The Boys: The Asset Vought Cannot File

By the time Butcher finds out the jokes were never jokes, he's already spent a month laughing at every one of them. Waking up wasn't the hard part: the hard part is what the body charges after - a stab wound closes fast, then demands burgers raided from a teammate's fridge at 2 a.m., and every hard landing bills his knees for days. He answers to Wayne Warwick now, ex-infantry, a security contractor whose file doesn't exist under a billboard the size of two buses reading SEVEN YEARS STRONG. Buried in the punchlines was real intelligence: Becca alive, Stormfront's tenure, a boy named Ryan, delivered as one-liners nobody thought to write down. When Butcher finally hears it plain, he doesn't rage at the secret. He rages at the month he spent laughing at the delivery. Monique never asks why his hands stopped shaking; she just starts making the coffee right.