Nicholas pushed through the agency doors at seven-thirty in the morning, already aware that the day had decided to dislike him before it even properly began. The receptionist looked up from her desk, paused mid-sip, and slowly lowered her coffee as he passed the front desk as usual.

"You look like shit."

"Morning to you too, Denise."

"I'm serious."

"Thanks."

He didn't slow down. Behind him came the faint, almost resigned mutter of Jesus Christ

Fair.

He probably did look awful. His ribs had been arguing with every breath since last night. His temple felt like something had taken up residence there and refused to pay rent. Even walking felt like a negotiation with his own body, one he was steadily losing.

The elevator ride was quiet in the way early mornings at the Agency had always been-too awake to be calm, too tired to be functional. Nicholas stared at the passing floor numbers and briefly considered whether any of his choices over the past forty-eight hours had been necessary or merely habitual. He arrived at the same conclusion he always did: the decision itself had been correct. The aftermath was simply... enthusiastic.

When the doors opened, the bullpen swallowed him in noise. Phones rang in overlapping cycles, keyboards rattled in restless rhythm, and people moved between desks carrying files, paper cups, and the particular caffeine dependency that kept institutions like this alive.

He had tried to sleep it off. He really had. But staring blindly at the ceiling had only lasted a forty-seven hours before the suffocating boredom-and the relentless ache in his bones-had driven him out of bed. At least here, there was noise. The clatter of keyboards, ringing phones, the chaotic, overlapping hum of other people's problems. Unlike his new roommate who he shut his bedroom door and rarely ever came out.It was a necessary distraction. It kept the inside of his head from getting too loud.

The moment he stepped inside, conversations fractured. Three stopped mid-sentence. A fourth man nearly lost his grip on his mug.

"Damine," someone called out.

"You look like shit," another voice added.

"People keep saying that," he replied flatly, as he walked walked between the cubicles.

A woman nearby snorted into her coffee. From behind a divider, a man from accounting leaned up just enough to be seen.

"Did somebody hit you with a car?"

"No."

"A bus?"

"No."

"A larger Nicholas?"

Nicholas didn't break stride.

The man nodded solemnly. "Got it. Classified."

His desk was at the far edge of the floor, slightly removed from the rest of the noise, as if even the office had decided he should be kept at a cautious distance. He sat down. The chair groaned in protest. His ribs followed suit. His entire body seemed to express collective dissatisfaction with the concept of movement.

His inbox was worse. Seventy-three unread emails. A third of them could be safely ignored. Another third were people creating problems they would later deny responsibility for. The remaining handful mattered, which was always the most exhausting category. He opened the first, read it once, and deleted it. The second followed without ceremony. The third received a full ten seconds of consideration before joining the others in the afterlife.

A shadow appeared beside his desk.

Nicholas looked up.

His supervisor stood there holding mug.

"Conference room."

"Morning."

"Conference room."

Nicholas sighed.

"That's usually where people discuss things."

"Today we're discussing why you ignored your phone for twelve hours."

Nicholas stood. The supervisor's eyes drifted toward the bandages visible beneath his collar.

A pause.

"How bad?"

"I'll live."

"Unfortunately."

"That's what my roommate said."

The man blinked.

"You have a roommate?"

Nicholas immediately regretted speaking.

"Interesting."

"It isn't."

"Oh, it definitely is."

Nicholas chose silence instead and walked out before the conversation could develop a life of its own.

The conference room was already waiting-four people, one laptop, two cups of coffee, and the unmistakable atmosphere of impatience stretched thin over professionalism.

Nicholas sat without ceremony as the presentation began.

A map filled the screen. Red markers scattered across multiple locations. Photographs followed, then names, then dates layered over timelines that didn't quite align unless one knew exactly where to look. The room settled into focus.

Nicholas listened, absorbing everything without interruption. Every detail mattered. Every inconsistency mattered more. And the missing pieces-those were the ones that never stopped echoing in his head.

Three years.

Three years of following movements that left no clear origin. Three years of reopening cases people preferred remained closed. Three years of asking questions that made certain rooms go quiet whenever he entered them. Most days it felt less like investigation and more like assembling a puzzle after somebody had deliberately thrown half the pieces into the ocean.

But every now and then something surfaced.

A repeated name.

A contradiction.

A witness remembering what they shouldn't.

Those moments mattered.

Those moments kept him moving.

The presentation continued until another photograph appeared on the screen. The atmosphere shifted subtly. Not enough for outsiders to notice, but enough for people in the room to sit a little straighter.

Nicholas didn't.

He simply stared.

The man on the screen was dead.

Dead.

Officially.

Legally.

Conveniently.

Dead.

Apparently the bastard was also a close relative of Jesus Christ.

At the front of the room, Director Bastian clicked his remote and enlarged the photograph.

"Three separate sightings in the last month," he said. "One in Rotterdam. One in Prague. One in Marseille."

Someone frowned.

"But he's dead."

"Excellent observation, Marshall."

A few tired chuckles went around the room.

Bastian pointed toward the image.

"Unfortunately, the dead man appears to disagree. CCTV footage. Facial recognition matched at eighty-seven percent. Enough to raise questions."

"Or somebody wearing his face," someone offered.

"Could be," Bastian agreed. "Except somebody wearing his face also used his voice, fingerprints, and apparently forgot the inconvenience of being deceased."

Another image appeared.

Passport records.

Bank transactions.

Surveillance stills.

Nicholas's mouth curved slightly.

There it was.

Fieldwork.

Better than paperwork.

Admittedly, the cut across his torso had recently submitted a strongly worded complaint regarding his career choices. But Nicholas had always preferred jobs that took him somewhere over jobs that kept him sitting behind a desk.

"Intelligence division gets first crack at this," Bastian continued. "They're already building profiles. We'll evaluate deployment once they've finished screaming at each other."

"How long?" somebody asked.

"Couple of days."

Nicholas's faint smile remained.

Couple of days.

Good.

It meant eventually the work would find its way to him.

And work, unlike people, rarely disappointed.

Forty minutes later the meeting finally adjourned. Chairs scraped back. Files were gathered. Conversations resumed as people mentally escaped to coffee breaks and inboxes. One by one the room emptied.

Nicholas remained seated.

The dark screen reflected his expression back at him.

Blank.

Controlled.

Professional.

A lie.

The door opened again before he had fully disengaged.

A lean woman walked in without bothering to knock, carrying a paper coffee cup like it was a permanent extension of her hand. A gold hoop peaked from the right side of her razor bob catching the fluorescent light each time she moved, and despite the late hour, there wasn't a single wrinkle in her charcoal blouse. She looked effortlessly put together in the infuriating way only certain people managed.

She took one look at Nicholas, then dropped into the chair beside him without invitation

"Still thinking about it?"

Nicholas didn't answer.

She accepted that as confirmation.

"You know what your problem is?"

"I have several."

"You take everything personally."

He glanced at her.

She smiled.

"Which would be charming if it weren't terrifying."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

Silence settled comfortably between them.

"No leads?" she asked eventually.

"No."

"No progress?"

"No."

"No sleep?"

Nicholas looked at her.

The lady immediately raised both hands. "Right. Stupid question."

Another pause stretched between them.

"You know it wasn't your fault."

Nicholas exhaled through his nose.

"Don't, Oriane. Not now."

She studied him for a moment.

"You're still not ready to admit it, are you?"

Nicholas didn't answer.

He simply leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. The ache behind his temple throbbed in rhythm with his heartbeat.

Oriane sighed to herself.

"Okay then. Have it your way, big guy." She stood up and grabbed her coffee. "Just so you know, I'm unavailable for emergency therapy sessions after one in the morning on weekdays."

Nicholas cracked one eye open.

"Noted."

"Weekends are fully booked too now that Swesh moved in."

"Tragic."

"I know. Priorities."

She reached the doorway, then paused.

"There is a fine line between genius and insanity-"

"-and I use that line as a jump rope. I know. You mentioned." Nicholas groaned.

"Good." Oriane grinned. "Try not to continue with that bad habit."

"I hate you."

"I know."

Then she disappeared into the hallway.

Silence returned with the efficiency of something well practiced.

Eventually, his phone vibrated.

Unknown number.

For one brief second his pulse quickened.

Hope.

Dangerous thing.

He opened the message.

7 PM

148, Velvet Deck, Marsa.

Then another vibration followed immediately.

He will be there.

Nicholas looked through the glass wall of the conference room.

Below, the city continued through its morning rituals. Cars crawled through traffic. Pedestrians carried coffee like sacred offerings. People argued with parking meters and checked watches and lived ordinary lives.

The sort of lives that remained blissfully unaware that the dead occasionally forgot to stay buried.

Nicholas stared at the address.

And smiled.

+++

Before becoming an operative, Nicholas had worked different jobs.

Technically, the first one wasn't even a real job. He'd been ten years old. His father had called it entrepreneurship; his mother had called it a desperate excuse to keep him out of the house; Nicholas had simply called it twenty coins a glass.

The lemonade stand had occupied a dusty patch of dirt just outside their front gate for an entire summer. It consisted of a rickety folding table, a hand-painted cardboard sign his sister Lucy had decorated with crooked lemons and far too many glitter stickers, and a plastic jug that sweated profusely beneath the afternoon sun. Nicholas had stood proudly behind it with all the rigid seriousness of a corporate executive negotiating international trade.

His father had stood beside him most days-not because the stand required adult supervision, but because his son did.

"Never cheat people," his father had told him while helping squeeze lemons one humid afternoon. "If the lemons are turning bad, you tell them."

"Then they won't buy it," ten-year-old Nicholas had pointed out.

"Then they won't buy it."

"That's terrible business."

His father had laughed, a warm, booming sound. "It is. The world is full of terrible business, kid." He had reached over, ruffling Nicholas's hair before nodding toward the quiet road. "Most people will disappoint you eventually. Some will lie straight to your face. Some will leave. A few won't ever mean to hurt you, but they'll manage to do it anyway."

Nicholas had considered this gloomy worldview deeply. "Then why bother setting up the table?"

His father had smiled softly. "Because some people won't."

At the time, Nicholas had found that answer profoundly unsatisfactory. But by the end of that summer, he'd made enough coins to buy Lucy a ridiculous, overstuffed plush rabbit she had formally dubbed Sir Hoplington.

Sir Hoplington had somehow managed to outlive nearly everyone else.

The second time he got employed had been out of cold, brutal necessity.

One night, two police officers had knocked on the front door, and adulthood had aggressively figured Nicholas out before he could even look up the definition.

There was no transition period. Suddenly, he was nineteen years old with no parents, a half-abandoned university track, a mountain of structural debt, and an eleven-year-old sister whose lungs seemed entirely determined to betray her. He needed anything that paid immediately, which was how he ended up structuring his life around a grueling, three-job rotation that left him with exactly two hours of unallocated time a day.

The baseline of his existence was the apron. He found himself waiting tables at a high-volume downtown diner from dawn until the afternoon rush died down.

Waiting tables was a fascinating, clinical study in human self-restraint. It meant handling early morning shifts on three hours of sleep, carrying heavy trays on a sprained ankle, and maintaining a perfectly placid, accommodating smile while wealthy patrons treated him like part of the upholstery. The tips were lousy, the hours were punishing, and the smell of old grease stayed under his fingernails for months.

The tips were lousy, the hours were punishing, and the grease stayed under his fingernails for months. But it kept the lights on.

But the diner alone wasn't enough to cover the rent and Lucy's prescriptions.

So, the moment his diner shift ended at four in the afternoon, Nicholas traded the apron for a pair of steel-toed boots. He spent his evenings working as a "floater" down at the commercial railyards and shipping docks-doing the brutal, unglamorous grunt work the contracted crews were too tired or too proud to touch.

It helped that he was vastly overgrown for his age; at nineteen, he had already reached his full height of six-foot-two, with a broad, solid frame that made the foreman take one look at him and hand him a shovel. On the hind side it also made people believe that he was as sturdy as the Great Wall of China. No one looked at his towering silhouette and saw a grieving teenager drowning under the weight of an adult's bills. Sympathy was a luxury reserved for the fragile, so Nicholas learned to carry himself with an iron posture that matched their assumptions, burying his exhaustion beneath a mountain of muscle.

If a drywall crew needed an extra pair of shoulders to haul sixty-pound sheets up a broken elevator shaft, Nicholas was there. If a foreman needed someone to spend four hours in the choking dust of a concrete mixer cleaning out the dried drum with a hand chisel, Nicholas took the cash. He lent his hands to carpenters, roofers, and mechanics, learning by osmosis how to fix things, break things, and bear terrifying weight without letting his spine snap.

Life became a strict, mathematical equation dedicated entirely to Lucy and Lucy only.

He learned how to properly braid her thick hair because her hands shook too much to manage it. He learned how to actually cook because he discovered instant ramen didn't legally count as childhood nutrition. He learned to distinguish between the dry coughs that meant she needed her inhaler, and the deep, rattling coughs that meant he needed to carry her to the emergency room.

She had utterly despised hospitals. She hated the needles, the sterile smell, the lack of color. But she would always manage a weak smile whenever he walked into the ward looking like a ghost.

"Did you finally rob that bank?" she'd whisper whenever he sank into the bedside chair, completely spent.

"Not yet."

"Pity."

"I know. Next week, definitely."

"Good. We can buy a pony."

"Where exactly are we keeping a pony, Luce?"

"The living room. Obviously."

"Understandable. I'll tell the landlord."

And somehow, against all available logic, they would laugh. Children possessed an unfair, terrifying talent for surviving sadness-right up until they didn't.

Three years ago, Lucy had died of complications from pneumonia.

At twenty-three, Nicholas had walked out of that hospital room with absolutely nothing left to lose. No parents. No sister. No home that actually felt like a home, and no future that held even a flicker of interest.

Which, as it turned out, was an incredibly dangerous asset to possess. Grief left massive, hollow spaces inside a man, and empty spaces had a distinct habit of being occupied by bad people with dark motives.

The recruiters who eventually hunted him down hadn't looked like government handlers or intelligence spooks; they had looked like ordinary, high-end businessmen. One brief conversation had evolved into two, two had become a formal contract, and the contract had quickly morphed into a sense of purpose. Or, at the very least, something close enough to fool his conscience.

Officially, Nicholas Damine worked corporate asset security.

Unofficially-well, there were very specific reasons his annual tax forms gave his accountant severe migraines. The work paid beautifully, it required an array of deeply ugly talents, and more importantly, it granted him access.

It gave him names. Hidden servers. Unmarked files. Closed doors that normal citizens didn't even know existed. Because on the rain-slicked night his parents had died in that staged intersection, someone very powerful had gone to immense trouble to ensure the official police investigation remained permanently incomplete. Reports had vanished into thin air. Witnesses had moved across the country. People had conveniently forgotten what they saw.

Officially, it had been a routine robbery gone wrong. But Nicholas had stopped believing in official stories around the same time he stopped selling lemonade.

+++

The damp evening traffic rolled past him as he navigated toward the address provided in the encrypted text. Shops were beginning to roll down their metal shutters for the night. Streetlights flickered awake in uneven sequences, casting a dull orange glow over the commuters hurrying toward the subway with grocery bags and office fatigue.

Normal lives. He had possessed one of those once, a lifetime ago.

Nicholas shoved his hands deep into his coat pockets and continued down the concrete pavement. His left side throbbed. His ribs sent a sharp, agonizing reminder up his spine with every third step. His entire physical form still held incredibly strong, negative opinions regarding his current life choices.

He had a solid hypothesis about what waited for him at this particular address. People rarely went through the trouble of sending anonymous, untraceable invitations for pleasant reasons. But in his line of work, variables had a habit of violently rewriting the constants. A simple drop became an ambush; a routine surveillance run devolved into a three-block gunfight. Plans were merely polite suggestions that reality thoroughly enjoyed mocking.

Which was why he'd come heavily armed.

The familiar, reassuring weight of the 9mm pistol rested snugly against the small of his back beneath his dark jacket. He was severely bruised, stitched together, and his breathing was still a negotiated privilege.

Still, he could manage. Managing was usually more than enough to get the job done.

Above him, heavy, charcoal clouds drifted lazily across the darkening sky, completely suffocating the last traces of daylight. The evening air carried that peculiar, metallic weight that always announced a downpour before the first droplet actually hit the asphalt.

It was definitely going to rain. He found himself genuinely hoping he could conclude this meeting and get back home before the storm broke.

Home.

Right. There was a highly caffeinated raccoon currently living in his apartment now.

Nicholas's mouth twitched into the faintest ghost of a smile. The raccoon attended university full-time. The raccoon apparently owned approximately eight hundred mechanical pens and seventeen separate charging cables for devices he no longer physically possessed. The raccoon cooked absolutely terrible instant noodles, possessed a vocabulary consisting primarily of hostility and anxiety, and yet, against all mathematical probability, had somehow managed to stitch his torso back together without accidentally killing him in his sleep.

A thoroughly curious creature.

Nicholas wondered what the raccoon had scavenged for dinner tonight. He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, stepping past the glowing storefronts toward the address at the end of the block, silently praying it wasn't more noodles.