.
“Domino?” someone asks. “Ma’am?” She ignores him and continues on her self-surgery, this time pulling out two teeth and dropping them into the sink. Again, someone asks if she’s in there, and if she’s okay. This time, she lifts her head and answers. She’s great, she says while taking a look at herself in the cracked mirror. In addition to the three bullet holes in her upper back and the one in her shoulder, a fresh slashing scar cuts across her mid-section.
The door opens, and in enters Domino’s X-Force teammate Josh Foley, a.k.a. Elixir. Aghast at her condition, he asks what happened to her. Domino continues looking at her reflection in the mirror, seemingly ignoring Foley’s question.
Flashback…
In the Nob Hill apartment that Neena Thurman, a.k.a. Domino, calls home, she endures a beating at the claws of a mechanical man dressed in all black. He cracks her in the jaw, knocking her to the floor. Landing on her back, Domino fires four shots from her pistols at the masked assailant. He returns the fire in force, hammering the floor near her with the sustained rounds of machine gun ammunition. He follows this up by rushing toward her and kicking her in the face. She falls to the floor once again, lifts her head, and stares at her attackers. “Are you @$#%#^s about ready to get started?” she asks.
Present…
“Domino?” Elixir asks, repeating his question. “Nothing,” Domino tells him. Elixir doesn’t believe her; he asks her to look at herself. Domino, interrupting him, asks if he’s going to heal her or what. She only asks because if she’s going to bleed out, she’ll do it somewhere cleaner. Apologizing, Elixir tells her of course he’ll heal her. She tells him to just do it, then; she’s got places to be.
Elixir lifts his hands and prepares to lay them on her injured body. Just before he makes contact, however, a gloved hand appears seemingly out of nowhere and grabs him by the wrist. “Not so fast, golden boy,” a familiar, gruff-sounding voice says. Both Elixir and Domino turn to behold Wolverine standing in the doorway, garbed in his gray and black X-Force uniform. He has a few questions for Dom before Josh gets started, he says.
Clearly annoyed, Domino turns to Elixir and asks what part of ‘whatever you do, don’t say anything to Wolverine’ he didn’t understand. Fumbling for the right words, he says she sounded like she was in trouble, and that he doesn’t really know her. “You think you know him?” she asks, gesturing toward Wolverine.
Josh admits he doesn’t, but Wolverine interrupts him mid-sentence. He asks Domino who did this to her. “Elixir. He just…he just went crazy!” she says, taking a seat on the bedframe. “I think you should kill him.” The astounded Elixir pleads that he didn’t do anything, but Wolverine doesn’t need to hear his defense to know he’s innocent. For the second time, he asks Domino who did this to her. She insists it isn’t his problem.
“No #@%^,” he tells her. After Domino correctly assumes that Wolverine’s going to let here bleed until she tells the truth, he once again tells her to spill it. She looks at him out of the corner of her eye. Blood drips from a cut down the tip of her nose. Without lifting her head, she takes a prolonged pause and utters the name of the culprits: the Assassins Guild.
Logan folds his arms and glares at her. He knew she was crazy, but he didn’t think she was stupid, too. Interjecting, Elixir asks if he can heal her now. Logan asks him if he said he could. Segueing back to the subject at hand, Wolverine says there isn’t any point, anyway, since Domino is clearly feeling suicidal. That’s the only reason he can figure for crossing the Assassins Guild. “Funny,” she tells Logan. “Now, do you want to know what happened or do you just want to be a *%@#?”
Wolverine tells her to proceed with the story. She explains they came to her—before she hooked up with S.H.I.E.L.D., and before she came across X-Force. Although Wolverine is shocked she took a job from the Guild, Domino informs him that she didn’t know it was them; it wasn’t a kill, it was a score. Plus, she was bored and needed the money. Wolverine asks whose money. Domino lays down on the bedframe, stretches her arm over her head, and answers that it was just some guys…
Flashback…
Domino finds herself surrounded by some guys at a shipyard. Dressed like ninjas and bearing samurai swords, they descend on her like a swarm of bees.
Present…
“What’s ‘The Hand’?” Elixir asks. Wolverine, resting his face in his palm, tells him to shut up. Domino, meanwhile, continues to explain. They had set up shop in New Orleans, she says, and were running weapons in and out through the Gulf of Mexico. The Guild, it seems, didn’t take too kindly to it. The guys that approached her knew every move the Hand was making, inside and out. All they were missing was her.
Wolverine calls bull on her story; she expects him to believe the Assassins Guild just needed an extra gun? No, Domino says; they just wanted luck on her side.
She doesn’t really remember at what point she realized they were the Guild; it was probably around the time the Hand got the drop on them and started shouting ‘kill the Assassin Guild scum!’ in Japanese. Anyway, her crew just wanted its score, and as much as she loves fighting ninjas, that’s all Domino wanted too.
The Hand was running weapons, they told her. They said they were sitting on a pile of cash. Looking back, Domino doesn’t know why she was so surprised by what she found. People lie, she says, and the Hand, like any business, likes to diversify—but even she has her limits. She recounts to Logan and Josh that the truck containing the pile of cash actually contained a pen of young, female sex slaves. She was stunned.
Domino explains to Wolverine that the Assassins Guild must have known what the Hand was up to, yet refrained from telling her. So, in the chaos, she decided to free the girls. She succeeded, leaving the Hand and the Assassins Guild free to deal with each other. It took her a few days, but she got the girls out of Louisiana and into the Japanese Embassy in Texas. “End of story,” she concludes—or so she thought. Now it looks like the Guild is a little…upset with her.
Wolverine turns and fires two rounds from the handgun into the door, destroying the hinges. It falls to the floor. In the doorway stands the shadowy figure of X-23, their teammate from X-Force. “If the Assassins Guild caught her, they would not just let her escape,” X-23 coolly insists. She starts to tell Wolverine to ask her another question, but he interrupts her and commands Elixir to heal Domino.
Later…
Wolverine takes a drive with Domino in his classic Ford Mustang. As they crest one of the numerous hills in San Francisco, Domino, fully healed, reminds Logan she doesn’t need his help. She’s wrong, he replies. “I know I shouldn’t give you shocking news while you’re driving, but I have managed to stay alive without you for pretty much all my life,” she tells him. That didn’t stop her from running to Elixir, Logan responds. “I don’t run to anyone,” she says. “And don’t pretend I don’t know why you’re really doing this.”
Sneering, Wolverine asks what she means. “I know you’ve got your dog nose and bear senses and whatever,” she says, folding her arms behind her head, “…but I’ve got my instincts too. You’ve wanted me in a big way ever since Japan,” she says with a sly grin.
Logan asks her if that’s right, also bearing a sly grin on his face. Yep, she says. He begins to tell her something in response. Unfortunately, he takes a sniper bullet in the face, cutting his sentence short. As blood explodes all over the broken windshield, the car runs off the road and flips over as it takes the turn too fast.
After it comes to a rest, Domino slips out of her upturned door. If this is how Logan is going to help her, she’ll pass, she says. She takes only a few steps away from the upturned vehicle before she hears a booming voice call out her full name. Domino looks up—and curses. Standing perched on the buildings surrounding her and the upturned car are the cybernetic assassins from the Assassins Guild. That morning was a courtesy, one of the assassins tells her—a warning. They gave her 24 hours and told her to return to them alone, but she didn’t listen. The Assassins Guild only gives one such chance.
Okay, Domino says—fine. They got her. She tells them she surrenders, and lifts her hands to emphasize the gesture. In both her hands, however, she still holds her pistols, pointed straight up in the air. As if by accident, she squeezes the trigger in her left hand and fires off a round. Oops, she says, her eyes widening in surprise. The men from the Guild look around for a moment in confusion. A moment later, the bullet returns to Earth, hitting the foremost assassin on the top of the head. His skull explodes from the impact.
Taking this opportunity to begin her attack, Domino springs into action, unloading her clips at the surrounding members of the Assassins Guild. As she fights, she yells to Logan that she changed her mind—he can help!
Her bullet takes one assassin in the throat, killing him as well. Domino asks if they can’t still talk this out. They continue firing at her, ignoring her light-hearted commentary. As she takes cover behind a wall, she makes another proposal: how about they put down their guns, she shoots them, and then she talks it out herself?
Again ignoring her chatter, the assassins begin formulating a strategy to flank her in her hiding spot. At that very moment, however, Wolverine emerges from the wrecked car and begins eviscerating their assailants. He stabs one man through the head, then impales another on his claws. Fountains of blood begin decorating the streets of San Francisco. Wolverine kills two more, gutting them mercilessly with his Adamantium claws. Domino leaps to his side, firing her pistol through the base of another assassin’s jaw.
Standing back to back in the middle of the street, they finish off the rest of the attackers. Covered in sweat and blood, they survey their surroundings, awash in truncated corpses smeared with red. The both catch their breath. “Logan,” Domino says, turning to her teammate and partner. Wolverine wipes the blood from his mouth and turns to her. They lock eyes and, in a moment of passion, embrace each other and share a visceral kiss. Domino wraps her legs around Wolverine’s sturdy torso, and he lifts her off the ground while they continue to hold onto one another.
A voice calls out Neena’s name, interrupting this feverish moment of raw, animal passion. Ending their kiss, Domino turns and looks at the new arrival: Razorfist of the Assassins Guild. The burly, savage-looking man with blades for hands snarls and asks Domino one question: “where’s the money?!”
Wolverine, clearly agitated, turns to Domino and repeats the question incredulously. “Where’s the money?” he barks.
Domino playfully bites on her thumb, unable to contain the guilty grin spreading across her face. “Whoops,” she says.
