#Portable Imaging Devices | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

iraot · 27 days ago

Text

Dead On Paper

Pairing: Dawnbreak/Zayne x f!reader Summary: He is hired to kill her, but realized he was born to protect her instead. Genre: Romance, Some Smut, Blood, he's an ASSASSIN GUYS so just... he kills people. Word Count: 17, 896 AO3

A sealed, untraceable burner device chirps once—no vibration, no screen light, just a short mechanical tone sharp enough to pierce the hush of Zayne’s safehouse. He picks it up without hurry, thumbprint unlocking the message buried under four layers of encryption. Coordinates first. Then a face scan, timestamped, taken from a distance with low exposure. She’s walking near a market, head tilted to the sun like someone who’s never felt watched.

Target: a civilian woman. No priors. The file confirms it—no aliases, no history with black-market trades, no contact with arms or laundering circuits. Even her financial records look clean outside of a few late payments, nothing criminal. Her name’s been scrubbed from the brief, redacted by whoever ordered the kill. That’s unusual. Even high-profile jobs rarely erase the subject's name unless there’s heat somewhere.

Zayne narrows his eyes as he decrypts the secondary layer of metadata. The source trails back to a shell entity registered in Singapore—long dissolved on paper but active in deep channels. One of a thousand fake fronts tied to an old laundering tree used by both legacy cartels and the newer syndicate branches that spun off during the post-2008 chaos. He knows the kind. Family dynasties and private enforcers. The kind of people who issue death orders not to eliminate threats, but to humiliate those who failed them.

He reclines back in the steel-framed chair, fingers drumming once on the desk beside him. The image of the woman lingers on the cracked screen—arms full of greenery, face turned just slightly, mouth open in what looks like mid-laughter. Civilian. Young. Alive. And someone wants her very much not to be.

The reward is abnormally high—seven figures for a civilian who’s never touched a gun, never crossed a border under false papers, never whispered a name worth killing over. It makes him pause, green eyes narrowing on the screen like it might flinch under the scrutiny. This isn’t about threat mitigation or cleanup. This is punishment by proxy, and she’s the proxy—collateral born from blood ties to someone who fucked the wrong people and fled before the debt collectors came knocking.

Zayne leans forward, elbows on the metal desk, and reads the fine print again. No time limit. No discretion required. They don’t care how messy it gets. That confirms it—this is about spectacle, not silence. Someone wants her to disappear as a lesson carved into bone, left bleeding in the air as a warning to others who forget who they owe.

He exhales through his nose once, controlled and quiet, and types a single line of reply into the secured channel: I’ll handle it. Four words. Enough to signal acceptance, initiate payment escrow, and launch a countdown no one will trace back to him. But it isn’t final. Not yet. Zayne doesn’t pull triggers on photographs.

He scouts. Confirms. Decides. Always.

Zayne rents the unit under a fake name, cash only, no questions asked. It’s bare inside—concrete walls, no windows, stripped light fixtures. He brings in his own power supply, a collapsible chair, surveillance gear tucked into repurposed moving boxes labeled “kitchen” and “holiday lights.” Across the street, three ordinary-looking orange cones sit angled just right, each one housing high-res lenses wired into a portable server cooled by fans that hum beneath the drone of traffic.

For two weeks, he watches her from behind glass and code, logging everything with sniper precision. She opens the nursery each morning at exactly 6:45AM, sliding the gate open in one smooth motion before disappearing behind a veil of condensation and leaf-shadow. Her routine is seamless. Reliable. She starts her day with chamomile and mint tea in a chipped mug painted with violets, always held in both hands like it centers her.

She plays music through a speaker rigged near the herb section—first soft jazz, low saxophone and brushed percussion, then Spanish ballads after 9AM, lilting and sad. She hums sometimes, unconsciously, her mouth twitching with lyrics she doesn’t say aloud. Her lunch is always packed: boiled egg, vegetables, rice in a reused takeout container. Never any takeout. Never anything prepared by anyone but her.

She doesn’t answer phone calls. The burner she carries stays buried at the bottom of her bag, screen unlit, battery rarely above fifteen percent. Zayne tracks her movements through the rest of her week—short walks, two bus routes, no deviation. Once a week she slips into a hole-in-the-wall bookstore and leaves with worn paperbacks, crumpled bills exchanged with the owner in silence. No credit. No receipts. Just cash.

When her shift ends, she rides her rusted bike home with a basket full of trimmings and dented groceries, her fingernails dark with soil, her posture sagging with work. She greets no one. She never invites anyone in. And behind the nursery, under the old brick archway where vines have begun to grow wild, she kneels with a bowl of tuna for three stray cats—thin things with matted fur that purr when she speaks.

Zayne watches all of this. Records every minute. And finds nothing. No tail, no accomplices. No panic in her steps, no precautions. If she knows someone’s watching her, she hides it perfectly. But he doesn’t think she knows. She looks up sometimes at the sky, eyes wide like someone waiting for a better life to descend gently, green and growing, into her palms.

She’s crouched near a table of succulents, sleeves rolled up, hands dusted with potting soil, when a child comes barreling into the nursery. A boy, maybe five or six, wild curls and mismatched socks, clutching a bruised fern like it’s a treasure. He says something—Zayne can’t hear it through the feed, but her laughter rings out anyway, rich and spontaneous. She throws her head back just slightly, eyes crinkling, lips parted in a way that makes it unmistakable: it’s real.

Zayne blinks behind the scope, momentarily still. It takes longer than it should for his breathing to return to its usual rhythm. He shifts his position by instinct, recalibrating for line of sight, but the laugh echoes in his memory like an anomaly. It shouldn’t matter. It bothers him that it does.

She’s a target. That’s the refrain. Simple. Clean. She exists in this file for a reason—because someone, somewhere, decided her continued breathing was a liability. Zayne doesn’t ask why. Not usually. The 'why' makes the hand shake. Makes the bullet miss.

But something isn’t sitting right this time. Her routine is too open, too linear—no dead drops, no burner swaps, no subtle check-ins with strangers or mirrored surfaces. She doesn’t take alternate routes home. She doesn’t scan the street before she locks up at night. She walks like no one’s ever told her to be afraid. Like she doesn’t know that death is parked across the street in a borrowed van watching her finish a conversation with a six-year-old about aloe and water schedules.

She’s not avoiding being tracked. She’s not hiding. She doesn’t even know she’s being watched and that’s what makes it harder.

He enters the house at 2:14AM, lock bypassed in under four seconds, gloves on, eyes already mapping the interior like a living schematic. The place is small—one bedroom, no signs of luxury, no hidden compartments or surveillance. She sleeps in a bed without a headboard, covered by a faded quilt with stitched vines and leaves, the kind that looks handmade. He doesn’t linger. Just moves like smoke through each room until he finds what he’s looking for.

The shoebox is buried in the closet, tucked behind rain boots and a crate of broken ceramics. No lock, no alarm—just taped shut and sealed with old, half-peeled stickers. He opens it with a scalpel. Inside: a stack of unopened letters, official and bland, with seals from places like “Collection Units,” “Asset Adjustment Services,” and “Financial Intercession Groups.” Corporate euphemisms for legalized extortion. Some are printed on thick cardstock, others typed in sterile fonts, but they all have the same tone—pay what they owe, or we’ll extract it elsewhere.

He flips through them until the photographs start. Surveillance shots. A man and a woman—her parents. Stained shirts, glassy eyes, one of them half-smiling in a gas station mirror. Each image is stamped “DELINQUENT” in red ink. Beside it, a breakdown of debt portfolios: gambling, laundering, crypto fraud, unpaid smuggling tolls. One sheet reads $2.3 million outstanding. Another simply says: ASSET RECOVERY: ALL TIED.

Zayne stares at the handwriting below the photo.

Last known location: UNKNOWN.

So they went dark. Cowards who left their daughter as collateral.

She’s not part of the scam. She’s just the remaining name with a heartbeat. On paper, she’s tied into the debts—accidental proxy, inherited without consent. Her only crime is not covering their tracks for them.

He sits on the edge of her couch, documents spread like tarot cards across his lap, and exhales—slow, silent, like something sharp’s being drawn out of his chest. His code is old, quiet, carved into the marrow: no innocents. No children. No ghosts forced to carry the weight of other people’s bad decisions.

No one deserves to die for the sins of absentee, criminal bloodlines and no one gets to hunt her while he’s watching.

The rental sits to the left of her house, a sun-bleached skeleton with warped siding, blistered paint, and a roof that sighs in high wind. Zayne signs the lease as Elias Tan, a name clean enough to pass background checks and common enough to be forgettable. He doesn’t move in all at once—just a few boxes, a mattress, and the quiet thrum of tools unpacked with surgical precision. Each day he fixes something small: a cracked shingle, a leaking gutter, the stubborn back gate that swings open in storm wind.

He starts a garden along the fence line, nothing flashy—just cucumbers, rosemary, a few heirloom beans in salvaged planter boxes. The kind of thing you can ask advice about, even when you don’t need it. The soil is poor, so he tills it by hand, sweat running down the curve of his spine under worn cotton. It gives him something to do that looks honest.

She sees him for the first time on a humid Tuesday morning, dragging a twenty-pound bag of fertilizer across the gravel path, breath hitching at every uneven step. He’s trimming back lemon balm when he glances up. No words at first—just a look, held for a beat too long.

“You need a hand?” he asks, voice even. No smile. No pressure.

She shakes her head, arms locked around the bag. “Got it.”

He nods and steps back, she passes, and they leave it at that. Non-threatening. Just a neighbor with dirt under his nail a man who builds, instead of destroys.

The second time they speak, she catches him mid-morning, crouched beside a weather-beaten citrus tree he’s trying to revive. He’s trimming back curled, browning leaves with surgical snips, expression focused, hands steady. She walks by, slows, and tilts her head with the quiet confidence of someone who knows plants like they’re kin.

“You’re cutting too close to the node,” she says, nodding at the branch in his hand. “You’ll stress the stem.”

He looks up at her, eyes unreadable but attentive. “I thought it was rot.”

“It’s calcium deficiency,” she replies, stepping closer, brushing her thumb across one of the leaves. “Soil’s probably too acidic. Try crushed eggshells.”

He considers this, then asks, “You ever grafted from a lemon onto an orange base?”

That catches her off guard—in a good way. Her face brightens, eyes sparking like someone who didn’t expect to be taken seriously. “Yeah,” she says, grinning. “You’re braver than you look.”

He doesn’t respond, just returns to trimming, but there’s a flicker at the corner of his mouth, almost like amusement.

A week later, there’s a knock at his door. He opens it and finds her holding a woven basket filled with tangled sprigs of mint—wild, unruly, fragrant from several feet away.

“For tea,” she says, lifting it toward him. “Or whatever it is you drink after sunset.”

He takes it without hesitation. “I make chili jam,” he offers, stepping aside to retrieve a jar from his kitchen. “Want to try some?”

She perches on the edge of his porch while he unscrews the lid. There are no spoons, so she dips a finger directly into the thick, red mixture and brings it to her lips. She licks once, slow, thoughtful, then gasps quietly.

“Oh, that’s—hot,” she laughs, eyes wide. “But really fucking good.”

He says nothing. Just watches her mouth, the shine on her lower lip, the shape of her laugh as it curls out of her like steam. She talks for another minute or two, but he doesn’t hear much of it. Not really.

That image—her finger, her lips, the moment—lodges in his mind like a trigger half-pulled. He files it away with clinical care, like evidence but he doesn’t delete it.

The burner glows faint blue in the dark, a signal pulled through a quiet channel that only speaks in silence. Zayne uploads a high-resolution image of bloodied clothing—a hoodie similar to the one she wore last Tuesday, torn and stained with carefully applied theater blood. He pins it to GPS coordinates leading to an isolated burn site he used three years ago, a gravel pit ringed with trees and ash that no one patrols. No body. No teeth. Just enough residue to imply a conclusion.

The contract broker responds in under forty minutes. Confirmation flags appear, payment clears, and her profile gets an automated status: TERMINATED. Zayne watches the progress bar complete, then files the job under his real alias, Dawnbreaker—signed, sealed, archived with the others. She’s dead now, on paper. Dead enough that no one with a price list will come looking for her again.

He opens the encrypted archive, scrolls down to her original file, and deletes the biometric images from the kill folder. Gone, as protocol demands. But he copies one—the unedited one, the one where she’s smiling at a pigeon from across the street—and drops it into a buried partition in his personal archive. Just in case, he tells himself. Contingency. Not sentiment.

Still, when the screen fades to black, he doesn’t close the laptop right away.He just sits there, staring into the dark, and for once it doesn’t stare back. –

He learns her schedule like a melody—one note at a time, steady, familiar. Not for strategy or escape routes, not anymore. There’s no ambush in his mind, no scope tracking her from across the street. He memorized her routine the way a man memorizes the tide: because it matters to him, because its rhythm softens something he didn’t know needed softening.

She hums when she waters the plants, low and tuneless, like her thoughts are too full to keep silent. He hears it even from his yard, faint through the breeze, sometimes rising into fragments of a melody he never recognizes. She sways gently as she moves, trailing her fingers along leaf edges, like she’s reassuring them that she’ll be back tomorrow. It’s ritual, not work.

On slow afternoons, she reads pest control manuals with frayed spines and penciled notes in the margins. Half the time she forgets them outside, pages curling in the sun until he quietly gathers them and drops them off by her door. She never asks how they get back there. Just smiles, mutters “thank you, plant gods,” and tucks them under her arm like sacred texts.

When snails invade her violets, she crouches with a flashlight and whispers threats like a tired parent. “You little bastards better not touch my orchids,” she mutters, plucking them off one by one and dropping them gently into a tin. She keeps a kill count on a sticky note taped to the windowsill. He pretends not to smile when he sees it hit twelve.

One evening, she waves him over with dirt-streaked gloves and a furrowed brow. “Spider plant’s got something weird on its leaves,” she says, holding it out like a sick child. “You ever seen spots like this?” He leans in, fingertips grazing the edge of the pot, shoulder brushing hers. He tells her it’s fungal. She tells him she’s relieved it’s not a curse. He doesn’t correct her.

— It's late afternoon when the conversation slips past weather and watering schedules. They’re seated on her back porch, her feet bare and tucked under her, Zayne leaning against the railing with a glass of cold water in one hand. The sun is low, casting long gold stripes through the latticework, dust motes swirling in the light between them. She pulls her hair back absently and asks, “So what do you do, exactly? You’re too methodical for accounting, too quiet for customer service.”

He answers without hesitation, calm and rehearsed. “Freelance logistics. Short-term supply chain stuff. Inventory control.” It’s vague but plausible, the kind of job that sounds both boring and too technical to probe deeper. She nods like it makes sense and doesn’t ask more—not because she believes it entirely, but because she doesn’t want to ruin the quiet by making it heavy.

She’s silent for a moment, eyes scanning the small garden bed in front of them. Then she speaks without looking at him. “My parents disappeared six years ago. Took a bunch of other people’s money with them. Left me the mail, the debt collectors, and a name that doesn’t belong to anyone respectable anymore.”

He doesn’t move, doesn’t interrupt, just takes another drink and waits. She exhales slowly, like it costs her something. “I don’t hate them. I did for a while, sure. But mostly I don’t think about them now. It’s like… they were a dream someone else had, and I just woke up in the part where everything’s wrecked.”

He watches her, eyes unreadable but steady. “That’s a heavy inheritance,” he says.

“Yeah.” Her laugh is soft and dry. “Would’ve preferred land or a timeshare. Maybe a haunted watchtower or something. At least that comes with ghosts you can see.”

He doesn’t chuckle, but there’s a shift in his posture, something just shy of warmth. “Most people don’t talk about it like that.”

“Most people try to solve it,” she replies, glancing at him sideways. “Tell me to track them down, sue someone, write a letter, ‘process the trauma.’ You didn’t do any of that. You just… let it sit.”

He shrugs slightly. “Not everything needs fixing.”

She nods, a small smile flickering at the edge of her mouth. “That’s rare. Most men don’t know when to shut up.” He doesn’t say anything to that either. Just watches the way her shoulders loosen when she’s finally said too much and didn’t regret it.

The evening is quiet, heat bleeding off the pavement in slow waves, when she appears at her back door with her arm cradled awkwardly against her chest. She tries to wave him off with her good hand, downplaying it with a weak smile and a casual, “Clumsy me—smashed a pot. Got a little too aggressive with the shelving.” The gash is long, stitched but fresh, the skin around it red and taut, still swollen beneath gauze that’s already soaking through. Zayne says nothing, just nods once, but his eyes never leave the wound.

The cut’s too clean for a terracotta shard—too long, too precise, no drag marks or irregular tears that would come from jagged edges. She was cut with intent, not accident. She moves slower than usual, flinching when she bends, but hides it behind chatty small talk and jokes about tetanus shots. He offers her tea; she declines. Says she’s tired, just needs to sleep it off.

That night, after the neighborhood has gone dark, Zayne pulls a tablet from a false bottom in his tool chest and taps into the nursery’s security feed—something he wired on his second week without telling her. He scans back six hours. There’s a man in the footage, medium height, leather coat, mirrored glasses that don’t reflect the camera. He isn’t browsing. He’s cornering her near the back greenhouse, gesturing wildly while she stands still, arms crossed but shoulders tense.

The feed’s audio is too low for voices, but the body language tells enough—she tries to walk away twice, and both times he blocks her path. She finally pushes past him, hand gripping her forearm tightly, blood already soaking into her sleeve. The man leaves calmly, no rush, no panic, head down. Professional. Former debt collector, Zayne guesses—someone hired to rattle cages, remind her what happens when money owed goes unpaid or unforgotten.

Zayne closes the feed and deletes the last twenty-four hours. Not just the file, but the server metadata. Wiped. Gone. He sits back in the dark of his living room, lit only by the glow of the screen and the soft green flicker of the security router’s heartbeat.

He doesn’t plan revenge. Not yet.

But he writes down the man’s face. And he doesn’t forget.

The trail isn’t hard to follow—not when you know how collectors move, how they drink cheap coffee in laundromats and always overstay their welcome at low-end motels. Zayne pulls surveillance from street cams and ATM clusters, piecing together the man’s route through the city. Credit card pings lead to a port-side warehouse district full of abandoned freight, rusted chains, and stacked shipping containers that haven’t been checked in years. He gets there just after midnight, boots crunching over gravel, gloved fingers tracing the latch of a container with a scent that’s wrong—coppery and humid, like something that’s been left too long.

Inside, the collector is slumped against the back wall, head tilted unnaturally, arms bound with zip ties still cinched tight at the wrists. Blood pools beneath him, sticky and black. His tongue is missing, lips parted as if trying to scream even in death. There are no signs of struggle—just execution. The work is professional, deliberate. Someone wanted him silent, and someone wanted it understood.

Zayne crouches beside the body, eyes scanning the scene without emotion. He didn’t do this. That much is clear. No one kills like him—his method is cleaner, colder, a scalpel where this was a scalping knife. But this wasn’t random. Someone else followed the same scent trail, maybe smelled the same debt. Maybe decided this wasn’t about her anymore. Maybe it never was.

He rises slowly, shutting the container door behind him without leaving a trace. Back outside, the air feels heavier, thicker with something unseen. He doesn’t know who got to the man first.

But he knows this much now: He’s not the only one watching her.

She knocks just past eleven, a soft, almost apologetic tapping against his doorframe. Rain sheets down behind her in cold, silvery lines, her hoodie soaked through, dark curls of wet hair plastered to her temples. Her fingers tremble around her phone, the screen dim and cracked, useless. “Power’s out,” she says, voice small, breath hitching. “And the storm’s freaking me out. I just… didn’t want to sit in the dark by myself.”

Zayne steps aside without a word, letting her pass into the warmth and light of his kitchen. He hands her a towel first, then a dry shirt, heavy with his scent, and turns to the stove without watching her change. She sits quietly while he brews tea, eyes following the motion of his hands, precise and sure. When he opens a drawer for a spoon, she spots the knitting needles tucked neatly beside utility tools, long metal ones with red-painted tips.

“You knit?” she asks, not teasing—just surprised, intrigued.

He doesn’t answer. Just closes the drawer again. She doesn’t press. The silence between them is soft, not awkward, and when he returns with two mugs, she accepts hers with a nod of thanks.

They sit on the couch, close, steam curling up between their hands. Her shoulder brushes his, light but unmistakable, and neither of them moves away. Outside, the storm cracks across the sky like bone splitting. Inside, she doesn’t flinch. She exhales slow, steady, then turns slightly and rests her head back against the cushion beside his. Doesn’t speak.

When she leaves an hour later, wrapped in a dry coat and steadier than when she arrived, she pauses in the doorway and smiles. Not wide. Not performative. Just quiet, real, like something settled. Zayne watches her cross the gravel back to her house, headlights from the streetlight flickering over her path.

He stares at the door for a long time after it closes

Not thinking. Just feeling.

Like something important nearly happened, and might again.

The night air is thick with late-summer damp, cool on sweat-slick skin but not enough to banish the warmth still radiating from the soil. Overhead, string lights stretch between two fences, swaying faintly in the breeze, casting broken amber light across the backyards. Zayne is crouched near the rosemary, the scent sharp on his hands as he trims back a branch with the precision of a surgeon. Across the narrow space, her silhouette shifts among tomato vines and sprawling mint, dirt clinging to her calves, hair tied messily off her neck, the fabric of her shirt sticking slightly at the small of her back.

They’ve been working like this for nearly an hour—no music, no conversation, just the clink of tools, the occasional rustle of plants being turned or watered. It’s quiet, but not sterile. Comfortable. Her presence is a soft hum in the background of his mind, rhythmic and grounding. He’s gotten used to it—her garden gloves tossed onto the fence post, the way she hums tunelessly when she concentrates, the soft curse when she finds aphids again on her basil. It’s not surveillance anymore. He isn’t watching. He’s just…near.

Then her voice slices gently through the quiet.

“Want to see something?”

He looks up, blinking, surprised by the interruption but not displeased. She stands near her porch, wiping her hands on a ragged kitchen towel. There’s dirt under her nails, smudges on her cheeks, and something lighter in her eyes. “The lavender finally came up,” she says, nodding toward a tray sitting under a makeshift UV lamp. “They’re tiny, but they made it. You said once you never bothered starting them from seed.”

He doesn’t remember saying it out loud, but he nods and follows her across the yard. Her porch creaks under their weight as she leads him toward the table where the tray rests, a grid of damp soil and fragile green shoots barely taller than a fingernail. She kneels beside it, gestures for him to come closer, and starts talking—explaining the mix she used, the spray bottle technique, the humidity dome she rigged out of an old cake cover.

As she looks up to speak again, the porch light catches on a streak of dirt across her cheek. Without thinking, Zayne reaches out. His thumb grazes her skin, a slow wipe from just below her eye to the edge of her jaw, lifting the smudge away in one clean stroke. Her breath catches. She doesn’t lean back.

Her eyes lock onto his, wide and startled—not in fear, but in sudden awareness. He’s still close, hand halfway raised, her skin warm where he touched it. She swallows, then says his name—soft, quiet, almost questioning.

“Zayne.”

He says hers in return. Low. Careful. Like it might break something if he isn’t gentle with it.

There’s a pause. The porch is quiet but for the rustle of nearby leaves and the gentle creak of the wind nudging the wood. Then she steps forward, slowly, her fingers brushing against the edge of his shirt as she closes the space between them. She rises onto her toes and presses her lips to his—light, cautious, but not uncertain. It’s not a question. It’s a confession wrapped in silence.

The kiss lingers. Just lips against lips, the soft, warm pressure of something new testing its weight. She tastes like mint and rain, and something delicate and unnamed trembles between them. He doesn’t deepen it. Doesn’t pull her in or press back harder. He simply lifts his hand again, cups her jaw with deliberate tenderness, thumb tracing along her cheekbone in a way that says he could destroy anything that dared harm her—but he won’t ever touch her like glass.

She pulls away first, breathing just a little heavier, her hand still hovering near his chest. She looks at him like she’s not sure what she just did, but doesn’t regret it. Her mouth opens—no words come. Instead, she exhales slowly and nods.

“I should—” she starts, then stops. “Goodnight.”

He answers, quiet but unshaken. “Goodnight.”

She leaves barefoot, dirt still clinging to her soles as she disappears down the steps and across the lawn. She doesn’t run, but she moves quickly, like something might stop her if she stays.

Zayne remains where she left him, hand still faintly warm, jaw tight. When he finally sinks back into the chair near the table, it creaks beneath him. His fists curl on his thighs, fingers digging in, knuckles white. He doesn’t turn off the porch light. He doesn’t sleep, not because of threat but because he can still feel her lips—gentle and unguarded—like a promise he didn’t deserve and couldn’t bear to break.

—

The evenings fall quiet by the time he shows up, arms full of rosemary, garlic scapes, lemon balm clippings wrapped in damp paper towels. She’s already boiling water or roasting something when he knocks, expecting him without ever saying she is. The kitchen is small but warm, the walls honey-colored with steam curling against the windowpanes, and the scent of earth and spice fills every corner. She gives him a wooden bowl to clean the herbs, humming softly as she stirs miso paste into broth or brushes oil over warm flatbread.

They eat at the small table near the back door, the one facing her little herb patch where wind chimes tangle softly in the breeze. Sometimes she asks if the thyme tastes too strong, or if the eggs cooked long enough, but mostly they eat in silence. It’s not awkward. It’s familiar—the kind of quiet that feels earned, like something shared rather than something missing.

She sits closer now, not quite pressed against him, but near enough that her thigh brushes his beneath the table when she shifts her weight. The first time it happens, her knee knocks into his and she doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t move either. Just takes another bite of soup, slow and measured, while their legs remain gently aligned, a quiet point of contact neither acknowledges out loud.

Once, while she’s scraping lentils from the bottom of the pot, she glances over her shoulder and says, “You don’t talk much, do you?”| “Don’t need to,” he replies, eyes steady on her hands.

She grins without looking at him again. “Good. I like that better.” And he understands then—it’s not that she wants company. It’s that she wants someone who doesn’t demand to be seen while she's still learning to be.

It happens just past midnight. Zayne is in the backyard, securing the last of the hose reels and flipping off the porch lights, the moon heavy and yellow behind a veil of slow-moving clouds. The wind picks up in short, sharp bursts, rustling leaves and bending the tomato stakes at his feet. As he turns toward the gate, his gaze catches on the glass of her greenhouse—just a shimmer at first, but then a shape, dark and still, reflected in the pane.

It stands where it shouldn’t—between the rows of hibiscus and lavender, too tall for her, too motionless for wind. The figure’s not moving, but the angle is wrong, the placement off; it’s not inside, it’s behind her greenhouse, lit by nothing but moonlight. He drops into a crouch before he even thinks, sliding a blade from his boot, eyes locked on the shimmer. But by the time he rounds the fence and reaches the spot, it’s gone. The space is empty. Still. No footprints in the mulch. No broken stems. No sound except the soft rattle of string lights overhead.

Zayne doesn’t believe in coincidence. Whoever it was stood there long enough to study her, to memorize angles, movements, maybe wait for a moment when she’d step into that glass room unaware. It wasn’t random—it was recon. Someone watched her like he once did. But not like him. Not to protect. Not to keep.

He doesn’t tell her the next morning. She’s smiling too easily over breakfast, teasing him about overwatering his thyme, and he lets it lie for now. Instead, he spends the afternoon laying ground sensors six inches beneath her rose beds and reprogramming the micro-cameras he once installed for his own surveillance. Now they feed directly to his secured server, pinging alerts to his burner phone. She doesn’t know he’s building a fence of code and eyes around her life. She doesn’t know yet someone else is trying to slip in through the cracks.

The sun is low, slanting in through the kitchen window, catching dust motes and bathing the room in soft orange. She’s cleaning with casual energy, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, hair messily twisted on top of her head, humming as she sorts mail and shoves worn dish towels into a drawer. Zayne leans against the counter, watching with that quiet stillness that never quite leaves him, offering to help only once. She waves him off with a laugh and tosses a sponge at his chest.

Then she opens the bottom drawer near the floor and stiffens—just slightly, just enough. Her hand lingers a second too long before she pushes it shut with her hip and says, “That one’s just old bills. Junk I keep meaning to shred.” Her voice is breezy, light, but her eyes don’t meet his as she turns back toward the counter. He makes no move to question her, doesn’t even change expression. But he logs it, like everything else.

When she excuses herself to shower, he moves across the room without a sound. The drawer slides open easily—she didn’t bother to lock it. Inside, the papers are folded, some crumpled, others stiff with age and creased from too many hands. Envelopes marked with return addresses he recognizes from years of contract work: Collection Units, Financial Intercession, Recovery Escalation. No names on the senders. No signatures. Just threats. Demand letters. Photocopied photos of her face, her place of work. She called them bills. But they’re warnings. And they’ve been piling up.

The drawer’s contents spill like a confession—torn envelopes, hastily folded sheets, paper still dusted with the residue of anger. Each one is different in format—some printed on faded company letterhead, others handwritten in thick black marker like a ransom note. No return addresses. No official seals. Just half-legible demands scrawled in frantic script, the kind that smudges when written too fast, too hot with rage to wait for the ink to dry.

Some pages are short, just one or two lines. “You’ll pay what they owe.” “Blood knows where to find blood.” Others are longer, bulleted, spiraling with accusations and threats of “enforcement visits,” thinly veiled beneath legalese. One page simply reads “RUN. IT WON’T HELP.” in red ballpoint, the letters jagged, pressed so hard into the paper it left grooves on the envelope beneath.

Zayne doesn’t react. He sifts through the pile like an archivist, hands careful, eyes scanning each word without giving away a thing. The rage behind them is unmistakable—not the cold precision of hired killers or corporate silence. This is desperate fury, the kind that comes from men whose money’s gone, whose power’s cracked, lashing out at anything left to punish and all of it points back to her. Not because she did anything wrong, but because she’s still visible. Still reachable and someone—more than one—wants to remind her of that.

Zayne returns to his safehouse just before dawn, slipping in through the side entrance beneath the vines. The sky’s beginning to pale, but his thoughts stay anchored in the dark. He powers on the encrypted terminal hidden behind a false panel in the wall, fingers moving with practiced ease through layers of security. He isn’t looking for names. He’s looking for shape—slant, pressure, pattern. The way certain letters lean too hard to the right. The way the lowercase “f” never crosses fully. The handwriting in the threats burned itself into his mind the moment he saw it.

It doesn’t take long. He opens an old dossier from six years back, a failed collection job out of Detroit, and there it is—black and angry across a confession letter, nearly identical. Same pen pressure. Same malformed “r.” The signature at the bottom: Victor Dunn. Former enforcer. Known for using fear before force, humiliation before blood. Tied to the Mendez line—a syndicate with long money and short patience, the same one that sent the kill order on her weeks ago.

Zayne stares at the file, jaw tight. Dunn shouldn’t be active. Last he heard, Dunn had gone underground after botching a protection job and leaving a trail of bodies no one wanted cleaned up. But if he’s resurfaced, if he’s part of the threats then this isn’t coincidence.

It’s legacy.

Vengeance and he’s not the only one circling her at least not anymore.

—

Victor Dunn dies on a Wednesday.

The bar is a low-lit dive on the edge of the industrial quarter, a place where the floor sticks and the jukebox eats quarters. Dunn sits at the far end, nursing cheap bourbon from a cloudy tumbler, the type of man who drinks alone because it makes him feel harder. Zayne walks in unnoticed, hood up, the weight of a flask already resting against his palm. The bartender never sees the sleight of hand—how the bottle Dunn brought in for himself ends up dosed with an odorless sedative laced with synthetic aconite.

The fight starts ten minutes later, as planned—two hired drunks swing at each other just behind Dunn’s stool. Shouting. Glass breaks. Chairs screech. In the commotion, Zayne nudges the bottle an inch closer to his target’s hand, lets the chaos cover the moment Dunn tips the rest of it back and grimaces. It takes eighteen minutes for his throat to swell, his heart to stutter. He’s dead before he hits the floor. To the rest of the room, he just passed out. To the police? Another overdose in a city full of them.

Zayne slips out through the back and walks five blocks before ditching the hoodie in a trash bin. No fingerprints. No witnesses. No security cameras facing the alley. Dunn’s death is ruled as accidental. Case closed in under forty-eight hours.

Zayne doesn’t relax. He watches the digital trail. Waits. And someone else keeps watching her—another set of eyes in the dark, patient, methodical. Whoever they are, they haven’t moved yet. Haven’t struck.

Which means they’re waiting for something.

Not her death.

Her vulnerability.

And Zayne knows now—this isn’t about if they’ll try again.

It’s about when.

The camera feed comes in just after 2:00 a.m.—a whisper of movement pinging Zayne’s encrypted server. The alert is faint, almost subtle, not the kind that would raise alarms for anyone but him. He’s already half-awake, seated at his desk, sharpening a blade he doesn’t need to use tonight. When the motion alert flashes, he taps the key, leans in, and watches.

The footage is black and white, softened with the grain of lowlight exposure, but the figure is clear. A dark sedan idles across the street from her house, tucked just far enough into the alley to avoid the streetlamps. The headlights are off. Engine silent. It wasn’t there five minutes ago. The driver doesn’t exit. He leans forward against the wheel, elbows propped, gaze fixed not on the front door, but the side yard—the greenhouse. Zayne’s chest tightens as he realizes the man isn’t surveying the house. He’s watching her route. He knows her pattern.

Zayne magnifies the feed, enhances the angle. The man’s face is partially obscured by shadow and tinted glass, but he’s clean-shaven, short dark hair, wearing a collared shirt and gloves. Not street muscle. Not a junkie collector. Professional. His posture is too composed. Too deliberate. There’s no fumbling with a phone, no cigarette, no nervous shifting. He’s not casing the house. He’s confirming something.

The car doesn’t idle long. After exactly twenty-three minutes, the headlights flash once—low beam, quick flick, not an accident. The engine murmurs to life, soft as a cat’s breath. By the time Zayne bolts out the back door and crosses three yards in a straight sprint, the car is gone. Not a sound of tires screeching. Not a trace of burned rubber. Just absence, clean and surgical.

He checks the camera playback, frame by frame, until he gets a brief shot of the license plate—centered, perfectly lit by the greenhouse flood light. He runs it through two firewalled databases, both civilian and military. The number pings back: valid registration, leased vehicle, no name attached. Clean. Too clean.

No traffic tickets. No parking violations. No servicing record. The plate’s not fake—it’s sanitized. Zayne leans back in his chair, eyes narrowing at the blank digital report. That’s worse than fake. It means the plate’s real, but protected. Government issue or black market protected. Which means someone has reach. And they know where to look.

He watches the footage again, this time focusing not on the car, but on the angle. The driver wasn’t just watching the greenhouse. He was watching her window. The one with the chipped paint and the vine pressing against the pane. The one she leaves cracked open at night because she says she sleeps better with fresh air.

Zayne’s fists tighten. He tells himself it could be a coincidence. A passerby. A curious neighbor who parked in the wrong place but he doesn’t believe it. Coincidences don’t sit motionless in the dark for twenty-three minutes and drive off without a headlight blink of confusion.

He doesn’t tell her. Not yet. In the morning, she’ll hand him a sprig of sage, smiling, saying it helps with pests.

Instead, he spends the rest of the night on his laptop and gear, rerouting the greenhouse camera feed to a secondary off-site server. He replaces the standard motion sensor with a military-grade proximity net and walks the perimeter twice in silence. Then he loads two guns—one for open carry, one for his ankle—and sets a third beside the couch where he pretends to sleep. He watches until the sun comes up because someone else is watching her and Zayne doesn’t share.

—

The evening is soft with heat, the kind that lingers even after sunset, wrapping around bare skin like a second shirt. They sit outside on her back patio, tucked beneath the overhang strung with mismatched glass lanterns that cast warm colors across the worn wooden table. The wine is red, rich, sweating in mismatched tumblers that catch the flicker of citronella candles. Zayne sips his slowly, eyes fixed on the curve of her throat as she speaks in half-hushed tones, like the words are fragile, easily shattered if said too loud.

The air smells like grilled zucchini—charred skin, oil, cracked salt—and she nudges a plate toward him without looking. Her hands, usually so steady when repotting basil or coaxing root bulbs from old soil, tremble slightly as she wipes her fork clean with a paper napkin. She doesn’t notice the shake, but he does. His fingers pause on the stem of his glass, silent, alert.

“They knew what they were doing,” she says finally, not looking at him. “They knew how deep they were in, and they still signed everything under my name.” Her voice is calm, but her shoulders are locked tight, posture stiff like she’s bracing for an argument she’s already lost. “Because it’s easier to disappear when you leave someone behind to clean up the wreckage. Easier to vanish when there’s a name on the books who isn’t yours.”

Zayne says nothing. Just watches her, head tilted slightly, green eyes unreadable but focused. The air between them grows heavier, no storm—just tension, memory, the weight of past decisions she had no part in. She takes another sip of wine, this time with both hands, like she’s steadying herself on the glass alone.

“They left like it was a heist. Neat, silent, timed.” She laughs once—sharp, brittle. “But I got the aftershock. Collection calls. Doors kicked in. People who didn’t care that I didn’t even know how deep it went. Just that I was easier to find than they were.”

Zayne shifts, just slightly, leans his forearm on the table and says, low and level, “Do you think they’re still alive?”

She hesitates. For once, her voice falters. “I don’t know. And I’m not sure I care anymore.” Her eyes lift to meet his, and for a moment, she looks older, worn down—not tired from work, but tired of surviving other people’s messes. “If they are… I hope they’re scared. Just a little. Like I was.”

He nods, slow. Doesn’t offer comfort. Doesn’t tell her they’ll get what they deserve. He just holds her gaze until her breath steadies, until her grip on the fork eases, and the wind carries the scent of burnt herbs off into the dark and in that stillness, she starts breathing like she finally has room.

He doesn’t speak when she finishes. Doesn’t offer apologies or platitudes, doesn’t reach for her hand or murmur something sweet to bridge the quiet. He just watches her—eyes unmoving, green and sharp in the flicker of candlelight, studying her face like it’s a map that leads somewhere dangerous. Every word she’s spoken, every hitch in her breath, every time she swallowed hard before saying something honest, he files it away. Like evidence. Like a puzzle that, if assembled correctly, will reveal where the next hit is coming from.

She looks down at her plate and pretends to be done with the conversation, but he knows she’s still bleeding inside from it. She changes the subject, asks him about companion planting, jokes about the weird bug she found in her kale earlier that morning. He goes along with it, nods when he needs to, offers a few soft, dry answers that won’t pull her back toward the hurt she’s trying to bury under grilled vegetables and red wine. But his mind is already elsewhere—clicking through shadows and data points, building patterns she doesn’t know he’s seeing.

Later that night, when the house is dark and she’s asleep behind closed curtains, he sits in his own kitchen with only the glow of his laptop for company. No lights. No music. Just the soft mechanical hum of the air conditioner and the steady tap of keys beneath his fingers. He reroutes a former fixer—an old contact who owes him silence more than favors—redirects him off his current surveillance gig and toward a new assignment: run traces. Not on her.

On everyone else.

Every property sale within a five-block radius. Every background check that’s touched her name in the last ninety days. Every camera that picked up the black sedan. He doesn’t just want to know who else is watching her. He wants to know how long they’ve been in his orbit. and if someone else is circling her, they’re already living on borrowed time.

It arrives in a plain white envelope with no stamp, no seal, no sender. Just her name written across the front in sharp, slanted letters—bolder than the last ones, as if whoever wrote it didn’t care about hiding anymore. She finds it that morning nestled between junk coupons and the local circular, her fingers pausing mid-sort when her eyes catch the handwriting. Her chest tightens before she even opens it. Some part of her already knows this one is worse.

Inside is a single sheet of glossy paper. No words. No warning. Just an image: her, walking home, head down, grocery bag in one hand, keys in the other. The angle is low, taken from behind a row of hedges. She remembers that day—it was raining lightly, and she paused at the gate to shake water off her shoulders. She never looked back. The timestamp in the corner is from forty-eight hours ago. Whoever took it was close. Watching. Waiting.

She doesn’t scream. Doesn’t throw the paper away. She stumbles inside, locking the door with trembling fingers, and makes it as far as the kitchen before her knees buckle. The letter crumples in her fist as she slides down against the cabinets, back hitting the cold tile with a soft thud. Her breathing is shallow, uneven, and her eyes won’t focus—she keeps glancing at the door like it might open, like someone might already be standing on the other side.

That’s how Zayne finds her. He doesn’t knock—he hears the change in her pattern from outside, hears the absence of movement where there should be footsteps, humming, her usual distracted energy. When he opens the door and steps into the kitchen, he sees her on the floor, knees pulled up, the paper clenched so tight in her hand it’s creased through the ink. Her eyes snap up to him, wild and wide, and for a second she doesn’t say anything. She just stares.

“I didn’t see them,” she whispers, voice frayed. “They were right there, and I didn’t even feel it.”

Zayne crosses the room slowly, crouches in front of her with a stillness that feels like a held breath. He doesn’t ask questions. Just pries the paper gently from her hand and scans it once.

He memorizes the angle. The distance. The background blur. Then he folds the letter and tucks it into his jacket. He says nothing. But the look in his eyes tells her: someone is going to pay for this.

He doesn’t ask if she wants to get up—he simply acts. In one fluid motion, he leans down, slides an arm beneath her knees and another around her back, and lifts her as if she weighs nothing. She makes a quiet sound in her throat, not quite protest, not quite surrender, her hands clutching at his shirt before she can think better of it. Her face burrows against his collarbone as he carries her into the next room.

The couch creaks softly beneath them as he sits with her still curled against him, his body solid, unmoving, wrapped around her like a wall. He grabs the knit throw folded over the back—gray, soft, worn in places—and pulls it over her shoulders without ever letting her go. She trembles under it, breath ragged, fingers gripping the front of his shirt in tight, stuttering motions. He doesn't speak. Doesn’t shush her. Doesn’t offer hollow words.

He just lets her cry.

His hand comes up once to the back of her head, palm wide and steady, thumb brushing her cheek. He holds her like armor, like gravity, like silence itself. And all the while, his eyes stay open, fixed on the front door—not to watch for danger but to dare it to come through.

It starts small—barely-there touches that could be passed off as accidental. A hand grazing his shoulder as she walks past him in the garden. Her fingers brushing the inside of his elbow when she leans closer to show him the pest bites on a leaf. She laughs more now, and when she does, she’ll rest her palm lightly on his forearm, like it’s instinct, like her body forgets he’s supposed to be a stranger.

Zayne never flinches. He doesn’t lean into it, but he doesn’t move away either. He allows it, absorbs it, and stores the sensation like a secret kept under his ribs. Her touch is light, never lingering too long—yet somehow, he feels it hours after it’s gone.

When she talks, especially when she’s animated—telling him about a plant’s root system or the nightmare customer who tried to haggle over a bag of soil—he finds his gaze drifting. Not to her eyes. Not to her hands. To her mouth. The curve of it when she smiles. The way she presses her lips together when she’s thinking. He watches, quiet and still, never interrupting and she notices. He knows she does—sees it in the flicker of her glance, the subtle way her teeth catch her bottom lip, the way her words slow, like she’s suddenly more aware of how they leave her but she doesn’t stop. If anything, she speaks softer. Holds his gaze longer. Like she wants him to keep looking.

She finds the box propped against her back door one morning, unmarked except for her name written in clean, deliberate handwriting across the top. No return address, no company logo—just the weight of something personal wrapped in plain brown paper. Her boots crunch lightly over gravel as she picks it up, tucking it under her arm while balancing a tray of seed starts in the other. It’s still early, the dew clinging to every leaf like breath, and the sky hasn’t fully decided if it wants to be blue or gray.

She opens it in the garden, seated on her overturned bucket stool between rows of kale and sunflowers. Inside: a pair of gloves, not the flimsy canvas ones she’s always buying in packs of three, but stitched leather, supple and strong, padded across the palms, designed for real work. They’re her favorite shade of green—the kind that matches the moss creeping up the base of her fence. A folded note sits on top, small, simple, scrawled in his tidy, unassuming hand: “These should last longer.”

Her throat tightens immediately. She blinks fast, head bowed as she turns the gloves over in her lap, running her thumbs across the seams like they might split under her touch. The tears come before she can stop them, sharp and hot. She bows her head lower, lets her hair fall forward to hide her face from no one.

She doesn’t go inside. She doesn’t wipe her cheeks. She just stays there in the garden, knees in the dirt, pretending the wind is too strong today. Pretending it’s the pollen in the air. Not kindness that broke her open.

– It’s early morning when Zayne notices the disturbance—just after sunrise, dew still clinging to the blades of grass, the garden glazed in silver light. He’s doing his usual perimeter check, nothing new expected, just routine. But then he sees it: bootprints, fresh and deep, sunk into the soft mulch along the side of her greenhouse. Not his. Not hers. The spacing’s wrong. The tread is military-issue, not casual—a brand he recognizes from tactical catalogues used by low-visibility ops teams.

The prints stop just beneath the greenhouse window, the one she always opens a crack when the humidity gets too thick inside. He kneels, fingers brushing the edges of the sole mark. There’s no attempt to hide the approach. No backtracking, no scuffing. Whoever it was wanted a clear view—inside the structure, toward her workbench where she drinks her morning tea with her legs curled under her on the stool.

Zayne glances through the pane, and it hits him: from that spot, at that distance, they could see everything. The mug she favors—white with a faded botanical print. The way her shoulders curve as she leans over soil trays. The damp strands of hair that fall along her neck while she works, sweat collecting at the hollow of her throat. Whoever was there stood close enough to see details, not just surveillance patterns.

He rises slowly, eyes scanning the surrounding fence line, the street beyond, the way the shadows fall in angles too familiar now. Someone’s testing proximity—measuring comfort. They weren’t just watching anymore. They were imagining the moment they’d step through the gap and reach for he and that makes this different.

This isn’t recon.

This is intention.

Zayne adjusts his schedule without a word, slipping into a rhythm that most soldiers take years to master—three hours down, three hours up, cycling through the night like a machine with a heartbeat. He builds his waking hours around hers, always keeping her within reach, eyes on the monitor even when she’s asleep. When she’s awake, he’s calm, present, making tea or trimming basil. But the moment she closes her door for the night, he becomes something else—watcher, hunter, guardian with no uniform but instinct.

One evening while she’s inside humming along to a jazz record, he climbs the side of her house in silence. Gloves on. Tools tucked into a roll at his belt. The eaves give just enough shadow to conceal his work, and within minutes he’s mounted a pinhole camera barely wider than a screw head, tucked into the weathered fascia above her back porch. It syncs directly to his private relay, filtered through a triple-layer proxy chain. No sound. Just a live feed. Just enough.

She never notices. Not the shift in air when he slides past her window, not the faint scrape of metal against wood. She trusts him. Enough to lean on him, laugh with him, fall asleep knowing he’s next door. And he hates how easy that trust comes, how effortless it is to exploit but he keeps the feed up anyway.

Because her safety isn’t a luxury anymore. It’s a line in the sand.

And he’s already killed for it.

—

The sky outside is bruised purple, the last edges of daylight fading into shadow, and the kitchen smells faintly of rosemary and something sweet she baked earlier—he doesn’t know what, didn’t ask. Zayne stands by the table, fingers brushing the spine of the manila folder he set there minutes ago, unopened. A small USB drive rests on top, matte black, unmarked. He doesn’t sit. Doesn’t move toward her. Just waits until she finally looks up from her tea and catches the seriousness in his posture.

“What’s that?” she asks, her brow furrowed, her voice hesitant like she’s bracing for bad news.

He gestures once, a slight incline of his chin. “It’s a new name,” he says, voice low but steady. “Driver’s license, social number. Birth certificate. Clean record. There's a bank account with a work history already attached—quiet, believable, enough in it to not raise flags.”

She stares at the packet like it might bite. “Zayne… what is this?”

He doesn’t blink. “In case you ever want to leave everything behind,” he replies. “Walk away. Start somewhere else. Some people get to choose. You haven’t had that in a long time.”

Silence falls between them, soft but sharp around the edges. Her fingers toy with the rim of her mug, eyes locked on the papers like they carry weight she can’t lift. “You think I should run?” she asks, voice barely above a whisper.

“No,” he says, and for once, there’s something warmer under his tone. Not soft, exactly. But protective. “I think you should have the option. I think you deserve to choose what happens to you next.”

She doesn’t answer. She just stands and walks the two steps between them, then presses her arms around him—not polite, not casual, but full-bodied and immediate, like she’s anchoring herself to something solid before the floor can fall out again. Her face buries against his chest, and he stands still for a second, surprised. Then his arms wrap around her, slow but firm, like drawing a line between her and everything that still wants to claim her.

“Thank you,” she murmurs against him and he doesn’t say anything back. He doesn’t have to.

—

The broker’s flat is a third-story walk-up tucked between a shuttered liquor store and a dog grooming parlor with flickering neon. It smells of stale coffee and burnt wires, the kind of place people choose when they don’t want to be found. Zayne gets in without a sound—lock picked, gun holstered, no mask, no hesitation. The broker doesn’t even look up until Zayne’s already inside, standing by the window, the glint of a syringe caught in the room’s weak yellow light.

“Zayne?” the man croaks, half-rising from the chair. His laptop is open, cursor blinking over a series of encrypted message logs. He doesn’t answer. Just steps forward, grabs the back of the man’s neck, and drives the needle in cleanly behind his ear. The body slumps. No struggle. No sound. Just a heartbeat that fades and never returns.

Zayne glances at the laptop, fingers already working over the keyboard. Not for records of the original contract—he’d already erased those weeks ago. He’s looking for names. Echoes. Anyone else who accessed the job file after it was marked “complete.” What he finds sends a cold ripple through his spine: a mirrored access code. External. Burned through an anonymizer but still traceable in the backend metadata.

There’s a name. A digital fingerprint. A secondary inquiry logged by someone who had clearance—but not from the same family. Different domain. Different scent. The man in the black sedan. The one at the greenhouse.

Not working for the same people. Not following orders. Acting alone.

Zayne wipes the terminal clean, removes the drive, and closes the laptop with slow, surgical care. The body goes into the back of a van he parks behind a condemned warehouse two blocks over. That night, it’s buried six feet under an abandoned greenhouse outside the city, compost shoveled in thick layers over the grave.

He scatters lily bulbs across the soil. By spring, they’ll bloom blood-red.

There are no loose ends now, except for one and Zayne has a name, a name, a face, and a promise: No one else touches her.

Not ever.

—

The blanket they lie on is old, worn soft by time, with its corners curled and stitching coming loose in places. She’d pulled it from the hall closet earlier that evening, laughing that it smelled like rosemary and mildew, but it had served its purpose well—spread across the patch of grass beneath the oak, away from the porch lights, half-wrapped in shadow. The air is cooler now, touched by the first hint of autumn, and the grass beneath them carries the damp memory of the day's heat, breathing up through the weave of the fabric. Above, the sky is wide and open, a dark indigo ocean scattered with stars that blink slowly, half-hidden by shifting branches that cast long, reaching silhouettes across their legs.

They’re both stretched out in parallel, shoulders just shy of brushing, but the space between them feels electric—charged, not by nerves, but by awareness. No phones buzz, no music hums softly from a speaker. There is only the steady, organic chorus of the night: cicadas rasping in waves from the treeline, the soft whisper of wind through the tall grass, the occasional rustle of leaves disturbed by some unseen thing. It’s the kind of quiet that doesn't demand conversation, only companionship, a kind of stillness neither of them had known in other lives, and they lie there suspended in it, neither moving, neither speaking, but completely present.

Zayne rests with his hands folded behind his head, eyes half-lidded, not quite closed, his breathing deep and even. To an outsider he might appear relaxed, lost in the stars like she is—but beneath his skin, every sound still registers with sniper clarity, every leaf that shifts too sharply, every break in the rhythm of the wind. His mind never fully softens, even here. But her presence at his side makes the edge duller, the silence less like a battlefield and more like a held breath he doesn't mind waiting through.

She’s quiet for a long time, fingers tangled loosely in the fraying edge of the blanket, eyes fixed upward with a look that doesn’t quite belong to the moment—distant, wide, searching. And then she speaks, barely louder than the wind, her voice steady but pulled from somewhere vulnerable.

“I think I’m falling for you.”

The words hang in the air, light but impossible to ignore, like the scent of something blooming after dark—unexpected and intimate. She doesn’t glance at him after she says it, doesn’t gauge his reaction. Her eyes remain fixed on the stars, as if it’s safer to address them than face whatever might be in his expression. Like saying it aloud was hard enough without inviting confirmation or denial. Her breath catches slightly at the end, not quite a hitch, but a subtle tension in her chest as she waits—maybe not for an answer, but for the weight of having said it to settle somewhere inside her.

Zayne doesn't answer, at least not with words. He doesn’t shift to meet her gaze, doesn’t offer the easy comfort of reciprocation. But after a long pause, he moves his hand from behind his head and reaches across the space between them, finding her hand with a certainty that is quiet but unmistakable. His fingers thread between hers—not tentative, not testing, but firm, as if this gesture alone is his reply. Not a promise. Not a confession. But something with gravity.

She doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t pull away or speak again. Her grip tightens slowly, gently, like she’d been waiting for something to anchor her. Her thumb brushes over his knuckles once, a silent thank-you, and though the words still echo softly between them, neither of them breaks the quiet.

And under the endless dark sky, with their hands linked and hearts laid bare in the hush of cicadas and shifting wind, neither of them moves, because whatever this is, it’s real now and neither of them is ready to let go.

–

The storm rolls in heavy, all color stripped from the sky and replaced with bruised clouds that churn and flash with the promise of something violent. Rain comes in sheets, sudden and unforgiving, hammering rooftops and rattling downspouts with a wild rhythm that turns the air electric. Zayne hears it long before the knock—feels the shift in pressure, the air thickening, the scent of ozone and soil rising through the floorboards like a warning. But it’s her silhouette in the window that tenses his shoulders, the shape of her framed in shadow and lightning.

She’s barefoot when he opens the door, toes wet and mud-speckled on the porch, the hem of her thin cotton dress clinging to her knees. Her hair is damp, curls plastered against her cheek and forehead, cheeks flushed and mouth slightly open, chest rising with the rush of running through rain. She doesn’t step inside immediately—just stands there grinning, half breathless, like this is all one big dare she hasn’t decided if she regrets.

“Tea,” she says, voice pitched with amusement, as if the word excuses everything. Her smile is crooked, teasing, but there’s something in her eyes that betrays her—something uncertain, raw, wanting. The kind of look you don’t wear for a drink. The kind of look you give someone you don’t want to leave alone anymore.

He doesn’t ask why she came. Doesn’t tell her she’s wet, doesn’t hand her a towel. He just steps aside, lets her in, and shuts the door behind her with the same quiet finality he reserves for chambering a round.

They don’t bother with the kettle because what she really came for has nothing to do with tea.

The door has barely latched behind them when she turns, still flushed from the run through the storm, rain dripping from her lashes, chest heaving beneath the cling of soaked fabric. Her fingers twitch like she wants to reach for him but hasn’t given herself permission—until she does. A hand rises, hesitant, then decisive, touching his chest just above his sternum, and she leans in without ceremony. The kiss is soft at first, trembling with restraint, a question wrapped in heat. She tastes like rain and something sweeter—like surrender held between teeth.

Zayne doesn’t hesitate. The moment her lips part against his, he steps into the space between them, crowding her back until she hits the wall, hands sliding firmly to her waist like she belongs beneath his grip. His mouth finds hers again, deeper this time, answering the question she didn’t dare ask with something elemental and sure. His breath is hot against her temple when he breaks for air, the kind of exhale that shudders through him like restraint cracking at the edges.

She gasps when he lifts her—shocked more by how easily he does it than the movement itself—her legs instinctively winding around his hips, bare thighs tightening at his sides. His hands are under her now, one bracing the small of her back, the other cupping beneath her thigh as he carries her across the room like she weighs nothing, like he’s been waiting to do this since the moment she first smiled at him over seed trays and spilled tea. Rain hammers against the windows, thunder shaking the panes, but inside the world has gone narrow and burning.

He sets her on the kitchen counter, the cold marble making her arch with a startled sound that dies against his mouth. His body presses into hers, solid, overwhelming, and her fingers dive into his hair like she needs to anchor herself to something real or drown in it.

And Zayne? Zayne feels like he’s not kissing her—he’s claiming her. With his mouth, his hands, his breath and she lets him.

The counter is slick with condensation from her skin and the rain still clinging to her dress, and he doesn’t rush—he doesn’t need to. Zayne kisses her like it’s been etched into him, mouth dragging slow and deliberate along the curve of her jaw, then down her throat where he lingers, tasting her pulse. His hands work at the thin fabric clinging to her, sliding it up inch by inch, exposing her like an offering, like she’s something to be unwrapped not with urgency, but with reverence. When he pulls the dress over her head, he does it with the precision of someone unwrapping something sacred, not hurried, not rough—just steady, determined, sure.

She’s already trembling, the cold of the air mingling with the heat rising in her, her legs parting instinctively as he lowers her onto the cool countertop. He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t smirk. Just slides his hands down the sides of her thighs, fingers drawing invisible lines, mapping every shiver like it’s telling him something. His mouth finds her collarbone, her sternum, the dip of her navel—and then lower, lower, until she’s gasping just from the proximity of his breath.

When he kisses the inside of her thigh, her body jerks, tension melting into something deeper, needier. He doesn’t go straight to where she wants him. He teases—devours the soft skin at the bend of her leg, tongue tracing fire that only delays the inevitable. And when he finally moves between her, when his tongue finds her—slow, firm, consuming—her breath hitches, then breaks.

She lets out a sound that isn’t a moan, not at first, but a whimper, a soft, shocked exhale like she wasn’t prepared for how it would feel to be wanted like this. Her fingers dive into his hair, gripping tight, hips lifting against his mouth as if her body is trying to keep pace with what he’s doing to her. Her voice fractures with each flick of his tongue, each deep stroke, each pause where he watches her with dark, focused eyes before continuing.

Outside, thunder rolls like a heartbeat, but inside—she’s the storm, when she comes, it’s not a scream—it’s a surrender. A low, shuddering cry pulled from her very center, her thighs locked around his head, her hands shaking, his name lost somewhere in the breath she can't quite catch. And Zayne? He keeps going. Until he’s sure she won’t forget that this—his mouth, his hands, his hunger—belongs to no one else but her.

Her breath is still uneven, chest rising in shallow pulls, skin flushed from where his mouth left a trail of devotion across her body. Her fingers twitch where they rest on his shoulders, gripping the cotton of his shirt like she’s afraid to let go, like she’s not ready to lose the weight of him against her. He kisses her again—not her mouth this time, but her ribs, her hip, the inside of her wrist—each one quieter, more reverent, like punctuation in a language only they understand. And then he’s above her, between her, his gaze locked on hers with a kind of focus that borders on unholy.

He slides into her slowly, deliberately, with a groan that catches in his throat and dies against the warm skin of her neck. Her body arches into his, welcoming, trembling, wrapping around him as if she’s known this weight her whole life but never had the name for it until now. His thrusts aren’t fast, aren’t greedy—they’re measured, deep, a rhythm built on the unspoken. Each one presses the breath from her lungs, not from force, but from how close he feels—how real.

He doesn’t whisper dirty promises. Doesn’t say her name over and over like a chant.

He’s quiet—achingly so—but everything he doesn’t say is in the way he holds her, the way he presses their foreheads together and closes his eyes like this is the only place in the world he can be still. He isn’t trying to leave a mark. He isn’t trying to conquer.

He’s just… there. Fully. Undeniably.

Inside her in a way that feels less like sex and more like something old, something foundational. As if, in this moment, with her wrapped around him and her hands buried in his hair, he's saying without speaking: You’re mine. Even if you never know it. Even if you never say it back.

You already are.

She moans softly into his neck, the sound muffled by skin and storm, her fingers sliding from his shoulders to his back, nails dragging just enough to feel him shudder. Her legs tighten around his waist, holding him to her like she’s afraid he might slip through her fingers, like if she lets go the moment might dissolve. But Zayne doesn’t move fast—doesn’t chase it. He stays inside her, steady, his hips rolling with the kind of control that makes her fall apart all over again with every deliberate thrust.

Each movement sinks deep, unhurried, like he’s carving her into memory. There’s no rush in his touch—just reverence, heat, weight. His hand finds hers above her head, fingers threading through tightly, anchoring them both. She opens her eyes and sees him watching her—really watching—and something in her chest cracks open, wide and silent, like this isn’t just a man holding her. It’s him staying. Rooted.

Their bodies move together like they've done this a thousand times in some other life. He shifts just slightly, hips angling different, and her gasp punches out like it surprises her. Her back arches, and he swallows her next sound with a kiss, slow and deep, like the rhythm of his body inside hers. His other hand is on her waist, thumb brushing her skin, grounding her in a moment that feels impossible—too full, too real.

She whispers something—maybe his name, maybe nothing at all—into the shell of his ear, and it makes him tremble. Not from lust, not from control slipping, but because she wants him like this. Sees him. Without question. Without fear.

He groans again, lower this time, buried against her throat, body tightening with the weight of what he’s feeling but can’t let out. His release comes quietly, teeth clenched, muscles locked, like he doesn’t want to let go, doesn’t want the moment to leave him. He stays inside her afterward, still hard, still trembling faintly, his face tucked into the crook of her neck, their breath tangling in slow, uneven waves.

Neither of them speaks.

She just runs her fingers through his hair, soft and absent, the same way she touches seedlings before she sets them into fresh earth. And Zayne breathes with her—in sync, shared, like he’s been chasing silence all his life and finally found a version of it he doesn’t want to escape from.

—

She thinks it’s a whim—an idea born over too many late dinners and the restless quiet that settles over them after midnight. Just a weekend trip, she says with a half-smile, somewhere green where they can drink tea outside and pretend the world doesn’t exist. She talks about wildflowers and maybe picking up a packet of heirloom seeds if they find a roadside market. Zayne nods, offers to drive, listens to her dream out loud like it wasn’t already carved into the next steps he’d laid weeks ago.

Long before she brought it up, he’d already selected the house—a two-bedroom cottage tucked into a grove off a dirt road no one travels without intention. He booked it under a shell name four identities deep, a registration that doesn’t trace to anything real. The payment was routed through a layered system of burned cards and buried crypto accounts, untraceable, disposable. While she packs clothes and gathers jars of herbs, he sits at his terminal wiping her forwarding address from three databases, planting a redirect in its place: an empty apartment in another city, already rigged to show false movement on security footage.

He doesn’t tell her what he’s doing. He doesn’t need to. Her hands are busy folding sweaters into a canvas duffel, her mind already halfway to the scent of loamy earth and morning dew. She trusts him—implicitly, without hesitation—and that’s something Zayne doesn’t take lightly. He watches her from the doorway for a moment longer than necessary, memorizing the soft hum in her throat as she packs, the way she tucks one sock into another like ritual.

When they leave just after dawn, her eyes are bright with the thrill of escape, her window rolled down to let the wind mess her hair. She doesn't ask why he takes the longer route. She just rests her hand on his knee and starts pointing out birds on fence posts, talking about names for a garden they haven’t even walked through yet. Zayne keeps his hand on the wheel, his other curled loosely around hers, and behind his calm silence, he’s already watching the road in layers—routes in, routes out, no cameras, no tails because this isn’t a break.

It’s the extraction and he’ll make sure she never has to return to what they just left behind.

The road stretches out like silk ribbon unwinding beneath the tires, long and quiet, lined with pine and low-slung fog. The sun hasn’t broken fully yet—just a pink bruise on the edge of the sky—and the cabin is filled with the steady hum of the engine, the occasional shuffle of her shifting in her seat. She sleeps curled toward the window, cheek pressed to her shoulder, breath soft and even. He keeps one hand steady on the wheel, but the other drifts—light brushes against her thigh, small, absent touches that ground him more than he’ll ever admit.

She murmurs in her sleep once, the sound slurred, soft. His name. Not his alias. His name. The real one she doesn’t know she knows. His fingers pause where they rest, a breath catching somewhere beneath his ribs. He doesn’t react outwardly, but in his mind the syllables echo—Zayne—and he files it away, precise and quiet, like tucking a blade into a belt. Not for violence. But for proof. That even in dreams, she’s reaching for him.

The moment they pass the crooked county line sign, he hits the first trigger. GPS signal reroutes through a spoofed beacon on a highway two states south. He doesn’t slow down. Just tilts his phone screen once, confirms the signal bounce, then opens the secondary server tethered to the signal relay. Purge begins. Encrypted logs are scrubbed. IP pings rerouted. Facial recognition masks uploaded to rerun loops of her entering false locations—libraries, coffee shops, train stations—all automated ghosts that will confuse any tracker with less than government-grade clearance.

Then he plants the breadcrumbs. Three separate data points: a credit card ping in Chicago, a burner number attached to a cabin rental in Oregon, and a fake pharmacy script logged under her new name in Nevada. Each one clean, shallow, intentional. Not enough to catch, just enough to chase.

He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t shift his expression. Just drives, knuckles pale, eyes calm, the woman beside him sleeping like there’s nothing left in the world trying to find her. And if Zayne has done his job right, there isn’t.

The town unfolds slowly, like a secret kept between hills and tree lines, tucked too deep into the folds of the land to show up on anything but paper maps or memory. Cell reception is thin. Gas stations have mechanical pumps. The post office shares a roof with the general store, and everyone waves at everyone whether they know them or not. The signs are hand-painted and chipped, boasting names like “Pine & Petal” and “Cassie’s Feed & Fix,” and the only currency more stable than cash is reputation—earned through presence, not paperwork.

The nursery is just past the edge of town, where the gravel road curves between two weeping willows. The sign out front sways gently in the breeze, its paint faded and soft, the script curling around a hand-painted sunflower. On her first day, Zayne walks her there, not because she needs help finding it—but because he needs to see it. Needs to know what kind of people she’ll be surrounded by, what kind of ground she’ll be standing on when he isn’t right beside her.

She meets the owner—a stout, sun-tanned woman with a voice like velvet and dirt under every fingernail—and within five minutes, they’re laughing like old friends. Zayne watches from the corner of the greenhouse as she unpacks starter trays with practiced ease, her fingers quick and sure. He listens as she tells a half-true story about growing up surrounded by bad decisions, about how the only thing that made sense back then was soil. “People ruin things,” she says, smiling softly, “but plants just… try to live. Even in the wrong place.”

The owner nods. Offers her the job before she finishes the sentence.

Zayne doesn’t say anything. Just slips away before she can look for him, leaving her with a clipboard, a watering schedule, and the first real piece of peace she’s been allowed in years. He walks back home the long way—through the woods, eyes scanning shadows—not looking for threats. Just making sure there aren’t any.

The path home winds along a dirt road lined with blackberry brambles and old fencing, the boards warped by sun and time. She walks beside him with her hands in the pockets of her dress, shoulders relaxed in a way they rarely are, the tension that usually knots between her shoulder blades finally smoothed out. The late afternoon light catches on her cheeks, and there’s a smudge of soil across her jaw that she hasn’t noticed. She doesn’t talk much, but when she does, her voice is lighter, like it no longer has to push through static just to be heard.

She smiles, the kind that isn't polished or guarded, just open, and tilts her head toward him as they near the cottage. “I forgot what it feels like,” she says, half-laughing, half in awe. “To breathe with both lungs. Like I’m not waiting for the next hit.” She doesn’t cry. But her eyes shine like she might, if she wasn’t so busy memorizing how safety feels on her tongue.

Zayne doesn’t respond. Not with words. He watches her, nods once, and reaches ahead to open the front door before she can. It’s not ceremony—it’s ritual now, the smallest act of shelter. Inside, he takes off his boots, washes his hands, and begins pulling ingredients from the pantry. Onions. Rice. Stock. His movements are fluid, practiced. He doesn’t say it, but everything in how he dices, simmers, stirs says: you’re home now.

She hums as she waters the rosemary in the windowsill. Not to fill the space. Just because she can.

He builds it behind their cottage, just beyond the blackberry hedge where the grass grows thick and the ground is soft from years of being left alone. The greenhouse rises slowly, beam by beam, frame by frame, salvaged lumber hauled from an old barn a few miles out—wood worn smooth with age but still strong. He doesn’t use power tools, doesn’t rush the process. Each cut is deliberate, measured with a craftsman’s eye and the kind of care he never shows when he's breaking bones or snapping triggers. His knuckles split more than once from splinters and hammer strikes, blood drying in thin lines across his skin.

He never wears gloves. He wants the ache.

Wants the realness of it.

She comes outside in the mid-mornings when the light is gold and clean, balancing a mason jar of cold water with lemon slices and a little mint plucked from the porch planter. She leans against the half-finished frame, watching him work with amusement softening every edge of her voice.

“You’re going to burn like a fool,” she says, smirking as she catches sight of his reddening shoulders and the sweat beading along his neck.

He glances up at her, shrugs once without breaking rhythm, and keeps hammering, jaw set in that quiet way of his that means I’d rather blister than be soft. She rolls her eyes and sets the jar down beside his tool kit anyway.

He’s halfway through anchoring one of the side panels when the hammer slips, catching his thumb with a vicious crack. The hiss he lets out is low and bitten off, more pain than he usually allows to show, and he presses his mouth tight to the back of his hand as if to seal it in. She startles at first, then covers her mouth with her soil-streaked fingers and laughs—full, unrestrained, the kind of laugh that leaves her slightly doubled over. “That,” she says between giggles, “was dramatic.” Her grin is so wide it lights her whole face.

He turns to her, breath still tight, but that laugh hits something inside him hard—softer than bone but just as permanent. He doesn’t speak. Just steps forward and kisses her without warning, without plan. His hands are rough and still stained with sawdust, his mouth insistent, hungry in the quiet way only he can be. It isn’t a thank you. It’s a vow. Built beam by beam with everything he doesn’t say.

The frame is finished by dusk, clear panels slotting into place like held breath finally exhaled. The inside smells of sawdust and warm earth, of work and beginnings. The soil in the beds is freshly turned, dark and damp, rich with compost he mixed by hand. There’s no ceremony when she steps inside barefoot, hem of her dress brushing the floorboards, trowel in hand. Just a quiet kind of reverence as she kneels in the corner where the light falls best at sunset, and presses the roots of the first cutting into the earth.

Lavender, of course—soft and stubborn, fragrant even when bruised. She hums to herself as she pats the soil around it, fingers stained with the same dirt she’s been working into her new life. The leaves shiver slightly under her breath, like they know they’ve been placed somewhere safe. When she looks up at him, there’s a smudge of soil on her cheek and peace in her smile.

Zayne steps forward, silent as always, and takes the watering can without a word. The spout tilts, a slow, steady pour soaking into the roots, the water catching light like glass. He uses his right hand—the same one that had held a gun only weeks ago, finger steady, gaze cold, ending the last man who knew what her name used to be. That hand, now dappled with dirt and dew, moves with surprising care.

She watches him with quiet wonder, like she knows but doesn’t speak it and in the hush of the new greenhouse, among seedlings and shadows, he waters the first bloom of the life they’ve stolen back together. Not as a soldier. Not as a killer but as a man learning how to grow something he never meant to keep.

They’re sitting on the porch steps, the evening sun filtering gold through the trees, casting long shadows across the overgrown path leading back to the road. She’s barefoot, toes curled against the wood, sipping from a chipped glass of red wine she keeps swirling like it might reveal something at the bottom. The air is quiet, slow-moving, a hush that’s become routine between them—comfortable, unspoken, full of weight. He’s beside her, one hand resting against her thigh, thumb stroking slow arcs over the fabric of her dress.

She speaks softly, like she’s not sure it’s worth mentioning. “There was a man at the nursery today. Older. Said the violets looked like they’d been raised on patience.” She chuckles once, but it fades quickly. “Then he asked if I’d always worked with my hands. Said it like he already knew the answer.”

Zayne freezes. Completely. His wine glass hovers midair, motionless, the red liquid catching the light like blood on glass. He doesn’t blink. Doesn’t breathe. Every sense in him sharpens, collapses inward to the single name he’d memorized and buried: Rian Sorn. Not Caleb. Rian. Older brother. The last enforcer. Disavowed from his house after their father’s death but known for keeping blood promises long past when they were due.

“Had that strange smile,” she continues, absently. “You know the kind. Not friendly. Not creepy. Just… like he knew me. Like he was waiting to be remembered.”

Zayne slowly lowers the glass, sets it on the step without looking. His pulse doesn’t quicken—it concentrates. Thoughts click into place behind his eyes like a scope narrowing, cold and silent. He nods once, just enough for her to stop talking, and then gently shifts the conversation to something else—soil pH, basil rot, anything—because she can’t know what’s coming. Not yet but in his mind, he’s already reaching for the old tools. The knives he hasn’t touched since the last death. The burner phone no one knows he reactivated because if Rian Sorn is here, he didn’t come for flowers.

He came to finish the contract Zayne already buried and this time, Zayne doesn’t intend to leave a body anyone can find.

Rian Sorn isn’t like the others—he doesn’t work for contracts, doesn’t answer to syndicates, doesn’t need a reason beyond the weight of unfinished blood. He’s the kind of man who kills out of inheritance, not obligation. His name never appears in records; there’s no heat trail, no payment logs, no messages. Only results. Silent disappearances. Houses burned down with no arson trace. Entire bloodlines snuffed out under the guise of accidents. Ritual violence—methodical, clean, personal. And if he’s close enough to make small talk about violets, then he’s already mapped the house, the exits, the blind spots. He already knows where she sleeps.

Zayne moves differently that night. There’s no panic, no rushing—just a complete shift in rhythm, like gears locking into place. He walks the property twice, barefoot, ears tuned to every creak of wind, every bird that doesn’t sing. Inside, he checks the locks—not once, but twice, fingers brushing along bolt edges, making sure the screws haven’t been tampered with. He flips the window latches. Secures the basement access. Even resets the motion detectors, narrowing the radius to just beyond the treeline.

In the quiet of the bedroom, she’s already asleep, curled on her side in the dip she’s worn into the mattress beside his. Her breathing is slow, lips parted slightly, one hand resting across his pillow. He watches her in the dark for a long moment, reading every line of her body like scripture—where she’s most vulnerable, where she trusts without thinking. Where he’d bleed the world dry to keep her untouched.

The knife he hides beneath the bed isn’t the folding kind tonight—it’s longer, sharper, a single-edged Karambit wrapped in oil cloth. He sharpens it slowly at the kitchen table while the kettle whistles and the lights stay off. Then he places it within reach, exact angle, practiced muscle memory. When he finally lays down, it’s not to rest. It’s to wait.

He doesn’t sleep not until the sky begins to pale. Not until he’s sure Rian hasn’t come to claim what Zayne has already marked as his.

Zayne picks up the trail in silence, without fanfare, relying not on devices or drones but on the patterns that live in muscle memory. He doesn’t need GPS when he knows how a predator moves—doesn’t need a name when he has behavior. Caleb—or Rian, he knows now—has been cautious, skilled, leaving no digital trace, but he’s not invisible. Zayne catches the first break when he spots the faint shimmer of heat in a parking lot near the edge of town—an exhaust signature too fresh for how still the car looks, parked at a blind curve near the woods. The thermal haze rises in waves from the tailpipe, subtle, nearly lost in the afternoon glare. It’s a trick he learned in Prague, when heat was the only language you could trust and every breath might get you killed.

That night, Zayne uses one of the few remaining contacts he hasn’t burned—an old fixer who owes him for a job that saved her life and took someone else's. The message is simple, clean: a digital tip-off that the girl is using an alias and just got spotted in New Mexico. Zayne even attaches a blurred photo—low resolution, plausible enough, timestamped for twenty minutes in the future and pinged through a burner signal off a modified dashcam.

The bait is too perfect to ignore, and the timing is surgical. Rian, meticulous and hungry for closure, takes it. By the time he moves—quick but not rushed, confident enough to fall for the misdirection—Zayne is already one step ahead. The false sighting routes him toward the old nursery’s delivery zone, an overgrown backlot once used for storing soil, pallets, broken tools. It's a dead space now, no witnesses, no cameras, a fence with a single weak link that only someone tracking a trail would push through.

Zayne waits in the shadow of the half-collapsed greenhouse, crouched behind a rusted steel rack, heartbeat steady, knife ready, eyes fixed on the path. The wind stirs loose paper and pollen. The dirt here smells like memory and rot. And when Rian steps into the clearing—silent, curious, reaching for the last breadcrumb—Zayne moves because this is where it ends. Not in bloodlines.

Not in threats, but in a grave no one will dig but him.

The clearing is silent but tense, every insect gone still, the branches holding their breath. Zayne doesn’t give a warning—there’s no sharp callout, no monologue. Just movement, explosive and lethal, as he lunges from the greenhouse’s ruined frame like a blade in motion. His boots skid across packed dirt as he closes the distance in three quick strides. Rian barely registers the shape bearing down on him before instinct kicks in, knife flashing out from beneath his jacket, but it’s too late—Zayne is already on him.

Their bodies collide with a bone-jarring crack, momentum carrying them both sideways into the delivery shed’s rusted wall. Zayne drives a knee into Rian’s ribs, catching the wind out of him, then follows with an elbow to the temple that makes the other man grunt and stagger. Rian recovers fast, trained—he swings low with the knife, a practiced arc aimed for Zayne’s thigh. Zayne twists, the blade grazing cloth, not skin, and responds with a brutal hook that snaps Rian’s head back. There’s no choreography here—this is dirty, close, every blow meant to maim or drop.

Rian spits blood, face curling into a grin that’s half malice, half respect. “Knew it’d be you,” he growls through grit teeth. Zayne says nothing. Just slams his forearm into Rian’s throat, knocking him into a stack of plastic pots that scatter with a crash.

They wrestle into the mulch beds, slipping in compost, the smell of fertilizer sharp in the air. Rian lands one solid punch to Zayne’s jaw—makes his vision blur white at the edges—but Zayne absorbs it, turns the pain inward, and redirects the force with a twist of his hips. His knife comes up, low and brutal, slicing across Rian’s abdomen in a single, controlled stroke—hip to sternum. The sound isn’t dramatic. Just wet. Final.

Rian staggers backward, clutching his guts like they’ll stay in place by sheer will. His legs buckle. He drops to his knees in the dirt, fingers twitching in the mulch, trying to rise again even as blood pools beneath him. He gasps—chokes once—then folds forward, face pressing into soil.

Zayne watches, chest rising slow, calm. His hand doesn’t shake. His breath doesn’t falter. He looks down on the dying man like a gardener pulling weeds by the root. No rage. No gloating.

Just precision.

Just necessary removal and when Rian’s final breath rattles out through blood and spit, Zayne kneels. He grips the body by the collar and begins dragging it into the dark edge of the clearing—toward the shallow pit already carved beneath the compost tarp, because this isn’t vengeance.

It’s maintenance

The wind shifts just enough to carry the sound of something wrong—metal scraping, a grunt swallowed by mulch, the final wet thud of a body hitting ground. She sets down the seed trays she was sorting, suddenly breathless, the hairs on her arms lifting like static. No one called her name. Nothing in the air says danger aloud. But she moves anyway, slow but certain, down the overgrown side path that leads to the back of the old nursery where she was told not to go.

Her boots crunch over shattered pots and torn landscape fabric, the scent of blood sharp and out of place in the sun-warmed dirt. When she rounds the corner of the collapsed greenhouse frame, her breath catches—but she doesn’t cry out. Doesn’t collapse. Doesn’t run. Zayne is there, crouched low beside the body like a storm paused mid-movement. His shirt is torn across one shoulder, blood slick down his arms to the elbows, one hand still clutched around the hilt of a blade so red it glistens.

He looks up, and in that moment, he doesn’t look like the man who fixes her sink or makes her tea or knows how she likes her toast just barely burnt. He looks like something older, carved from ash and oath, shaped by violence in the quiet way war is—not fire, but pressure. His eyes are not pleading, not defensive. Just watching. Waiting.

Her gaze shifts from the body to his face, then to the blood on his hands. She doesn’t ask who the man was. Doesn’t ask what he did. She knows. She’s always known and instead of breaking under the truth, she simply breathes it in.

“You did that for me,” she says, voice barely above a whisper, but carved from something unshakable. It isn’t a question. It’s a truth, spoken like a thread pulled taut and tied.

He says nothing. He couldn’t explain it if he tried. He just looks at her with the weight of everything he’s done—for her, to keep her, to build a life neither of them believed they’d survive long enough to live. There’s something unspoken in his expression, burning low and furious, like he’d do it all again and not blink and then she does the only thing that matters.

She steps into the bloodstained quiet, past the corpse, past the fear, past the violence, places her hand on his face, and holds him. Not like a man who’s broken.

But like one worth saving.

The porch is quiet beneath them, the night air soft and threaded with the scent of soil and cut grass. The moon hangs heavy and full above the treeline, its light glinting off the rim of her mug as she cradles it in both hands. The tea has long gone cold, but she hasn’t let it go, just rests it on her knees like a keepsake she’s not ready to part with. Her eyes are half-lidded, the exhaustion of the day tucked just behind her quiet, steady breathing. She hasn't spoken in a while, and he hasn't filled the silence—he never does. Some part of him knows silence is a kind of safety, too.

Zayne sits beside her, legs braced apart, elbows resting on his knees. His hands are scrubbed raw, fingertips still faintly pink from the cleaning they took after Rian. The scars across his knuckles are old but tight tonight, skin stretched and healing slow. There’s a kind of stillness to him that’s different from calm. Like he’s holding his breath somewhere under his ribs, waiting for something to finish settling in the air around them.

Without ceremony, without pause, he pulls something from his pocket. Not the usual folded paper, not a new ID packet. Just a small, square box—worn at the corners like it’s been in his coat too long. He holds it in his palm for a second before handing it over, gaze fixed not on her but the shadows moving just beyond the porchlight.

“This isn’t backup,” he says, voice low. “It’s not about running. It’s not a new name or a file to burn.” He glances at her now, just once, eyes fierce with something he rarely lets show. “It’s a future. If you want it.”

She looks down at the box in her hands, not moving, not breathing, then opens it with fingers slow and careful. Inside: a ring. Simple. Silver. Worn like his hands, forged for use, not flash. But beautiful, in the way something becomes beautiful when it’s meant.

Her throat tightens. Not from surprise. From understanding. From the weight of everything he’s never said until now. “You had this?” she whispers, voice cracking like the night itself.

He nods once. “A while.” Then, softer: “I didn’t want to offer it until I knew I could protect what it meant.”

She says nothing at first. Just reaches out and places the box down beside her, then shifts and leans fully into him, head against his shoulder, hand slipping down to find his. She squeezes. Hard. Like grounding herself to the moment so it doesn’t vanish.

“You really think we get that?” she murmurs. “A future?”

He closes his eyes for a second, then opens them again—sharp, green, unblinking.

“Since you,” he says. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted.”

She doesn’t say yes. She doesn’t have to, just laces their fingers together and stays pressed to his side until the moon slips west and the mug in her lap is cold and forgotten.

And Zayne, for once, lets himself hope.

The ceremony is unceremonious in the way only the truest things are. No audience. No rehearsed lines. Just a morning that begins like any other—with coffee that she forgets on the windowsill, and him quietly ironing his one good shirt at the kitchen table, jaw tight with concentration as he avoids the patch that never quite sits flat. Her dress is simple, linen the color of rain-bleached stone, and her hands still carry the soft scent of mint and clay from the greenhouse—because even on the day she marries him, she couldn't resist tending her seedlings.

They walk out together just past noon, barefoot in the grass still wet from the morning’s dew. The old oak at the edge of the property stands like a sentinel, its branches heavy with age, framing the clearing where bees hum low around wildflowers in accidental rows. There’s no music, just birdsong and wind and the sound of her breath hitching when he takes her hand. He’s not holding a script. There is no officiant. Just them, and the silence of something sacred blooming without spectacle.

They stand beneath the tree and say nothing for a long while. No promises out loud. No recited declarations. Just the look they share—a gaze full of every night they spent surviving, every morning they chose to stay. When it’s time, Zayne doesn’t say “I do” like he’s reciting a ritual. He says it low, quiet, voice grounded like the soil beneath them.

Like he’s not just agreeing to love her but swearing to root himself beside her. To grow something together that no one—not ghosts, not debt, not blood—can dig up again. She doesn’t cry. Just steps forward, slips a small sprig of rosemary into the loop of his belt where a blade once rested.

“For remembrance,” she murmurs, fingertips brushing his waist.

He catches her hand, brings it to his lips, and kisses her palm like it’s the center of the world, like it’s already his and in that patch of wild grass and wind, they are married—not by law, not by witness, but by the earth itself.

The cottage is warm with a kind of hush that feels earned, stone walls holding the heat of the fire flickering low in the hearth. The logs crack softly, throwing ribbons of orange across the wooden floor, across the bed they made themselves earlier that day—simple sheets, thick wool blanket, lavender tied with twine above the headboard, perfuming the room like memory. Rain whispers against the windows in gentle pulses, steady, private. The storm isn’t wild. It’s intimate. Like it came only to witness this.

She steps away from him without a word, untying the sash at her waist with slow, sure fingers. The linen dress slips from her shoulders, puddling around her ankles as she stands in the firelight—bare, unhurried, her skin kissed gold by the flicker of flame. She doesn’t cover herself. Doesn’t shy away from the way he’s looking at her. She just watches him watching her, the shadows moving across her collarbones, the slight swell of her breath. And when she climbs into his lap, one knee on either side of his thighs, she does it like ritual, like every inch of her already knows where to go.

His breath catches the moment she sinks down onto him, a soft, broken sound exhaled against her throat. Her hands brace against his shoulders, steadying herself as she takes all of him in one slow, aching stroke. He groans, low and guttural, pressing his forehead to her chest as his hands slide up the smooth length of her back, then down again to grip her hips with the kind of strength that says I will never let you go. Not in this life. Not in any.

She begins to move—slow rolls of her hips, deep and deliberate—and he doesn’t rush her. Doesn’t take control. He just watches. Watches the way her mouth parts, the way her lashes flutter, the way she bites back soft, strangled sounds when he shifts just right inside her. Each thrust is measured, more pressure than pace, his hands guiding, grounding her. She whimpers his name, voice thin with pleasure, full of trust.

And then he says hers.

The first time.

Rough and reverent, like something pulled from the bottom of his chest—something he never dared give voice to until now. Like it’s not just her name. It’s his home. tags: @blessdunrest @starmocha

#zayne x reader #zayne x freader #zayne ficrec

142 notes · View notes