The rain fell in slow, persistent sheets, washing over the shattered remnants of the alley. Smoke curled from smoldering barrels, carrying the acrid scent of gunpowder and charred wood. Rihan leaned against the cracked brick wall, his body battered, drenched, and trembling—not just from pain, but from the strange, almost alien relief that had finally settled over him. Forty years of survival, bloodshed, and betrayal had brought him here, and now he could almost taste the freedom he had sought for decades.
Forty years. Sold by his parents when he was barely a boy, sold to survive. The first blood on his hands had been his own family's shame, the first missions had been tests of obedience. Then came the Hitman Association—powerful, cold, merciless. They had taken him in, polished him, sharpened him into a weapon feared by even the hardest men. He had lived in the shadows, moved like a ghost, killed without hesitation, and yet never known peace. Not once.
He could feel the lingering aches of his body: muscles stiffened by decades of combat, scars threading across his skin like a map of suffering, his hands trembling from injuries that would never heal. His chest rose and fell raggedly with each breath, a testament to the years of near-death experiences. His eyes, once sharp and calculating, now flickered with a strange softness, a fleeting vulnerability that had been buried under layers of rage and survival instinct.
The Head of the Association was dead. Rihan had done it—not for vengeance, not for glory, but for freedom. Yet freedom had come at a cost. His closest comrade, the one who had fought beside him in endless battles, smiled as the knife slid home, slick with betrayal.
"Did you really think you could leave?" the man whispered, voice cold and hollow.
Rihan's lips curved in a small, bitter smile. Pain lanced through him, sharp and intimate, yet it was accompanied by an almost tender clarity. I tried. I truly tried.
Gunfire and shouts had faded around him. The alley was quiet, save for the rain and his labored breaths. He could feel life slipping, memories unraveling like smoke in the wind—the child he had been, the soldier he had become, the monster the world had forced him to be.
"I… I wanted… peace…" he murmured, voice breaking softly. Blood welled on his chest, dark and warm, spreading like a cruel tattoo across his soaked shirt. The pain was fleeting, almost dreamlike, as if the world had slowed to honor his last moment.
And then—darkness.