Ironhead - Book #1 (Little Tinman)

They didn't just kill Joaquin Herrera. They rebuilt him.

His entire life was orchestrated - the Latin Kings attack that murdered his friends, the grief that drove him to enlist, the bullet through his brain in Panama when he refused to become Project Ironhead's cyclotype prototype. When he woke in a CIA lab with a titanium skull and a tungsten heart, the architects revealed themselves: his father Renato and mentor Salvatore had been engineering him since childhood, turning trauma into conditioning until his body had no choice.

Now Joaquin hunts the Ghost - Salvatore, the architect who survived and vanished into Blue Moon's corporate empire. But revenge fractures when your dead friends come back as enemies. Sofia and Dominic weren't buried. They were upgraded, turned into Black Sun's elite cyclotype operatives, aimed back at the boy they died protecting.

FBI Special Agent Martina Lessa recognizes that pattern. She was eight when two American soldiers visited her Manaus neighborhood. Everyone died. She and her brother Lucas survived with modifications they didn't consent to. Lucas vanished into the machine. Martina crawled into the Bureau, hunting Joaquin Herrera through leaked whistleblower files that contain her own face.

When their cases collide - her investigation into Blue Moon's engineered disasters, his vendetta against the men who made him - the conspiracy's endgame clarifies. The program that destroyed them both isn't dead. It's scaling. Children disappearing from Chicago neighborhoods. Cyclotypes Joaquin unknowingly recruited. The dead who keep coming back as soldiers.

Victims turned perpetrators. Families feeding on themselves. Martina and Joaquin must decide whether they're after justice or annihilation, and whether destroying the machine means becoming it. The line between human and engineered horror dissolves, and the cost of truth is measured in what's left when you burn it all down.