CRIMSON CAMELLIA

First Blood

Their first operational mission came three months later — a quiet, surgical takedown of an arms broker in Macau who had begun moving dual-use components toward buyers with no flags and far too much money. The operation was clean, professional, and left three men dead and a server farm wiped down to bare metal by the time the sun came up over the harbor.

Ethan and Jax moved through it like they'd trained for years instead of months, the choreography of violence already fluent in their hands. Afterward, in a rented safehouse overlooking the water, Jax poured cheap whiskey into paper cups and raised his in a mock toast, blood still dried under his fingernails.

"Do not die on the first try."

Ethan drank. The whiskey burned less than the injections had, which felt, in a distant way, like a kind of progress.

Later, while Jax slept the deep, guiltless sleep of a boy who had never once lost a night's rest over a decision, Ethan stood alone on the balcony and watched the lights scatter across the harbor as something spilled. Somewhere out in that same city, or maybe a different one entirely, Sophia Chen was filing another report with his name in it. Somewhere farther still, Marcus Hale was weighing their usefulness against some private ledger only he had access to.

Ethan pressed two fingers to the inside of his forearm, to the faint raised scar where the IV line had lived for weeks, and wondered — with a coldness that surprised even him — exactly how long a man could go on serving a balance he still didn't understand, for people who had never once asked what he wanted the world to look like when it was over.

Below him, a boat crossed the harbor without lights, and for one unreasonable second, he thought of the truck on the mountain road outside Taipei, the one that had come the same way. He didn't sleep again that night.