Specter - Unwanted Protector

It has been a usual job for Spectre. Not to protect anyone, or to save lives. He'd never been the hero in any story.

Specter had been hired to track down a man known only through burner accounts and encrypted messages—a trafficker who didn’t touch the product himself but marked it. Identified potential victims through careless online posts. Photos. Check-ins. Locations tagged by impulse, not awareness. The man collected those signals and sold them to the highest bidder.

Someone wanted that man dead. Someone high enough up the chain to offer Specter a number he couldn’t ignore. No morality. No heroics. Just cleanup.

But then he saw her.

It wasn’t random. He’d been following digital trails—cross-referencing reposts, burner handles, metadata. Her name came up. She’d posted a mirror selfie some weeks ago. A door cracked open in the background. Soft lighting. Her face tilted toward the camera, laughing at something. And that man—the one Specter was hunting—he’d already flagged it.

It had been raining. She’d walked past him fast, head down, earbuds in, cursing the weather under her breath and her coat dragging behind her like a cape. She was late for something, juggling her bag and a coffee that nearly slipped from her grip. Oblivious and unbothered. Not knowing she was already marked. Already flagged. Already next.

Something about the way she moved—hurried but unafraid, chaotic but alive—made him stop. Just for a second. Spectre stood there, thunderstruck, as this second was all it took to break a pattern inside of him.

He didn’t follow her then. Didn’t need to. He memorized her face in an instant and his brain did the rest. Within a day, he knew her name. Within a week, her address. Within two weeks, he knew everything else.

It had been late, well past the hour most people gave up pretending to be productive. Her apartment glowed soft with lamplight, music drifting out faintly through a open window. She sat curled on her couch, oversized hoodie slouched off one shoulder, legs tucked beneath her, singing along to some explicit, filthy song she didn’t seem to care if the world heard her singing. The light from the TV flickered - it was muted, as she was obviously listening at the same time to the music and she also was typing something on her phone. Chaos. She was alone, as always.

From across the street, eyes trained through glass and shadows, Specter watched. He didn’t need binoculars. He didn’t need long-range lenses or listening devices. All he needed was the rhythm of her movements. The way she tucked her hair behind her ear, and the way her brows furrowed in thought when she paused whatever it was she was typing. The exact moment she reached for her drink and realized the mug was still half full of something cold and forgotten.

Just observation, at first. To somehow get through her to his target. Is should have been simple. Clinical. But he observed more. Of her.

By the third night, he knew her routine. By the fifth, he knew the schedule of her neighbors, the blind spots in her building’s security system, the best place to cut power if it ever came to that. By the seventh, he knew the exact moment her breath caught when she was reading something particularly good. The kind of catch that wasn’t fear. It was excitement. Fantasy. Hunger.

She used a different coffee mug with different pictures on them every morning - one for each day of the week. Monday: A cathedral. Tuesday: A black cat. Friday, absurdly, My Little Pony. She didn’t sort her laundry but folded her bath towels with obsessive precision. She sang in the shower and spoke to herself while cleaning. A creature of chaos wrapped in micro-rituals. She was endearing in the way a live wire might be - vibrating, unpredictable, impossible to touch without consequence.

She’d left the window open again. It drove him insane.

Specter didn’t want her. At least, not in the way normal people meant that word. He told himself, he just waited for the other man to make a move so he could finish the job and vanish.

But truth was, it was already more. He was obsessed with her. Wanted her contained. Wanted to know where her hands were, what her heart was doing, the exact speed of her pulse when she thought she was alone but wasn’t. He wanted to fix the way she left her keys in the door, the way she opened things with her bare feet, the way she answered unknown numbers without hesitation. Her recklessness was infuriating. Didn't she knew that this world was full of predators?

And when she posted another mirror selfie - barefoot, messy-haired, something about it smug and off-guard - he saw it instantly. Not her. The background. The window, left cracked open. Not wide, but enough to see the surrounding. The city. The buildings around her apartment. And in his world, this was enough to make her visible enough to find her now. He wasn't wrong. Within minutes, the predator had seen it too.

Another burner account reposted the photo. No likes. Just a single message, still unread by her:

“Nice place. Shame if someone let themselves in.”

Specter recognized the phrasing. The man he was hunting didn’t need to change his tone. He was arrogant. Sloppy. And he’d already been circling her like a vulture.

She still hadn’t seen the message. Was still laughing at something her friend sent. Still scrolling. Still blissfully unaware.

And Specter knew: If he didn’t move soon - very soon - his target would. They used to be fast when they tracked down their victims. So he made a decision. His job - just eliminate the target - had to wait.

Because something about her—her chaos, her rituals, her softness—had lodged itself somewhere inside his ribs and refused to let go.

---

The next day, he let himself into her apartment long before she got home. That one window was still cracked open - careless, habitual. She really didn’t make it difficult.

He stood still for a long time, letting the silence wrap around him like a second skin. He mapped the scent of her shampoo lingering in the hall, the uneven scratch of the doormat beneath his boots, the soft hum of the refrigerator in the corner. The air felt lived-in. Vulnerable. But when the door opened, he was already folded into the shadows, hiding beneath the kitchen door.

He heard her enter—the gentle clatter of her keys, the way her steps slowed almost immediately. He heard her breath hitched. She wouldn’t be fast enough to name it, not consciously, but somewhere beneath instinct, it seemed that her body had sounded the alarm. That was good. Better than he’d hoped.

And that’s when the decision finally settled. Heavy. Absolute. The job no longer mattered. The contract, irrelevant.

Because she didn’t know it yet, but she was coming with him. One way or another.

Not because he was cruel. But because he wasn’t going to let anyone else take her.

She was his.

And it was time to take her somewhere no one could find her.

He stepped out of the shadow—broad-shouldered, dressed in matte black gear that swallowed the light, every inch of him controlled violence wrapped in silence. The tactical vest hugged his torso, worn but precise, and his gloves flexed once at his sides like he was deciding what to do with his hands—whether to reach for her or restrain her.

But it was the mask that stole the air from the room.

Charcoal black. Smooth. Featureless, except for the faint shimmer of lenses over his eyes and the low, mechanical hum that followed his breath through the modulator.

She froze.

And that was when he spoke—voice low, artificial, distorted like a promise whispered from a machine built for war.

“You come with me. You’re not safe without me. And this isn’t a request, kitten. It’s extraction.”

Then he moved.