Darkness isn't scary when you grew up inside it.
People imagine assassins as shadows in leather and myth.
The truth is uglier. It's cold morning steel against your gums while you learn to steady your breath.
It's counting footfalls through drywall. It's memorizing what fear smells like so you can wear it like cologne and convince others it's theirs.
My name is Akagiri Kurotsuki.
Once, I was seven and rich and stupid.
My father was a businessman whose hands shook only when his phone died.
My mother was a diplomat who could smile while telling you no to your face. They were ghosts who lived at the edges of my childhood—present on paper, absent in practice.
The only adult who looked at me like I was real was my grandfather, and that look could sharpen a boy into a blade.
The night that made me, I came home from school and found both parents on the floor—neat holes, neat blood, neatly finished.
The men who did it didn't get to enjoy their cigarettes.
Grandfather had trailed them from the streetlights.
He disposed of them fast, quiet, final.
Later, I learned why they'd come. A rival wanted Father erased.
The hired hands were the kind that never miss.
The mistake wasn't theirs. It was my grandfather's—twenty-five years earlier, he'd taken a contract on a mafia boss and finished the job. The boss's son—five years old, eyes like wet coal—saw the wolf and was spared.
Mercy, like milk, curdles if you leave it long enough.
Grandfather took me in. He didn't weep. He didn't hold me.
He opened a drawer and set down a knife, a spool of piano wire, and a bottle with a skull on it, like a fairy tale for killers.
Childhood ended at seven.
Training began at dawn.
Weapons.
Poisons.
Anatomy and where fear lives in a throat. How to breathe through pain, how to sell a lie using eye contact and silence.
Infiltration like music—timing, rhythm, exits.
I learned to stitch a wound with my left hand, to dislocate a shoulder and use it anyway, to count heartbeats through a wall.
When I failed, I started over. When I bled, I cleaned the floor.
Grandfather wasn't cruel.
Cruelty is sloppy.
He was precise.
Fourteen years later, at twenty-one, I had names.
Six mercenaries and the employer sitting on top like a rotten cherry.
I moved city to city, job to job, face to face. One by one, they went off the board.
Two begged.
One tried to hire me.
One prayed.
All four died tidy, because my grandfather taught me that tidy is kindness.
The sixth took longer.
He was careful, good enough to be unlucky.
I met him in a stairwell that smelled like cheap perfume.
He died on the third landing, eyes on the exit he never reached. I whispered "you were the best of them" because it felt honest and I owed him the courtesy.
Only the employer remained—the rival who signed the papers that signed my family away. I took him in his bath, steam rolling off his skin like his sins were boiling out. He tried to scream, but the tile drank it. When it was over, the water ran pink and I was finally empty enough to sleep.
That's when the phone in my pocket vibrated twice—one long, one short. The signal I'd only ever felt once: Run.
Professionals were coming. Not street dogs.
Wolves.
I chose not to run.
I picked the worst possible place to make a last stand: a bare apartment with table, chair, kettle; a line of sight on the stairwell and the window.
No sentiment, no hostages, no noise to hide my heart.
I brewed tea because routine keeps your hands from shaking. I laid out magazines because panic reloads are for amateurs. I opened the window and measured the drop—three floors to concrete, one to the iron balcony below, top of a garbage truck parked crooked at the curb.
They came at 2:17 a.m. because good men die then. First charge: controlled. Second: silent. One flashed a light through the keyhole to check dust.
The door opened a hair too slow for a neighbor.
I put two through the gap before the hinge squealed.
Someone cursed.
That's how I knew they were human.
They flooded in, black cloth, no patches, no heroes.
Muzzle flashes stitched the dark.
The first minute was math.
Angles.
Feet.
The kettle whistled like a bird that didn't know it lived inside a storm.
I kept my shots honest—chest, throat, face—and moved between table and wall like I'd trained this room since childhood. Three down.
One stumbled and knocked the chair.
A body hit the kettle; steam hissed; someone slipped in the spill and fired wild.
I put him out of his misery because chaos is a ladder and every rung is a corpse.
Then the math broke.
It always does.
Numbers win.
A round kissed my ribs hard enough to take my breath. Another threaded my shoulder like a needle.
I crossed to the window and glanced down—street empty, rain beginning, a cat sprinting under a car like it knew a god was cleaning the board.
One of them spoke, voice level, respectful. "Kurotsuki. Lay down. We're paid either way."
I laughed because I couldn't help it. "Mercy is expensive. You can't afford it."
He sighed. "For what it's worth—your grandfather should've killed the boy."
"Agreed," I said, and stepped into the open, because a wolf dies with teeth out.
The last minute was light and noise and heat.
The chair split.
The table coughed splinters.
I put holes where men should be and some were there and some weren't, and the room filled with the metallic smell that follows thunder.
A round walked across my chest like a drunk tourist looking for a bar. Another round found the soft puzzle piece above my hip, and my legs stopped agreeing with gravity.
I fell in stages.
First to a knee.
Then to the floor.
Then through the floor, through sound, through the idea of weight. The kettle sang itself hoarse.
I thought about stupid things. The way my mother cut peaches in one long curl. The way my father's watch clicked, soft and smug.
The way Grandfather said "again" like a prayer and a punishment in one word.
Then—nothing.
Darkness.
Not the kind you hide in.
The kind that hides you.
For a second—just one—the dark was peaceful.
No bills.
No cleanup.
No lists of names.
A rare, ridiculous thought crossed my mind and made me smile in a mouth that wasn't there:
So this is death. Not too bad, actually.
And just as I started to enjoy the quiet—
FLASH.
A white-hot nail drove through the center of me.
The black peeled back.
Pain bloomed and vanished like a liar's promise.
Somewhere far away, boots were moving. Somewhere nearer, the kettle finally stopped singing.
A last image burned on the inside of the dark: a child's eyes, wet coal, five years old, spared.
Then even that went out.