Mayex needed to sit down.
He found a bench on the pavement outside the monastery and dropped onto it with the full, graceless weight of someone whose legs had simply stopped cooperating. He leaned back, tilted his head upward, and let the sky fill his vision.
It was a good sky. Gray at the edges, pale blue at the center, the kind of unremarkable Tuesday afternoon sky that existed in complete indifference to everything happening beneath it. A thin thread of wind moved through the street, cool against the sweat on his face.
"I needed this," he murmured, to no one. "Just this. Wind. A bench. Five minutes of absolutely nothing."
He let his eyes drift.
The street around him was ordinary in the specific, unhurried way of residential Köln on a quiet afternoon. People moved past with shopping bags and dogs and the comfortable absence of urgency. Nobody was running. Nobody was bleeding. Nobody had a gun.
He noticed the child almost immediately.
A boy — four years old, perhaps five — standing on the pavement a short distance away, crying with the absolute, world-ending conviction that only small children can produce. In his hand, or rather no longer in his hand, was the remnant of a broken cookie. He was staring at it as though it had personally betrayed him.
Mayex watched.
The boy turned and ran to his parents, his voice climbing to a frequency that cut through the ambient noise of the street without effort. His mother reached into her bag, produced another cookie with the practiced ease of someone who had done this before, and held it out. The crying stopped as though a switch had been thrown. The boy's face reorganized itself into pure, immediate happiness, the disaster of thirty seconds ago already erased from his memory entirely.
The father took his hand. The mother took his other hand. The older brother trailed behind them, absorbing a quiet, steady scolding with the resigned posture of someone who had learned that silence was the fastest route through.
They walked away together down the pavement, four people moving as a single unhurried shape, until the street absorbed them.
Mayex watched the empty space they left behind.
The pain arrived without warning — not physical, not located anywhere he could press his hand against. It simply appeared in the center of his chest, sharp and familiar, the specific ache of something he had spent years learning to outrun.
He had made a promise once. He had been young, and furious, and face-down in the dirt of a border road with his palms bleeding, and he had screamed it into the ground until his voice gave out. He had not forgotten it. He had simply — buried it. Covered it with routine and training and the noise of people he had come to care about. And most days, it stayed buried.
But it had always been there. On the bad nights, when the silence of the facility pressed in too hard, he had cried alone in the dark and felt this same pressure in his chest until it became unbearable. That was where the jokes had come from, he realized — not from lightness, but from the opposite. From a need to make noise loud enough to drown out something he couldn't afford to hear.
He slapped himself across the face.
A woman passing with a pushchair stared at him.
He looked back up at the sky, his jaw tight, his eyes dry.
"I wonder what they're doing right now," he said quietly. "Knowing them, they're probably having fun."
---
Boran's Perspective
"This is not funny, Adam."
The words came out through clenched teeth, and Boran meant every one of them.
Adam's idea had not produced the relief Boran had been hoping for. The situation remained exactly what it was — Johan standing four meters away with a loaded weapon and an expression of pleasant authority — and nothing about the next thirty seconds felt navigable. Boran's mind was running calculations it couldn't complete, searching for an angle that wasn't there.
Then Elara stood up.
Johan's eyes moved to her, and for the first time since entering the room, something that wasn't quite amusement crossed his features. "Oh. You were here too." He tilted his head slightly. "This planet is remarkably small."
Elara stepped forward without a word of warning or a single change in her expression. She simply stood, and then she was moving — one step, then another, her hand dropping to the knife at her pocket.
Nobody in the room spoke.
Adam didn't look surprised. His eyes tracked her movement with the focused calm of someone watching a plan unfold on schedule.
Boran leaned toward him, his voice barely audible. "What am I missing?"
"His gun," Adam said, his eyes never leaving Johan. "The old man said a group of men came for Johan — armed men. If that's true, and Johan engaged them, there's a reasonable chance he spent rounds in that fight." He paused. "Which means he may be bluffing. No bullets, no leverage — so he falls back on the threat of the weapon itself."
"And if you're wrong?"
Adam said nothing.
Elara took another step.
Johan's tone shifted, dropping the conversational warmth by several degrees. "I understand you operate differently from the others. I can respect that. But if you take one more step, your friend receives a bullet in the skull. Do you understand the weight of that? Do you actually understand what I'm telling you?"
Elara didn't stop.
She broke into a run — direct, committed, no deception in her approach, the knife already in her hand.
"Yes — go!" Adam said under his breath.
The gunshot was flat and sharp in the enclosed space.
Every eye in the room snapped to Adam.
No blood. The round had gone wide, or high — deliberately so. A warning, placed with the precision of someone who did not miss accidentally.
Elara stopped.
Not from fear. She simply reassessed the variable, recalculated the cost, and held her position. Her expression did not change.
Johan lowered the weapon slightly, the pleasant affect returning to his voice like a mask being reset. "My gun has bullets. That one was complimentary." He let the silence sit for exactly one second. "The next one will not be."
He looked around the room with an air of mild satisfaction. "Now. Someone unties my associate."
From the floor, the boy's face split into an enormous grin. He extended his tongue at Boran with the full enthusiasm of someone who had been waiting to do exactly that for the better part of an hour.
Boran's jaw locked. He held the expression of a man swallowing something deeply unpleasant, reached for his knife, and cut the rope in a single, sharp motion.
The boy rolled his shoulders, flexed his freed hands, and walked toward Johan with a lightness of step that made Boran's eye twitch.
Adam threw himself at the boy.
It had the appearance of an impulse — arms wide, full-body commitment, entirely inexplicable. The boy stumbled under the sudden weight of him, caught his balance, and shoved Adam away with visible confusion.
"What is wrong with you?" the boy said, genuinely unsettled.
"Nothing," Adam said, straightening his collar.
The boy stared at him for another moment, decided there was no available explanation, and walked to stand beside Johan.
Johan's attention moved to the old man. The smile that followed was not a kind one. "I want him slapped. One of you. I'm not particular about who."
Adam and Boran looked at each other. Then both of them looked at Elara, who had returned to standing perfectly still near the window and gave no indication she had heard the request.
"Boran," Adam said carefully.
"No."
"Take one for the team."
"Absolutely not. If Melon finds out I assaulted the client—"
"She won't find out."
"She finds out everything—"
"Boran."
Boran looked at the old man. He thought about the jeep keys. He thought about the front door swinging open on an empty hallway. He thought about standing over a tied-up boy on the floor while their client walked calmly out into the arms of a professional killer.
He thought about how long he had wanted to do this.
"This is going to cost me," Boran said.
Then he crossed the room in three strides and delivered the slap with a commitment that surprised everyone present, including himself. The sound of it rang off the walls.
A beat of complete silence followed.
"I didn't specify that level of force," Johan said, sounding genuinely impressed. "But I respect it."
He nodded toward the old man. The boy moved immediately, closing a hand around the client's arm and steering him toward the exit. The old man went without resistance — there was nowhere to go, and whatever calculation he was running had apparently produced the same answer.
At the door, the boy paused. He turned back to look at the group assembled in the wrecked living room, his expression cycling into something that was almost sincere.
"I hope we meet again. I had fun." His eyes settled on Boran for a half-second longer than necessary. "But next time — don't be unfair."
He pulled the door shut behind him.
The sound of the engine turning over reached them through the broken window, and then faded down the residential street until it was gone.
Elara walked to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator, removed the juice bottle from the top shelf, and carried it back to the couch. She sat down, unscrewed the cap, and began drinking directly from the bottle with the serene composure of someone watching an unremarkable sunset.
Boran stared at her. His mouth opened, then closed.
"You cannot be serious," he said.
She took another long drink.
"Boran," Adam said, pulling his attention away before the vein in his temple could develop further. "The hug wasn't sentiment. I put a tracker in the boy's pocket."
Boran turned to look at him slowly. "...You what."
"While I had him. It took approximately two seconds." Adam's expression remained completely neutral. "I assumed Johan's gun was either empty or nearly spent. I needed a contingency either way. The hug was the contingency."
A long silence settled over the room.
"I thought you were being emotional," Boran said, his voice flat.
"I'm never emotional."
"You looked emotional."
"I looked like someone planting a tracker. You interpreted it incorrectly."
The front door burst open.
Every head turned, hands moving toward weapons on pure reflex — and then stopped.
Mayex stood in the doorway, flushed and breathing hard, one hand braced against the frame. He looked around the room, taking in the shattered window, the cut rope on the floor, the juice bottle in Elara's hand, and the general atmosphere of a situation that had clearly developed without him.
Then his legs gave out and he sat down on the floor.
"I'm back," he announced, to the ceiling. "But I need a moment. This is why I hate running."
"Perfect timing," Adam said, already moving toward the door. "We were about to follow the tracker."
"Tracker?" Mayex lifted his head from the floor. "Follow who? Where's the boy? He was tied up right over—" His eyes found the cut rope. "He got away?"
Boran and Adam looked at him with identical expressions.
"No," Boran said.
"He didn't get away," Adam said.
"Then what—" Mayex pushed himself upright, wincing. "Okay. Short version. Please."
"Johan came," Adam said. "Took the old man. Freed the boy. I planted a tracker on the boy during what appeared to be an emotional breakdown. Now we follow them."
Mayex processed this. Then his face reorganized into something warm and entirely inappropriate for the moment. "Hold on. You hugged him? Adam — are you in love? Because I think you might be in—"
"I did it for the tracker."
"That's what someone in love would say—"
"Mayex."
"I'm just saying, it's okay, there's no judgment here, we support you—"
"WHY," Adam said, his voice climbing, "are we discussing this when there are people to follow?"
"Right, right — following people." Mayex stood, stretched his back, and took one long breath. "Give me sixty seconds. My lungs are still recovering."
The vein on Adam's forehead made a reappearance.
"Sixty seconds," Mayex said. "That's all I ask."
---
Johan's Perspective
"You're not getting away this time," Johan said, his eyes on the road.
The old man sat in the passenger seat and said nothing. He had arrived at a place somewhere beyond protest, a kind of exhausted acceptance that comes when a person has run out of both options and energy simultaneously.
In the back seat, the boy watched the city pass through the window.
"Where are we going?" the old man asked, his voice hollow.
"To see someone," Johan said. "Someone I need to have a conversation with."
"The red-haired girl?" the boy said from the back.
Johan didn't answer immediately. He changed lanes, checked his mirror, and let the silence run for a moment. "Yes."
The boy sat forward. "Johan. You're drenched in blood. Those men who came for you — they were your own people. Which means the board moved against you. Going to her now is like walking into the room and handing them the weapon." He hesitated. "Are you sure?"
"That's exactly why we're going," Johan said. "I need to know if the order came from her."
The boy fell quiet.
The streets narrowed as they moved away from the residential sector, the architecture shifting from clean facades to industrial gray, vacant lots, and the particular silence of parts of the city that had been left to develop their own rhythms. After several minutes, a low, flat building appeared behind a chain-link perimeter — an old gymnasium, the signage long since stripped, the windows blacked out from the inside.
Johan stopped the car. He looked at the building for a moment, then got out.
The guards at the perimeter stepped aside without challenge. They watched him pass — watched the blood on his coat, the spray across his jaw — and said nothing. Inside, the main floor was occupied, and every face turned as he entered, and every face registered the same unspoken calculation at the sight of him.
He didn't stop. He crossed the floor, reached the door to the changing room, and pushed it open.
He stepped inside alone.
She was seated. Still, composed, her red hair catching the light of the single overhead bulb. She looked at him and did not react to the state of him — not to the blood, not to the expression on his scarred face, not to anything.
Johan stood in front of her for a moment, his breathing controlled. When he spoke, the conversational ease was entirely gone. What remained was something stripped down and direct, the voice of a man who was not performing anything.
"Why?" he said. "Why did you send them after me? Or was it not you?" He stepped forward, his eyes fixed on hers. "Tell me. I need to hear it from you. Was the order yours?"
The girl with red hair looked at him.
She said nothing.
Johan's voice dropped to almost nothing.
"We need to talk, Nacy."