She wasn’t always named Tits, obviously. Her parents weren’t monsters. When she first started legging for Brick, he’d pegged her as Tits right from the get-go. Whenever he sent her out on a job, he’d tell Byron or the Jink or whoever, “Take the tits with you.” He never spoke to her directly.

When she popped him, she held on to the name. Not out of pride, or defiance or anything, but because she knew it didn’t matter what they called her. She was going to put her boot on the throat of the rackets, and anybody who can do that can be called any damn thing at all, Tits or Greasepit or Satan himself.

That first year she had trouble from the loud voices and broad shoulders in Brick’s old gang. She put them down hard, sliced ’em up and down and bathed in their blood. There were no second chances, and after a while there weren’t many first chances. She killed 37 people that first year, left them ripped nearly in half in the street in front of the copshops, and after that she was a ghost. A demon. A trigger and a knife with no hand behind it. She gave her orders and followed along behind them like the tenth plague of Egypt. In ten years, she was the unholy god of the city. Widows and orphans prayed to her, and the leggers burned incense and fat in her name in barrels in every alley in town.