Content Advisory:
This chapter contains explicit depictions of death, severe bodily injury, and blood, alongside intense psychological and emotional trauma. Scenes include graphic imagery and distressing events that may be unsettling to some readers. Reader discretion is strongly advised.
02:15 AM | N.P.U. Headquarters, North Metro
The corridor was a throat of fluorescent light, swallowing him whole. Adrian's boots struck the linoleum with a hollow, ticking sound a metronome counting down to nothing. Every step sent a fresh shockwave through his battered frame: a deep ache in the torn muscle of his shoulder, a raw burn across his flayed back, and underneath it all, a thick, stubborn guilt that had taken root behind his ribs like a tumor.
The files in his satchel were an anchor. He hadn't opened them.
Couldn't.
Not yet.
Maybe not ever.
Their physical weight dug into his side, but the truth they contained was a heavier, colder thing, pulling him toward a depth he wasn't ready to face.
"I'll read them later," he muttered to Elias. The words were scraped raw, empty of everything but exhaustion. A lie they both heard, clear as a confession.
Not tonight.
Elias didn't argue. Didn't offer pointless comfort or meaningless platitudes about sacrifice and the greater good. He just stood by the physio's door, a silent silhouette at the end of the too-bright hall.
His understanding radiated out not as warmth, but as a kind of respectful cold. The acknowledgment that some wounds couldn't be bandaged.
The physio's office stung with the smell of industrial cleaner and old pain baked into vinyl over years of treating injuries that shouldn't have happened. Adrian collapsed onto the table face-down, his body a map of fresh insults, each one with its own story of poor decisions and worse luck.
The physio's hands were professional, impersonal, efficient. They worked the knotted ropes of muscle along his spine with the detached competence of someone who'd seen worse and knew better than to ask questions.
Each dig was a lightning bolt of sense memory the scrape of the rooftop, the strain in his lungs, the guard's brutal twist on his already-bad wrist, the sickening heat of friction burns.
But the physical hurt was just surface static. White noise. The real torment was the loop in his head, the questions chasing their own tails in the dark:
Will Marcus make it?
Is he even alive?
Is his voice ever coming through the comms again?
Take care.
When it was over, Adrian sat up slowly, vertebrae shifting with soft, troubling clicks that suggested things weren't quite aligned the way they should be. He managed a "thanks" that sounded more like a threat, or possibly a warning. Elias held the door, his gaze fixed on a point in the distance, carefully avoiding Adrian's eyes the kind of tactical avoidance that spoke of years managing traumatized operatives.
Outside, the night was a wet black mirror. Rain had painted the streets in slick neon reflections, turning the city into something beautiful and treacherous. Adrian slid into his car, the cold leather seeping through his torn clothes like judgment. The city moved around him headlights cutting the mist, muffled music from a bar where people laughed and didn't know the world was ending, the flash of blue police lights two blocks over dealing with normal crimes committed by normal people.
He felt separate from it all. Moving through gelid water. His own breath the loudest thing in the quiet cabin.
He tried to light a cigarette. His hands shook a fine, uncontrollable tremor that turned the simple act of sparking a flame into an exercise in futility. The lighter sparked and died. Sparked and died. He gave up, tossing it onto the passenger seat with a sound of pure disgust.
Even this.
Can't even do this.
02:27 AM | Adrian's Safehouse
The safehouse greeted him with its familiar scent of dust and quiet defeat the smell of a place that was shelter but never home. He didn't turn on the lights. Just walked through the dark like a ghost haunting his own life and fell onto the bed, fully dressed.
The ruined jacket was glued to the burned flesh of his back, leather and blood and grit forming a crude new layer of skin. He stared at the ceiling, at the water stain shaped like some forgotten country, some place that didn't exist anymore.
He didn't blink.
Barely breathed.
Just waited.
For what, he didn't know.
The buzz against his thigh was a tiny earthquake.
His phone glowed on the mattress, a cold blue rectangle in the dark. 2:27 AM. A number he didn't know.
No name.
No preview.
Just numbers, anonymous and inevitable.
Dread was a taste copper and bile, familiar as an old friend.
He tapped the screen.
The image built itself slowly, a digital ghost forming in the dark, pixel by terrible pixel.
Marcus.
His body was arranged on beige industrial tile the kind that's easy to clean, resistant to staining a broken puppet discarded after the show. A single, perfect bullet hole was drilled through the center of his forehead, a full stop where a sentence had been.
Where a shy, wide grin had been just hours before, nervous in the helicopter, trying to be brave.
The wound was dark, neat, obscenely final.
Professional.
The right eye was swollen shut, a massive hematoma blooming underneath like a rotten fruit, purple-black and grotesque. The left eye stared at the ceiling, clouded and vacant, seeing nothing and everything and nothing forever.
His lips were peeled back from his teeth in a frozen snarl or maybe a scream, cut short. Teeth were shattered, bright white shards in the dark red ruin of his mouth. His fingers were gone severed cleanly at the knuckles, precise as surgery.
The stumps were raw, exposed bone visible in the meat. One twitched in the photograph, a last, futile signal from dead nerves that didn't know they were dead yet.
Blood.
There was so much of it.
It pooled around him, thick and glossy, already browning at the edges where it met the tile and began the long process of oxidation. The air in Adrian's room seemed to thicken, to carry the phantom stench of cordite and hot copper and the particular sweetness of a body that had stopped being a person.
Every detail etched itself into his brain with acid, permanent as a brand: the torn tendon in the neck, the specific arc of spatter on the wall telling the story of violence, the casual curl of his remaining hand like he was reaching for something he'd never find.
Adrian's stomach turned inside out. A rough, punched-out sound escaped him
"Hngh—" before he lurched sideways, retching into the blanket, cheek pressed to damp cotton, acid burning up his throat, his body trying to reject what his eyes had seen.
The phone skidded across the sheets, the screen still glowing with the horror, illuminating nothing.
Some detached, clinical part of his mindthe part that had kept him alive through too many crime scenes filed it all away.
For the archives, it whispered. For the nightmares. You'll need the details later. You'll need to remember exactly how this looked.
A full, terrible minute passed. His breath hitched wetly in the silence "Hah… hah…" the sound of a man drowning in air.
"Augh… God…"
Then he moved. His trembling hand clawed the phone back, fingers numb, moving on autopilot. He called Elias.
One ring.
Two.
"Elias." His own voice sounded foreign, thick, like his tongue had forgotten how to form words properly.
"Adrian?" Instant alertness. The voice of someone who never really sleeps. "Report."
"Snf— They have him." Adrian's voice was flat, dead, all the emotion compressed into a singularity. "They… they sent a picture. He's… gone."
A beat of static. A held breath on the other end of the line, the sound of a man calculating casualties.
"Are you sure?"
"I'm looking at it."
Silence. Then, Elias's voice, stripped down to the wire, all command structure and protocol because that's all he had left. "Demands?"
"No demands. Just the picture."
A longer silence. The kind that speaks volumes. "They're sending a message. Proof of concept. 'We can reach anyone. We can do this. You're not safe. Nobody's safe.'"
For a moment, the professional shell around Adrian cracked not shattered, just cracked, hairline fractures letting the pressure escape. He wanted to scream. "He… hnng… he shouldn't have—no, I— he was alive when I left. He was just—God, his face—he was happy to help…."
His voice broke on the last word, splintered like glass.
"Adrian." Elias's voice cut through, sharpened by a command that was also, barely, a plea. "You did what you could. This blood isn't yours alone." A pause, control drawn razor-thin, stretched to breaking. Sniffle…" You need to get your head back. That's an order."
The call cut.
The silence that followed was absolute. A solid thing, heavy as concrete. It was broken only by the ragged, wet sound of Adrian's breathing
"Hah… hah… augh…"
and the distant, indifferent groan of the city continuing its song, uncaring, unknowing, eternal.
Sleep didn't come.
It ambushed him.
It started with Marcus's smile the real one, in the helicopter. Bright, hopeful, edged with a fear he was trying to master. The smile of someone doing something brave for the first time, trusting that it would matter.
Then the smile melted, the edges blurring, dissolving like ink in water, flowing and reforming into the bloodied rictus from the photo. Fingers, whole and tapping at a keyboard one moment nervous, competent, alive became severed stumps the next, twitching with phantom signals.
Then the dream bled, seeping into older wounds, fault lines that had never properly healed.
He was small. The hallway of a half-remembered house was endless, dark, cold the geography of childhood trauma, where distances stretch and doors never lead where they should. Vivienne's voice sliced through the gloom, sharp as a shard of glass, cutting with surgical precision.
"Can't do anything right, can you? You never could. You never will. You're a mistake, making messes everywhere you go."
She appeared then his mother, though the word felt wrong, inadequate standing in a slash of harsh light, her form more blade than woman. A weapon with a pulse. Her words flayed the skin from his soul with practiced efficiency.
"You think you can protect him? You? You're pathetic!"
A deeper voice, strained, trying to intervene. Harold. Always trying, always failing. "Vivienne, for God's sake, calm down! Don't—don't talk to him like that, he's just a boy!"
"Not my boy!" she spat, the venom so potent Adrian could taste it in the dream bitter, caustic, permanent. "He's a mistake. Mine and your brother's. Did you think I'd never tell him? Did you think he wouldn't see?"
The memory shattered, morphing into sensory hell the deafening crunch of metal folding like paper, the kaleidoscope explosion of a windshield becoming a thousand diamonds of death, his foster father's face in the rearview mirror, eyes wide with a final, silent shout that never made it past his lips.
Blood in the car.
Blood on the tiles.
Blood in his mouth.
Blood everywhere, always, forever.
Vivienne's voice wove through it all, the one constant thread in the ruin, the spine that held the nightmare together. "You're the reason he's dead, Adrian. The world would have been better if you'd never been born."
You never could do anything right.
You never could.
You never—
Adrian jerked awake.
A silent scream locked his jaw, teeth clenched so hard something popped. His body was drenched, the sheets tangled around him like restraints, like burial shrouds. Dawn was a grey smear at the edges of the blinds not light, just the absence of complete darkness.
He pressed the heels of his trembling hands into his eye sockets, trying to push the images back, trying to unsee, unknow, undo.
His chest hitched "Hngh… sniff… augh—" with brutal, soundless sobs, convulsions of a grief too dense for noise, too heavy for tears. The kind of crying that comes from somewhere deeper than lungs, deeper than heart.
Marcus's death.
His father's wreck.
His mother's hatred.
The survivor's guilt always the survivor, never the saved.
It was all one tangled, barbed wire knot buried in his chest, and he had no way to pull it free without tearing himself apart from the inside out.
Nothing had stopped.
Not the night.
Not the pain.
Not the city grinding on outside his window, indifferent as a machine.
And somewhere, on a beige tile floor under cold fluorescent lights, in a building that made weapons from people, Marcus Varias lay forever still.
And the silence he left behind was the loudest thing Adrian had ever heard.
Louder than sirens.
Louder than gunfire.
Louder than his mother's voice.
Just silence.
Eternal.
Accusing.
Final.