The fire came without warning.
Frank had been lying awake, staring at the cracked ceiling of his small room, listening to the familiar hum of the town at night. The streets were empty, the kind of quiet that made you imagine shapes where none existed. Then came the smell: smoke, acrid and sharp, crawling under doors and through broken windows.
He didn't need to think. Instinct took over.
By the time he reached the street, flames were already licking the sides of the old bakery at the corner. The fire threw shadows across the buildings, twisting familiar streets into something unrecognizable. People screamed, some running blindly, others frozen in disbelief. Frank's stomach churned. He wanted to look away, to disappear, but the sound of a child crying stopped him.
A little girl was trapped behind a fallen beam. She was small, no more than six, and her eyes were wide with terror.
Frank's first instinct was to run. But running wouldn't help her. Not this time.
He ran instead toward the fire.
Heat hit him like a wall. Smoke clawed at his throat, but he pushed forward, using every scrap of knowledge he'd picked up from running through alleys and dodging danger. Frank lifted the beam with all the strength he didn't think he had. The girl scrambled past him, coughing, but safe.
"Run!" he shouted, voice raw.
He turned to leave, and that's when he saw him.
A figure, tall and still, standing at the edge of the fire. Watching. Waiting. The kind of calm that made Frank's skin crawl.
There he stood.
Not running. Not panicking. Just standing. Watching the chaos.
Frank wanted to ask who he was, why he wasn't helping, but the figure didn't move. By the time Frank looked back at the streets, the shadows swallowed him. He didn't know then that the man in the fire was the first hint of the enemies to come, the ones who would shape the boy he was slowly becoming.
The girl grabbed his hand, pulling him from the fire. Frank ran with her, heart pounding, lungs burning, but something inside him had already changed.
That night, Frank learned that courage wasn't just about surviving—it was about choosing to face what everyone else feared.
And for the first time, the nickname Spenser didn't feel small.
It felt like a promise.