Before You Knew Me

Chapter 11- Who is Marcus

DANIEL POV

I sat at the desk with my head in my hands, and my eyes wouldn't stop burning.

It finally hit me.

I had blood on my hands. Not the kind you wash off under a tap. Not enemy blood. Deeper than that.

Marcus's blood. My brother's blood.

*------ Flashback: Marcus ------*

They brought him in when he was eleven. Same as me.

Skinny to the point his ribs showed through his shirt. Busted knuckles that had never healed right. Teeth too big for his face. No home. No family. No file that anyone would ever miss.

That's what the Agency liked. Boys from nowhere. Like myself and my brother, brought in by Gabriel. Marcus was brought in amongst the other recruits. The three of us fell under Gabriel's card.

Marcus got the bunk above me. Ethan below me. A three-man steel bunk in the dorms. Military setup. We learned discipline and structure before we learned how to be teenagers.

First night, he leaned over the cold metal frame, his face upside down, and whispered, "If you snore, I'll kill you."

I had to clamp my hand over my mouth to not laugh. It was after lights-out. If the instructors heard us, we'd be doing burpees until we puked.

His voice was shaking. He was trying so hard not to cry.

I whispered back, "If you fart, I'll kill you."

He let out this choked, wet laugh. That was the start.

We trained together. 5 AM runs in the snow in just our underwear until our lungs felt like they were full of knives. Hand-to-hand combat in the mat room until our mouths bled and our gums were pink with spit. Holding rifles before we could legally drive. How to pick a lock with a bobby pin, how to lie without blinking, how to disappear in a crowd, how to kill a man with your hands.

We lived together, laughed together, bled together. We became the terrible trio of the camp. The instructors hated us because we had each other.

We became more than friends. When you hold a kid's hand at fourteen while they stitch his shoulder up without anesthetic so he doesn't scream and bite through his tongue - there's no word for that. That's brotherhood.

Marcus, Ethan, and I. We were inseparable.

Ethan was the smart one. Strategic and cold, always three moves ahead. Marcus was the funny one, the light, but he had the best aim in our class and a right hook that could drop a grown man. I was the one who followed orders even when they felt wrong in my gut. I was the leader, because I was too scared to disobey.

Gabriel was our handler then. The only adult who ever looked at us like we weren't just kids, and not just weapons, and not just abandoned trash. He'd bring us extra bread from the mess. Old, beat-up comics with the covers torn. He told us we could leave one day. We didn't believe him.

Until I did.

I was twenty-two. A job went bad in Bucharest. A civilian kid, maybe eight years old, got caught in the crossfire. Gabriel screamed in my earpiece, "ABORT! DANIEL, ABORT!" Command said finish. I finished. Then I went behind the building and threw up for an hour and couldn't stop shaking. I could still see the kid's shoes.

I left. I walked straight out of the Agency building with blood still crusted under my nails.

I thought they'd kill me. Gabriel made a deal for me instead. I would be their ghost. Go undercover. Look for information no one else could get. A real covert operation, off the books.

Two weeks later, Marcus showed up at my shitty one-room apartment with a duffel bag, a split lip, and a black eye that was swollen shut.

"You really thought you'd do this alone?" he said, and dropped his bag on my floor.

Ethan didn't join. He stayed at the Agency. He was tough and he didn't have anyone beating him like Marcus did in the barracks. Ethan stayed, and in that same year, we lost him. That's a different scar. One I still don't talk about.

From that day, Marcus and I could take on the world. Day by day we grew. We took down drug rings, underground fighting clubs, trafficking routes - all undercover, all off the grid. But we did it and we came out on top. Always together.

The day Gabriel died in my arms, Marcus was just as lost as I was. The man who guided us. Our second father. Gone.

When I left the Agency, Marcus followed me like he always had before. We never left one another behind.

Marcus and I built the company together. On paper, private security. Off paper, same thing we'd always done, but on our own terms this time. He was my partner. My emergency contact. My brother.

He knew about the promise.

Gabriel came to me a year before he died. He looked over his shoulder the whole time, paranoid, sick. He said, "I have something that will burn everyone. I can't destroy it, because if they kill me, my daughter needs leverage to stay alive. But I can't keep it on me."

He told me about a ledger. Every name, every dirty account, every operation. Hidden. He told me his daughter had it, but he never told me where. Until the day he died in my arms, blood bubbling from his mouth, when he made me promise to watch her. Not to know her. Just to keep her breathing. And then he told me about the locket.

I told Marcus about Gabriel's daughter, Elara, and the promise, but not about where the information was. I promised Gabriel I'd keep that to myself. I told Marcus everything else. I told him she had the key but I didn't know where it was.

That was my mistake.

---

Silas called. Said he had a name. A buyer asking about Gabriel's files. Wanted to meet. Said it was urgent.

He gave me an address. An abandoned office block on the edge of the industrial district. Fifth floor. Empty since the logistics company folded. No cameras. No witnesses.

I thought that was normal. That's how we always met.

Marcus said he'd come with me. Backup.

We got there at 9 PM. The building was gutted. Rain was hammering the windows. Desks still there, covered in a thick layer of grey dust. Chairs overturned like people had left in a hurry. The fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered. The windows were all black, city lights far away and blurred by rain. It smelled like old paper, damp concrete, and rust.

Silas wasn't there.

Only Marcus and me. Our footsteps were too loud.

"Where is he?" I asked, checking my phone. No signal.

Marcus locked the door behind us.

_CLICK._

The sound was too loud in that empty room. The air shifted around me. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. My gut screamed. That's when I knew.

It was a setup.

"It was you?" I said, without turning around. My voice sounded like someone else's.

He didn't even pretend to be confused. He just sighed.

"I watched her too, brother," he said. His voice echoed in the empty office. "Just like you did. Every day. The coffee shop. The apartment. The way she tucks her hair behind her ear when she's nervous." He spoke like he was reciting a report. "But I got paid for it. You did it for a dead man's promise. I did it for money."

He'd been selling her information. Where she lived, worked, what time she left for work. To the people who wanted Gabriel's ledger to use as a weapon, to find who they were looking for in the system.

"How much?" I asked. My hands were in fists so tight my nails cut my palms.

"Fifty grand just to confirm she was Gabriel's daughter," he said, and laughed - that same stupid, braying kid laugh from the bunk above me. "Fifty grand for a name, Danny. Can you imagine? They want it bad. They want her bad."

"You sold her out."

"I sold _you_ out," he said, and his voice went hard. "She was just the location tag. She would never pay me any attention and with you out of the way, I'll be there to save her and she will be mine and I will have money." He laughed again, pacing now. "Don't you get it?"

"You are double-crossing me and the people who paid you just to play hero and get the girl?" I spat. "Just to play savior?"

"No, you see, they will get their information, I'll save the girl, and take her far from here. Just me and her," he said. He wanted the money and the girl. His eyes were wild, jealous, desperate. "But don't worry, Danny boy, you won't be around to see that."

I was disappointed. No, I was shattered. He let money corrupt him and jealousy become an evil power. My brother.

He moved first. He always moved first.

He pulled the blade from his sleeve - a small, black tactical knife, the same one we were issued at sixteen. In the middle of that abandoned office, between two dusty desks, he came at me low and fast. Not to kill me clean. Low, to the side, under the ribs, twisting up into the liver. To make me hurt. To make me stay down and bleed out slow.

I sidestepped, but not fast enough. The tip caught my jacket and sliced it open.

Instinct kicked in. Ten years of muscle memory.

He slashed again and I caught his forearm with both hands. We slammed into a desk and it collapsed under us with a deafening crash, wood snapping, papers flying everywhere. We hit the dirty carpet hard, rolling, dust flying up in clouds so thick I couldn't see, couldn't breathe.

We fought the way we were taught as kids. No wasted movement. No shouting. Just sharp breathing and bone hitting bone.

He kneed me in the stomach and I felt all the air leave me. I punched him in the jaw, that same jaw I'd seen busted open at twelve years old. He grunted and headbutted me. My nose cracked. Blood poured hot down my face, into my mouth. Copper.

We rolled again and smashed into a filing cabinet. Glass shattered. A window cracked from the impact.

He got on top of me. He was heavier now. Stronger. He pinned my left arm with his knee and drove the knife down.

I twisted at the last second. It missed my chest and sank deep into my right side. Hot and deep and sickening.

I felt the burn shoot all the way up my back, down my leg. I screamed - I couldn't help it.

Pinned under him, his weight crushing my chest, he put his forehead against mine. Sweat and blood dripping from him onto me. Just like we used to do after sparring when we were fifteen, when we were too tired to stand.

"You left me first," he whispered, his voice breaking like that first night in the bunks. "You left me in that room." Making me think of how he was alone and beaten by the other boys while I was gone.

Something in me snapped. Not anger. Grief.

I grabbed his wrist with my left hand, and with my right, I took the knife out of my own side. The pain was white-hot, blinding. I could feel my own blood pulsing over my fingers.

One move. The one they drilled into us until we could do it blindfolded in our sleep. Disarm, reverse, thrust.

Quick.

He looked surprised. His blue eyes went wide. Like he didn't think I'd actually do it. Like we were still sparring on the mats and I'd stop at the last second and help him up.

I didn't stop.

The blade went in clean between his ribs.

He made a soft sound. Not a scream. A little gasp. Like air leaving a tire.

He slid off me onto that dirty office carpet, slow. His hand caught my arm on the way down, not to pull me, not to fight - just holding. Like he was scared to fall alone. Like he was eleven again.

I caught him. I pulled him into my lap. I held my brother in my arms, both of us covered in dust and blood, my side pouring blood onto his shirt, his blood onto mine, mixing.

I held him and cried, "Why? Why did you do it, Marcus? Why?"

He tried to speak. Blood came out of his mouth. His hand squeezed my arm once, weak.

And then he stopped breathing.

I sat in that abandoned office, rain hitting the black windows, dust settling on us like snow, and I held my brother until his body went cold.

I held him and realized I had to move and get to Elara before anyone else did.

I told Silas we were compromised. I didn't tell him Marcus was the leak. I couldn't say it out loud.

I told Elara I got stabbed on a job. I didn't tell her it was in an empty office that smelled like old paper and rust, or that I had to scrub my brother's blood out from under my nails for twenty minutes before I could touch her face.

And now she's in the next room, wearing my shirt, thinking her father was the monster.

She doesn't know the monster was just a hungry eleven-year-old boy from the bunk above me who never learned how to be anything else.

---

*3rd Person*

Fade to a different room. Daniel was gone. Marcus was laying in his blood, alone in the dark, rain hammering the windows.

Daniel had called Silas, his voice flat and dead, and told him Marcus was dead and where to find his body.

Silas, who was the director of the Agency, went to the abandoned office block at 11 PM. He took the stairs two at a time. He found Marcus on the fifth floor in a pool of dark blood.

But he wasn't dead. His chest was moving, shallow, barely.

Marcus was unconscious, hanging by a thread.

Silas pressed his jacket against the wound and rushed him out, half-carrying, half-dragging him into the elevator, into the car, straight to the private hospital wing. He didn't tell Daniel when he called earlier. He couldn't.

Silas would interrogate Marcus once he was awake. If he ever woke up.