Ironhead - Book #1 (Little Tinman)

They can kill Joaquín Herrera. They can rebuild him, too.

A staged shooting in a Chicago liquor store took the lives of his two best friends when he was eighteen. The grief drove him into the Army, then the CIA, then a classified operating table where they opened his skull and replaced what they found with something that doesn't sleep. When he woke with a tungsten heart and a red eye that never stopped watching, the architects had his father's face.

Now the friends he buried are walking again-collected, rewired, and aimed back at him, wearing the same smiles over different machinery.

The city is hemorrhaging: bombings dressed as infrastructure failures, children disappearing into programs that produce soldiers from the inside out, and a corporate empire whose paramilitary arm treats human bodies like rough drafts.

FBI Special Agent Martina Lessa has been chasing the same machine through burn sites and whistleblower leaks. She was seven when they modified her brain without asking. Her brother went deeper and never surfaced. Every classified document she's pulled points to the same name-and now that name is standing in front of her, held together by hardware and grief, asking her to trust him.

Chicago wants to call him a hero. Chicago doesn't know what's underneath the skin.

Ironhead is a psychological body-horror novel about engineered trauma, resurrected friendships, and the thing that happens when a weapon starts remembering it used to be a child.