Gideon Malick picked up a hamburger from the table and stuffed it into his mouth, his expression strange as he wondered whether the exquisite dinner that should have been served here, prepared by a Michelin three-star restaurant chef, had already been thrown into the trash. He did not think hamburgers, fries, milkshakes, soda, and doughnuts could count as suitable hospitality, especially when entertaining an important guest. Such common food only seemed shabby.
It was not until he saw his daughter, Stephanie Malik, handing out more food to the bodyguards together with their guest, then sitting on a bench in the courtyard to eat and talk, that he looked through the restaurant's floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking the courtyard and could only shrug, tacitly accepting the arrangement. The soldiers qualified to serve as Malik family bodyguards were all Hydra agents absolutely loyal to him. Their loyalty far exceeded that once shown by S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Operations Department toward Alexander Pierce. They were an armed force cultivated by the Malik family since childhood. Judging from the indifference this King displayed while sitting upon his throne, he had absolutely no need to perform such gestures to win people over.
No!
Dean Malick watched his daughter's smiling face in the courtyard and deeply suspected that this was not so simple.
The man sitting beside Stephanie was a conqueror through and through, an utterly cold-blooded tyrant with incomparable ambition to swallow the entire world. To him, there were only two kinds of people in this world: those with value and those without, and they received different treatment. He would never bother with meaningless showmanship. Even the deity worshipped by Hydra at its origin had been caged and sent into a laboratory by him. There had to be a reason for this—perhaps it was a warning born of distrust