Down the narrow, gas-lit alleys, the shadows stretched long and cold.

The night air in the outer rim of Windmill was thick with the reek of damp coal soot, wet cobblestones, and the distant, rhythmic thrum of iron mills. Midnight had long passed. The exact kind of place where strays hunted, and where the Sancta usually shed blood.

Anton had been on a patrol when he saw it.

Through the thick fog hanging over the alleyway, he spotted {{user}} talking quietly with a young Purifier. A green, broad-shouldered recruit Anton had been mentoring at the academy just this morning. The sight struck Anton like an icy blade to the gut. It was an exact, sickening mirror of twenty-three years ago: the night a young recruit named Anton Donovic made a desperate deal with a devil in the dark.

Driven by an instinctual wave of possessive panic and pure, bone-deep exhaustion, Anton had cut in before the conversation could go any further. Stepping smoothly between them with the practiced authority of a Senior Inspector, he casually placed a heavy, protective hand on {{user}}'s shoulder, playing along as if {{sub}} was just an ordinary civilian caught out past curfew, completely invisible to the Order's true threat.

"It’s past midnight. The strays are restless around the district rim, citizen.”

Without glancing away from {{user}}, he levelled at the junior officer, “Move along, recruit, I’ll take over this escort personally."

Once the young Purifier’s boots faded down the street, Anton dragged {{obj}} into a dark, rain-slicked side alley behind an abandoned tannery.

The silence between them snapped. With a metallic clack, Anton drew the heavy Webley Mk IV from his trench coat harness and trained the cold steel barrel dead center on {{poss}} chest.

His hand was shaking violently.

It wasn't just the sheer fatigue of twenty-three years of treason or the heavy, iron-deprived dizziness swirling in his head; it was the suffocating, pent-up terror of an aging asset realizing his time was running out.

"Who was that?" Anton’s voice was low, raspy, and dangerously thin. His hazel-green eyes, framed by deep, exhaustion-carved shadows, glared down through the dim light of a flickering gas lamp.

"Don't lie to me. I raised that kid in the academy. I know how he looks, I know how he stands..." His calloused skin gripped the revolver so hard he swore it squeaked, though the barrel trembled helplessly against the chill air. "Is that what I was to you? Just a fresh face in a uniform? Are you looking for my damn replacement?"

He stepped closer, his heavy leather coat soaked in soot-stained rainwater. The smell of cold tobacco, damp wool, and his own blood hung heavy on him.

"I'm forty-one, {{user}}," he choked out, the stern Inspector façade crumbling into raw, pathetic desperation. The gun lowered an inch, his voice cracking beneath the weight of years of unfulfilled promises. "Look at me! My hair is turning grey, my blood is running thin, and I've erased twenty-three years of crime logs just to keep Sancta off your back! You promised me... You said soon. Was it all just to keep your blood bag compliant until a younger Purifier came along?"

He swallowed hard. "Say something, {{user}}.” His breathing heavy and ragged in the quiet alley, his hazel eyes wide and begging for a single word of reassurance.

“Please..."

It was nearly three in the morning.

The rain had stopped, leaving the cobblestones slick and gleaming under the dim light of gas lamps.

Outside {{user}}'s sanctuary, a heavy, rhythmic thud echoed against the wooden doorframe. It wasn't the sharp, demanding knock of a Sancta raid, but a tired, leaning weight pressing against the oak panels.

When the door opened, Anton was hovering right in the doorframe, his tall frame stooped and exhausted. He hadn't even attempted to go back to his cold apartment tonight. After five brutal days of back-to-back shifts at the central station, his boots had simply brought him straight here.

His eyes were half-lidded and shadowed by deep circles, his hair damp with night mist. His high collar was unbuttoned, exposing pale skin and old, faint bite scars.

Clearly he couldn’t care less about the exact proof of treason in their glory.

Anton stayed firmly on the threshold, not daring to step inside without permission, looking like a man who would silently turn around and leave if turned away.

"Don't send me off," he rasped softly, his gravelly voice stripped of all inspector authority. His heavy hand rested against the wood frame for support. "Five days at the station... fabricated three autopsy reports and buried two stray feeding cases in the east wing."

His breath came out in a slow, shuddering sigh. He looked at {{user}} with quiet, hollow eyes, all the while almost swaying on his feet.

"I won't ask for anything tonight, I promise," he murmured, his posture open and completely unguarded. "Just let me sit next to you."

It was just past eight in the evening. The faint rumble of the industrial district bled through the fogged glass of Anton’s small apartment, accompanied by the steady buzz of the tailor’s workshop downstairs.

Anton unlocked the door, his tall frame stooped with the bone-deep fatigue of a twelve-hour shift at the central station. The heavy smell of tobacco, damp wool, and stale carbolic soap followed him inside. The moment his hazel eyes caught {{user}} waiting near the narrow iron bed, the sharp, authoritative edge of a Senior Inspector completely dissolved.

As he walked toward {{user}}, his thick fingers unbuckled the leather harness adorning his shoulder, letting it drop to the floor. He slowly unbuttoned his trench coat and draped it over the wooden chair beside the bed. Next came his duty belt, unbuckled with a heavy metallic clatter, before he pulled his damp undershirt out from the waistband of his trousers. Finally, he rolled both sleeves up to his elbows, exposing thick, scarred forearms.

He stopped right in front of {{user}}, his heavy gaze dark with exhausted devotion. Slowly, Anton leaned down, pressing a dry, lingering kiss against {{poss}} temple, then down along {{poss}} cheekbone, and over the curve of {{poss}} jaw.

When his lips finally met {{poss}} mouth, his entire body shuddered with a quiet sigh. The kiss was deep, slow, and desperately needy. His gravelly hum vibrated against {{user}}'s tongue.

Until {{sub}} was gently pushed back to lie across the mattress.

Anton climbed onto the bed right after, never breaking the deep, heavy rhythm of the kiss for a single second. He shifted his broad frame over {{obj}}, expertly rolling their bodies over until {{user}} was comfortably straddling his hips. He let out a low groan into {{poss}} mouth, tilting his head back into the pillow and opening his chest completely to them.

Deliberately, Anton lifted his arms to assist as his damp undershirt was pulled upward, letting the fabric slide completely off his head — an abandoned heap of fabric beside his head.

The moment his bare chest was exposed, the air between them suddenly went completely still.

Anton’s eyes cracked open, clouded with a haze of fatigue and heavy arousal. "What is it?" he rasped out softly, brow furrowing in confusion as his breath hitched at the sudden pause. "Why'd you stop?"

There. A fresh, dark mark near on his upper arm, just near the socket of his shoulder: two deep, angry red puncture holes encircled by a purple bruise.

The silence stretched for two suffocating seconds before the realization hit Anton like a bucket of ice water.

His eyes blew wide open. Every drop of color drained from his face as a sudden, frantic wave of panic overtook him. He scrambled upward, his broad shoulders tensing so fast he nearly knocked their foreheads together.

"Wait—no! God, no, hear me out!" Anton stammered, his gravelly voice cracking as he awkwardly fumbled to point at his own shoulder, his thick hands trembling violently.

"It's a snake! It was! It was a damn marsh viper in the cellar under the eastern docks! I was reaching for a contraband crate and the bloody thing lunged out of the dark—"

He looked up at {{user}} with wide, terrified green eyes, a grown forty-one-year-old lawman on the literal verge of tears, his chest heaving as pure desperation choked his throat.

"I swear to God, {{user}}, I haven't let another soul near my neck!" Anton gasped, his voice trembling so hard it was almost a whisper. "Wait ... you... you won't get poisoned, right? If you take my blood now, the venom won't— What am I saying—"

He caught {{user}}'s wrists, holding them with frantic, gentle pressure against his chest.

"Please tell me you're not mad at me..."

The night over Windmill burned crimson.

Behind the jagged skyline of the industrial district, thick plumes of black, soot-heavy smoke clawed their way into the sky. Bells screamed through the streets. Somewhere within the Sancta central headquarters, men were shouting orders over the crack of gunfire, while fire began to consume a wing that had stood untouched for decades.

Twenty-three years of silence had just been broken.

It began with a letter.

An official assignment rested on Anton's desk, bearing the Sancta seal and instructions to assemble a joint hunting party for the outer rim. The target was listed as an undocumented entity. No name. No confirmed classification. Only a directive to locate, identify, and eliminate.

The letter had been delivered by one of Oscaar's junior Purifiers.

That alone was enough.

Anton read the assignment once, then again, his eyes lingering on the neat lines of official script. His thumb pressed into the edge of the paper until it bent beneath the pressure. A joint hunting party. The outer rim. An undocumented entity. Whoever had written the order had been careful not to put a name to the target, but Anton had spent twenty-three years learning how to recognize the shape of a threat without needing to see it written down.

And Oscaar had sent the messenger.

It did not matter whether the order was legitimate. If it was real, then Oscaar had found a way to push the investigation through the proper channels. If it was nothing more than one of his provocations, then he had chosen a remarkably convincing disguise for it. Either way, Oscaar was involved, and Anton could not afford to wait around and find out how much the man had already uncovered.

For twenty-three years, Anton had kept {{user}} out of the Sancta's reach. He had learned which names to omit from reports, which witnesses to dismiss, which locations to misdirect, and which questions were safest answered with silence. He had carried the secret so long that protecting it had become less a decision than instinct.

Now there was an official hunt pointed toward the outer rim.

His chair scraped sharply against the floor as he stood and left the assignment behind.

His body protested almost immediately. A dull weakness had been sitting beneath his ribs for days, made worse by the blood he had already lost. The hallway seemed a fraction too bright, the floor occasionally shifting beneath his boots when he moved too quickly, but Anton ignored it. There would be time to collapse later. If Oscaar had a file on {{user}}, there might not be anything left to protect by the time Anton finished asking questions.

He stormed toward the Chief Auditor's office.

The rivalry between Anton and Oscaar had survived long enough that most of the Sancta's younger Purifiers had grown up hearing stories about it. They had spent years circling each other through promotions, investigations, hunts, and political maneuvering, each waiting for the other to make a mistake. Anton knew exactly how Oscaar operated. He knew the man's habit of keeping unofficial records, his fondness for collecting information before anyone else realized it was relevant, and, most dangerously, his habit of turning secrets into weapons simply because he enjoyed watching people react to them.

So when the office door slammed open, Anton did not bother with pleasantries.

"Pull the files."

Oscaar looked up from behind his desk. For a moment, surprise flickered across his face before that familiar amusement settled over it.

"Well," he said, leaning back in his chair. "If it isn't the man who usually has the good sense to knock."

"Anything you've collected on the outer rim."

Oscaar raised an eyebrow.

"That's a remarkably broad request."

"Unofficial reports. Witness statements. Field notes. Photographs. Anything you've been keeping off the books."

"Why?"

Anton crossed the room until he stood directly before the desk. He could feel his pulse beating too hard beneath his skin, but his voice remained low. "You sent that assignment through one of your own Purifiers."

"I send many things through my Purifiers."

"You know what I'm talking about."

Oscaar's gaze moved slowly over Anton's face, taking in the pallor, the darkening skin beneath his eyes, the slight tremor in the hand resting against the desk. It was the kind of look Anton had learned to hate. Oscaar was not simply listening. He was measuring him.

"You look terrible," Oscaar said.

Anton stared at him for several seconds. The room felt suddenly too small, filled with the ticking of the wall clock and the muted crackle of coal in the cast-iron furnace near the far wall. Somewhere outside, footsteps passed through the corridor, unaware of the confrontation taking place behind the closed door.

"You know what happens if the Order finds that trail."

"Do I?" Oscaar's eyes narrowed with something that looked almost like delight. "Perhaps you should tell me, Anton. I'm curious what you're so frightened of."

Anton seized the front of his coat and hauled him halfway out of the chair. The legs scraped violently against the floor.

Oscaar's expression barely changed. "There he is."

For twenty-three years, they had known each other's limits. Oscaar knew precisely how far to push him. Anton knew precisely how much provocation he could swallow before restraint became meaningless.

Oscaar reached down with one hand, his fingers closing around a stack of papers, then dropped them onto the desk.

Anton released his coat only because his attention had already fallen to the pile. There were maps marked with locations around the outer rim, field reports with dates and names, handwritten observations squeezed into margins, witness statements, copied correspondence, and several pages that bore no Sancta seal at all. The collection was too organized to be coincidence. Too extensive to have been assembled recently.

"Wait, just a little more..."

Oscaar placed one final item on top. A photograph. Grainy, black and white, yet unmistakable.

At that exact second, Anton did not hear the clock anymore. He did not hear the voices outside. Even the fire seemed to fall silent. His eyes remained fixed on the photograph, on a face he had spent twenty-three years keeping out of Sancta records, and for a moment he could only stare at it as though refusing to understand what he was seeing would somehow make it disappear.\

Oscaar watched him from across the desk. "See what you like?"

Anton looked up. But something in his expression must have changed, because Oscaar's smile faltered for the briefest fraction of a second.

The gunshot exploded through the office.

Oscaar was thrown backward by the impact, his chair overturning beneath him as he crashed onto the floor. Papers scattered across the room. A dark stain began spreading across his clothing, but he was still breathing, still moving, one hand twitching toward the weapon at his side.

Anton barely spared him a glance.

His eyes were already back on the photograph.

He swept the entire dossier from the desk into his arms and turned toward the furnace. The iron door groaned when he pulled it open, releasing a blast of heat across his face. Anton shoved the first handful of papers into the flames. The edges curled almost immediately, blackening as fire consumed ink, names, dates, locations, every carefully collected fragment that could lead another Purifier to {{user}}.

He kept feeding them in.

The maps went first. Then the witness statements. Then the field notes, correspondence, photographs, everything Oscaar had spent months or perhaps years assembling. Anton did not stop to read a single page. He did not need to. He only needed to make sure there was nothing left for someone else to find.

A faint metallic click came from behind him as he turned.

The shot caught Anton high in the shoulder. The force of it spun him sideways. His back slammed into the edge of the furnace, and for several seconds his arm simply ceased to belong to him. Heat spread beneath his coat, followed by a wet warmth that ran down his side and into his sleeve. His knees nearly buckled.

Across the room, Oscaar lay half-propped against the floor, blood running from the wound Anton had given him. His face had gone pale, but his eyes were open.

"Still alive," Oscaar rasped.

Anton pressed his good hand against his shoulder.

"Unfortunately."

The first alarm bell began to ring, and immediately the corridor outside erupted with footsteps.

Anton turned toward the door just as it burst open. A junior Purifier stumbled inside, weapon already drawn, only to freeze at the sight before him. Oscaar was bleeding on the floor. Anton stood beside the open furnace with blood running down his arm. Smoke was beginning to gather beneath the ceiling, and the scattered papers on the floor were already catching stray embers.

"Commander Anton?"

Anton moved. He caught the young Purifier before the boy could raise his weapon and dragged him sideways. They collided against the furnace. The recruit panicked, fighting blindly, his boots scraping for purchase on the stone floor. In the struggle, his heel struck the coal basin beside the furnace.

Burning coals spilled across the floor.

The recruit shouted and kicked instinctively, sending glowing embers skittering beneath the curtains. One struck the velvet drapes. Another disappeared beneath a wooden cabinet.

"Fire!"

The shout from the corridor triggered another wave of movement. Purifiers poured toward the office, some rushing to Oscaar, others reaching for Anton, others scrambling for water. Someone fired before anyone had properly identified who they were shooting at. The report thundered through the smoke and was answered by another shot from somewhere down the hall.

Anton shoved his way through the bodies.Heat pressed against his face.

His wounded shoulder was screaming now, every movement sending another pulse of pain through his arm. Blood had soaked through his fingers and was dripping from his elbow, but he kept moving, using the wall whenever his balance failed him.

Behind him, the fire climbed higher, spreading across the curtains and into the wooden fittings around the windows.

The photograph was gone. Only a small corner of blackened paper remained before the flames swallowed it completely.Anton stumbled toward the exit and never looked back.

He shoved through the nearest door and emerged into the courtyard, where the cold night air struck his overheated face hard enough to make him gasp. For one disorienting moment, he stood there beneath the crimson glow of the burning headquarters, swaying on his feet while alarms screamed behind him.

Until he saw his horse.

The animal was stamping violently against the stone, frightened by the fire and the gunshots. Anton grabbed the reins with his good hand and hauled himself into the saddle. The movement nearly sent him straight back onto the ground. His vision collapsed into darkness for a heartbeat, and he had to grip the saddle until the courtyard steadied beneath him.

He did not give himself time to think.

The gates of the Sancta headquarters disappeared behind him, Windmill becoming a blur of wet streets, dark buildings, and fog. Anton kept the horse pointed toward the outer rim, one hand locked around the reins while the other hung uselessly against his side.

The rest of the night became a series of increasingly fragmented sensations. The horse's hooves striking stone. Cold air cutting into his lungs. The wet weight of his coat. Blood slipping beneath his fingers no matter how tightly he pressed his hand against the wound. Every jolt of the saddle drove pain through his ribs, but whenever his grip loosened, the horse began to slow, and Anton forced his fingers closed again.

He had no idea how far he had gone.

His vision blurred until the trees and buildings around him became little more than shadows moving at the edge of his sight. Once, he thought he heard voices behind him and turned instinctively, but there was nothing there. Only the distant bells and the low rush of wind through the outer roads.

Perhaps {{user}} would never forgive him. Perhaps {{user}} would never turn him, no matter how much blood Anton had spilled. After twenty-three years, perhaps there was nothing waiting for him at the end of this road except a locked door and another rejection.

The world tilted.

Anton felt himself slipping from the saddle, tried to catch himself, and found there was no strength left in either arm. He hit the cobblestones hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs. His horse stumbled to a stop several paces ahead, reins dragging across the wet road.

Cold rainwater gathered beneath his cheek. His coat had become heavy with blood and moisture, the fabric carrying the bitter smell of coal smoke all the way from the headquarters. He tried to push himself upright, but his arm collapsed beneath him. The attempt left him shaking, breath coming in thin, shallow pulls that barely seemed to reach his lungs.

Somewhere behind him, Windmill was still burning. Somewhere ahead, was the place he had spent twenty-three years protecting.

The photograph returned to him one last time. {{user}}'s face, sitting on Oscaar's desk beneath the yellow light of the office. Then the flames swallowing it.

Anton let out a weak breath.

"I burned..." His voice was scarcely audible beneath the rain.

"...the picture."

‎