Chapter One

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The city always looked the same from the rooftops, a patchwork of glowing neon and inky black shadows, hiding all the sins of the people below. Bruno Black, or rather, the Grim Reaper, watched from his perch atop an abandoned high-rise, blending into the dark night. His silhouette was barely distinguishable from the shadow of the city's skeleton, and that's how he preferred it. Invisible. Unseen. Untouchable.

His world existed in the quiet, in the space between life and death, where people like him made their living. He was a professional assassin, a ghost who moved without a trace, hired through encrypted channels on the Dark Web to eliminate whoever his faceless employers deemed necessary. It wasn't personal, never personal. Bruno had long since detached from the idea of morality; in his line of work, morality was a useless, dying concept.

To the world, he was the Grim Reaper. A name whispered in dark circles, a myth that even criminals feared. His work was meticulous, his contracts flawless. He didn't leave a trail. No blood spatter on his shoes, no fingerprints on a gun. Just the cold, silent finality of death, delivered with precision.

And he preferred it that way.

Tonight, though, he wasn't working. He had just finished a high-profile contract two days ago, a swift and clean execution of a corrupt politician in Eastern Europe. The payment had hit his anonymous account within hours, a sum that could keep most people living comfortably for a lifetime. But not Bruno. He didn't do this for money alone, although the wealth certainly helped.

He did it because he was good at it. No, he was the best.

Still, downtime between jobs wasn't something he particularly enjoyed. It felt like waiting for a storm to break, knowing that at any moment the wind could change direction and the calm would shatter. But even the Reaper had to fill the voids between death sentences.

The warehouse he lived in was the perfect cover—cold, metallic, and filled with nothing that would tie him to a personal life. A sparse bed, a table, a few shelves stacked with books and laptops. It looked like a forgotten relic, a place where no one would think to find him. That was the point.

When he wasn't working, he trained. Physically, mentally. The former came easy—he had been conditioned since his teenage years, years spent in underground fight circuits, years he didn't think about anymore. He still ran ten miles a day, lifted weights in a small gym he had built in the basement, and honed his reflexes with target practice at a private range. There was no room for error in his line of work, and even a momentary lapse in his physical or mental state could mean death.

But recently, he had found a new interest: hacking and programming.

It started small. A curiosity. He had always been good with technology—part of the job required it. But now, in the downtime between contracts, it became more than just a tool for him. Bruno wanted to understand the code beneath the surface, to know how things worked in the virtual world the same way he knew how to manipulate the real one.

So, he taught himself to hack.

He spent hours at his desk, fingers gliding over the keyboard, diving into the hidden layers of the internet, breaking into systems just for the challenge. It wasn't for financial gain or data. He didn't need that. He did it to sharpen his mind, to know how his enemies operated in the shadows, to expand his own control. The world was built on code now, and if he mastered it, he could own it.

The satisfaction he got from cracking encryption felt almost as good as pulling a trigger.

When he wasn't learning to hack, he read. History, philosophy, biographies of men who shaped the world in blood and power. He never wasted time on fiction—it didn't interest him. He preferred the real stories, the ones where men built empires and others tore them down. He was like those men, he supposed. His own silent empire was one of fear and death, and no one knew his name.

Bruno kept to this routine religiously—train, read, hack, kill, repeat. It kept him sharp. It kept him alive.

Two weeks ago, a new contract came through. No details at first, just a broad outline. That wasn't unusual in the early stages of a job—his employers often started with nothing more than a location or a target's vague identity. But this one was different. The request was oddly personal, almost petty in its motivation, something that made his instincts stir.

The target was young—a mafia princess, barely out of her teens. She wasn't involved in the family's business, not directly, which already made this a strange assignment. He typically dealt with people who were knee-deep in crime, corruption, or politics. The girl, as far as he could tell from the limited intel, was an innocent.

But the source of the hit was what made it interesting.

Her own stepmother.

Bruno didn't need to know the why. That wasn't part of his job description. Whether it was jealousy, power play, or something darker, it didn't matter. But the fact that the stepmother had enough influence to put a contract on the girl's head meant one thing: she had power. Power meant money, and money was something the people behind the Dark Web operations never turned down.

Still, there was something off about it.

Usually, the client was clear from the start, at least in the motivation. They wanted someone gone because that person posed a threat. A rival, a witness, a political figure. But this... this felt too personal, too vindictive. Why kill the girl now? Why not years ago? What had changed?

The pieces didn't fit together the way they normally did.

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