Chapter One
638 Words
Present
[Midnight ,Cynrim's Apartment, Edge of the City]
The knock came like a warning.
Three hard, deliberate strikes on the door
not desperate, not random. Measured. Controlled. And yet, something about them made Cynrim's skin prickle.
She set down the small fern pot she'd been repotting, wiping her soil-streaked hands on her robe as she crept toward the door. It was almost 12:30 a.m. The city outside her quiet neighborhood was still awake but here, this late, no one visited.
She looked through the peephole.
And froze.
"...Zayev?"
He looked older now taller, colder but she would've recognized him anywhere. The boy she'd grown up with in the orphanage. Her childhood shadow. Her only friend, once.
But the man beside him
A giant, really. Half-slumped, blood soaking through his expensive black coat. One arm clutched his chest. His head was down, breathing shallow.
Cynrim barely had time to open the door before Zayev pushed past her, dragging the bleeding man with him.
"I need your help," Zayev said. His voice was rough. Urgent.
The stranger dropped to his knees, then to the floor and only then did Cynrim see the full horror of it.
Blood. Too much of it. Dark. Wet.
His chest.
He'd been shot twice near the ribs, and once, she noticed now, lower. His thigh was torn open, soaked red to the knee.
He was barely holding on.
"What the hell happened?" she gasped.
"He doesn't have long," Zayev said. "I brought him to the only person I trust."
[Earlier – The Borderlands, Nightfall]
Rover knew they were going to kill him.
Not from the silence he'd heard silence before. It wasn't the stillness, or even the tension in the air. It was Ezren. The way he walked slightly behind, not beside him. The way he didn't look Rover in the eye when they reached the clearing.
"Why here?" Rover asked flatly, voice low.
Ezren didn't answer.
Rover stopped walking.
And then he heard it the faintest click of metal behind him.
Too late for a gun. Too close for hesitation.
He spun, caught the wrist mid-air, and snapped it backward without thinking. The man screamed as the blade dropped. Rover grabbed it mid-fall and slammed it into the attacker's gut, fast and deep, pushing until bone stopped it.
One.
A flash of movement ,another to his right. Rover ducked, used the dead man's body as a shield. The bullet hit flesh. Wrong flesh. Rover didn't care. He rolled forward, drove his knee into the shooter's thigh and bashed his head against the rusted edge of a truck bumper.
Two.
"f**k…he's not human!" someone yelled behind him.
He didn't wait. Grabbed a broken iron rod, swung it, crushed a jaw. Another man reached for his leg — Rover stomped down, heard the bones give way under his boot.
Three. Four. Five.
Blood sprayed. Teeth cracked. He moved like instinct not chaos, but calculation. He knew the terrain. The angles. The kill points.
He had trained most of these men.
And now he was tearing through them.
Then, silence again.
Except for one pair of footsteps.
Ezren.
Rover turned, bleeding but upright. Breathing hard, chest soaked in red
some of it his, most of it not.
"I gave you everything," he said. "You were nothing. You wouldn't even be alive without me."
Ezren didn't look guilty. Just... tired.
"That's the problem," he murmured, raising the gun. "You made me. Now I'm breaking free."
Two shots rang out.
Once in the side. Another near the heart.
Rover didn't scream. He didn't even groan.
He dropped to his knees, dark eyes fixed on the only man he'd ever called family.
Ezren stared back.
Then turned his back.
That was the last thing Rover saw before Zayev's voice screamed from somewhere in the dark, and the world went black.
- Writer
