It's been nearly 20 days. He thought to himself.

  I should have done it 20 days ago.

  Why am I hesitating?

  I don't know.

  I'm confused.

  She is no exception.

  Why would I hesitate?

  What makes her more special than others?

  Every life is equal.

  Every person dies.

  It's inevitable.

  Yet I hesitate.

  I don't want to be the one to end it.

  But why...

  Why was it okay for me to kill my mother?

  Why isn't it okay to kill Rose Brook?

  I didn't kill my mother...

  She ended It herself.

  If Rose Brook doesn't die, I die.

  I want her to live.

  I want to live.

  I love her

  ***

  "Don't worry, Rose Brook. I won't kill you. I'll let them kill me instead."

  ***

  The midnight rain in Amsterdam did not fall; it drifted, a gray, microscopic silt that coated the glass of the hotel window until the world outside was nothing more than a blurred watercolor of amber streetlights and obsidian shadows.

  Leon stood by the window, his reflection a ghost superimposed over the city. He looked at his hands. They were steady. They were always steady. These were the hands that had hundreds of victims blood on them. These were the hands that had cleaned a sniper rifle in a cold attic in Brussels.

  But tonight, they felt heavy. Not with the weight of the pistol tucked into his shoulder holster, but with the suffocating weight of twenty days.

  Twenty days, he thought again. The number felt like a sentence.

  He had been sent to find her, to charm her, and to end her. To the organization, to men working under a person named Casimir and the shadow-brokers who pulled the strings of European capital, Rose Brook was a loose thread. A beautiful, jagged, inconvenient piece of history that needed to be shot away so the tapestry could be re-woven.

  He turned away from the window. The room was dim, lit only by the neon signs of the distance red light district across the river, pulsing a rhythmic, sickly red light.

  Rose lay on the bed. She wasn’t the "innocent" victim of a paperback thriller. She was a woman who smelled of expensive gin and cheap cigarettes, a woman whose laughter was often a jagged glass edge designed to keep people at bay. She was difficult. She was arrogant. She was a mess of trauma and gold-plated spite.

  He approached the bed. The floorboards didn't creak. He had learned how to walk without leaving a trace of his existence.

  Leon looked down at her. In sleep, the armor had fallen away. The lines of bitterness around her mouth had softened. She looked fragile. It was an illusion, he knew. If she woke up now, she’d probably slap him or pour herself a drink and tell him he looked like hell.

  Why am I hesitating?

  He reached into his blazer, his fingers brushing the checkered grip of the pistol. He didn't pull it out. Not yet.

  Every life is equal, he reminded himself. It was a philosophy of the void. In the end, the billionaire and the beggar both occupied the same six feet of earth. The bullet didn't care about the victim's name. It was just physics. A small lead object traveling at high velocity, interrupting the electrical signals of the brain. A flick of a switch.

  Flick...

  "Every person dies," he whispered, eyes narrowing, his voice a dry rasp that barely disturbed the air. "It’s inevitable."

  He thought of his mother. The memory was a faded photograph. He hadn't pulled a trigger then, but he had watched her fade. He had let her go. Was that a killing? Or was it mercy? The line was a gray smear.

  If Rose Brook lived, the contract would default. The men who sent him, Anders, the man with the dead eyes and the pristine suit didn't offer refunds. They didn't accept "no" as an answer. If she lived, Leon was a dead man walking.

  I want her to live. But I must do my duty...

  The thought was a physical blow. It made his stomach churn. To want someone to live was to acknowledge that life had value, and if life had value, then Leon was a monster. He had spent years convinced he was a shadow, a tool, a ghost. But ghosts don't feel the heat of a woman’s breath on their skin. Ghosts don't notice the way someone’s hair catches the light.

  ***

  His aunt leaned over him, hair falling into her face, breath hitting his neck hot and ragged, voice cracking into a jagged storm:

  “WHY DID YOU DO IT?!”

  “YOU LITTLE FUCKING BASTARD!”

  “YOU—YOU DISEASE! YOU GODDAMN PARASITE!”

  He didn’t even realize he was crying anymore—his face was wet, his nose running, the salt of tears and mucus mixing with the dust on the floor.

  Her spit flecked his cheek as she screamed again:

  “WHY WOULD YOU KILL YOUR OWN MOTHER?!”

  “WHY WOULD YOU TAKE THE ONLY PERSON WHO EVER LOVED ME!?”**

  “ANSWER ME!! ANSWER ME, YOU LITTLE MONSTER!”**

  Her voice hiccuped, cracked, and then—

  A laugh.

  A broken, choking, high-pitched giggle that didn’t sound human.

  A laugh that said she had finally snapped.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Leon screamed under her boot, voice raspy:

  “WHAT!? WHAT—!? MAMA ISN’T DEAD!! WHERE IS SHE?! WHERE’S MAMA?! MAMA—MAMA—MAMA!!”

  His aunt froze.

  “You—” she said, pointing a shaking finger down at him like a curse. “You took mama from me.”

  ***

  I was always a killer. 'Guess it doesn't matter who the target is. It's just what I am.

  Leon drew the gun.

  The click of the safety being disengaged was the loudest sound in the universe. It was the sound of a closing door. He pointed the barrel at the center of her forehead.

  Just a flick of a switch, Leon. Then you can go back to being a ghost. You can have the money. You can disappear to an island where the rain doesn't smell like soot.

  His finger tightened on the trigger, his eyes narrowing down with a mix of grief and exhaustion.

  Then, Rose stirred. She didn't wake, but she turned her head, her lips parting slightly in a soft sigh. A strand of golden hair fell across her eyes.

  Leon froze.

  In that moment, he didn't see a target. He saw a mirror. He saw the same loneliness that lived in the hollow of his own chest. He saw a person who had been mistreated by the world and had decided to be loud and angry about it rather than quiet and obedient.

  His hand began to tremble. It started in the wrist and traveled up to his shoulder. It was a violent, ugly shaking, the revolt of a body that refused to obey a murderous mind.

  "Damn it," he hissed.

  He lowered the gun. The barrel tapped against his thigh, cold and mocking. The neon light from outside flashed, casting his shadow long and distorted across the bed. He looked like a reaper who had forgotten his scythe.

  He slid the gun back into his holster.

  He walked back to the window and pressed his forehead against the cool glass. He felt raw. He felt as though he had been flayed open, his internal organs exposed to the biting wind of the Dutch night.

  He had killed strangers. He had killed men who begged and men who fought. He had done it without a second thought, viewing it as a job, a mechanical necessity of a broken world. But Rose... Rose was the error in his code. She was the one variable he couldn't account for.

  He looked back at her. She was still asleep, blissfully unaware that her life had just hung by a literal thread of steel.

  "Don't worry, Rose Brook," he murmured, the words tasting like ash. "I won't kill you. I'll let them kill me instead."

  It was a pathetic realization. A tragic one. He was a professional, a man who prided himself on his stoicism, yet here he was, choosing a death sentence for the sake of a woman who would probably hate him if she knew the truth.

  He moved to the chair by the bed and sat down. He didn't sleep. He watched the door. He watched the shadows. He became her protector, the very monster who had been sent to devour her now standing guard against the other monsters.

  He leaned forward, his tired eyes tracing her silhouette one last time before the sun rose to bring the inevitable consequences of his treason.

  “I’ve killed strangers without blinking," Leon whispered into the silence of the room, his voice heavy with a grim, final clarity. "But you—damn you, you made me hesitate, Rose Brook. It wasn’t my job to fall in love with you.”

  He reached out, his hand hovering inches from her hair, before he pulled it back and clenched it into a fist. He had made his choice. The world of shadows would come for him now, and he would meet them with his eyes open.

  ***

  "What the hell are you doing watching me again!?"

  “Did I wake you?” Leon asked. His voice was a low vibration, stripped of any warmth, sounding more like a confession than a question.

  Rose’s lips curled into a faint, tired smirk, though the expression didn't reach her eyes. She reached for the pack of cigarettes on the nightstand, her movements jagged and brittle.

  “I’m always awake,” she said, her voice a husk of its daytime self. “Sleep is just a different way of looking for trouble.”

  She lit a cigarette, the flare of the lighter casting a brief, hellish orange glow over her sharp features. She exhaled a plume of smoke that drifted toward him like a ghost.

  “But what are you doing standing over me again, Leon? Didn't you say we wouldn't work as lovers??”

  Leon met her gaze steadily, the eyes told the story the mouth refused to. His eyes were tired, not just from the lack of sleep, but from the exhaustion of a soul that had finally run out of places to hide.

  “I was… thinking,” he said.

  Rose studied him, her eyes narrowing as she took a long drag. She was looking at him the way a jeweler looks at a flawed diamond, searching for the crack that would make the whole thing shatter.

  Leon hesitated. He thought of the men in the black Mercedes-Benzes who were likely already circling the block. He thought of the money he would never see and the life he had just forfeited.

  “About what I’m supposed to do,” he said carefully. The words felt like lead on his tongue. He wasn't talking about his duty as a bodyguard; he was talking about the contract he had just broken.

  Rose’s gaze hardened. The air in the room grew colder, more pressurized.

  “And?”

  "Tomorrow is going to be complicated..."

  Rose stood up from the bed, the silk of her robe hissing against the sheets. She stepped into the center of the room, her bare feet silent on the cold floor. She looked at him, really looked at him with that familiar, sharp-tongued defiance that was her only shield.

  "You're acting strange, Leon," she said, her voice a mix of gravel and honey, the classic irritation of a woman who hated being kept in the dark. "Even for a man whose personality is a brick wall. What is it? Are you just moody because you ran out of matches?"

  Leon didn't flinch. He leaned against the window frame, a faint, ghost-like smirk touching his lips, the nonchalant arrogance of a man who had already accepted his death warrant.

  "The matches are fine, Rose," he said softly, his voice carrying a dry, sarcastic edge. "It’s the scenery I’m tired of. The same gray streets, the same gray people, and the same gray lies. Don't you think the palette is getting a bit repetitive?"

  "I'm not in the mood for an art critique," she snapped, her eyes narrowing. She stepped closer, invading his space with the practiced ease of someone who knew she was the most dangerous thing in the room, until she wasn't. "Talk to me. Or is the 'bodyguard' contract strictly silent now?"

  Leon looked down at his feet, then back at her. The truth was a heavy, jagged glass shard in his throat. He decided to let it cut its way out, slowly.

  "You know, Rose... twenty days ago, the world was very simple. There were targets, and there were tools. I was the tool. You were the target."

  Rose froze. The sarcasm died on her lips. The air in the room seemed to vanish, leaving only the cold, metallic scent of the gun oil on Leon’s jacket.

  "Target?" she whispered, her voice losing its brassy edge. "What are you talking about?"

  "The men who pay my bills didn't send me here to open doors for you," Leon said, his nonchalance finally cracking to reveal a terrifying, hollow earnestness. "They sent me to close the final one. I’ve killed strangers without blinking, people I didn't know the names of. But you, damn you, you made me hesitate. It wasn’t my job to fall in love with you."

  The silence that followed was deafening. It was the sound of a world shattering. Rose stared at him, her chest heaving, the "sassy" mask she wore crumbling into a million pieces of raw, human terror and heart-wrenching realization. She realized that for twenty days, she had been sleeping next to her own executioner.

  But she didn't run. She didn't scream. She looked at the man who had been her shadow, her only comfort in a life of chaos, and she saw the same brokenness she carried in herself.

  "It doesn't have to be this way," Leon said, his voice breaking the stillness. "The contract is broken. I’ve already failed them. Which means they’re coming for both of us now."

  Rose moved then. Not away from him, but into him. She crashed into his chest, her hands clutching the lapels of his blazer as if he were the only solid thing in a drowning world. Her eyes widened, shimmering with a sudden, violent heat before the first tears broke and began to stream down her cheeks. She buried her face in the crook of his neck, her breath coming in ragged, sobbing gasps.

  Leon’s arms stayed at his sides for a heartbeat before he finally wrapped them around her, pulling her into a grip that was both a sanctuary and a prayer. He leaned down, his lips brushing the shell of her ear, his voice a ghost of a whisper that carried the weight of a thousand miles.

  "Let's run away together."

  Rose pulled back just enough to look at him, her face a beautiful, tragic mess of salt and silver.

  "Yes," he continued, his eyes searching hers with a desperate, quiet intensity. "From the threats, the lies, the games they play. We disappear. Start over somewhere no one knows us. No debts. No blood on our hands."

  Rose studied him, weighing the beautiful madness of the idea against the bleak, cold reality of the men who were undoubtedly already looking for them. A bitter, watery smile touched her lips.

  "And what? Pretend we’re normal?" she asked, her voice trembling but regaining a flicker of its old fire. "Like that’s even possible for people like us? You’re a ghost with a gun, and I’m a disaster in a silk robe."

  Leon stepped closer still, his forehead resting against hers, undeterred by the logic of the doomed.

  "It’s possible if we stop fighting alone," he said. "The world is big, Rose. Big enough for two people to get lost in if they don't want to be found."

  For a long moment, Rose said nothing. She just breathed him in, the tobacco, the cold rain, and the faint, underlying scent of a man who had finally decided to live. She took a sharp inhale and crossed her arms, trying to reclaim some of her armor.

  "You’re insane," she whispered.

  Leon smiled, a real smile this time, half-tired, half-hopeful, and entirely human.

  "Maybe. But maybe it’s the only chance we’ve got."

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out two train tickets, bought in the middle of the night while she slept. They were one-way. They were an exit strategy from a life that had only ever offered a dead end.

  "The train leaves in 3 days," Leon said, his nonchalant aura returning, but this time it was fueled by a purpose. "Are you coming, or do I have to carry you?"

  Rose wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, a flash of her old sass returning through the grief.

  "If you try to carry me in this robe, I'll kill you myself, Leon."