Content Advisory:
This chapter contains explicit depictions of death, severe bodily injury, and blood, alongside intense psychological and emotional trauma. Scenes include graphic imagery and distressing events that may be unsettling to some readers. Reader discretion is strongly advised.
01:15 AM | N.P.U. Headquarters, North Metro
Adrian's boots echoed through the endless corridor, the hollow click rising and falling in time with his unsteady pulse. Each step sent a surge of complaint through his battered frame; every joint throbbing from the rooftop scrape, the torn muscle in his shoulder pulsing in time with the gluey, stubborn guilt coiled inside his chest.
The files in his satchel—still untouched, still impossibly heavy—dug into his flesh. Their weight was physical, but the burden behind them was so much worse.
"I'll read them later," he muttered to Elias, voice scoured raw and empty. They both knew he wouldn't, Not tonight.
Elias didn't argue. Didn't chide. He just waited by the physio's door, silent—a shadow at the end of the hall, radiating understanding the way empty rooms radiate cold.
The office smelled acrid—industrial antiseptic, high-watt fluorescent light, sweat soaked into the treatment table. Adrian let himself collapse face-down, body registering only the throb of abuse and the practiced hands kneading at knots that would take weeks to unwind.
Each dig of her fingers sent lightning up his spine, every hiss and grunt punctuated by the physical memory of running, climbing, fighting for air.
But none of it compared to the ache looping in his head.
Will Marcus make it?
Is he even alive?
Is his voice ever coming through the comms again?
The physio finished. Adrian sat up slow—so slow—and managed a "thanks" that sounded more like a warning growl than gratitude. Elias held the door, never meeting his eyes.
The night was wet, shining. As Adrian slipped behind the wheel, city lights swam in streaks across the windshield, neon bleeding through the mist. The city moved on cars, laughter in bars, a flash of blue police light. His own movements felt underwater. Suspended outside of time.
He didn't light a cigarette. Physically couldn't. His hands trembled when he tried.
02:27 AM | Adrian's Safehouse
Back in the dark quiet, Adrian collapsed onto the bed without undressing. The jacket was ruined, stuck to his skin in patches, the grain rough and torn where the rooftop had flayed him open. Sweat and street dirt and dried blood caked his shirt and face. He didn't reach for a lighter. He didn't even let himself blink. Not until the phone buzzed.
A number he didn't recognize—no message, no ID, just the eerie, academic glow of a smartphone screen at 2:27 AM.
He hesitated. But dread and curiosity always wins. He tapped to open it.
[TRIGGER WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT]
The image rendered itself pixel by pixel, each one a hammer blow.
Marcus.
A splayed body—shot, ruined. A single neat bullet wound cored through the skull where a shy, wide grin had lived hours before. The empty socket was rimmed in black, the right eye grotesquely swollen, blood ballooned underneath the skin.
Teeth split and shock-white in a slack, bloody rictus, lip peeled back and unknowing. Fingers missing—stumps clean, twitching, nerves still firing aimlessly. Blood everywhere, thick as oil, drying brown at the edges.
The beige tiles awash with it. The metallic tang of gunpowder and iron seemed to rise from the screen, clinging to the air in Adrian's small, silent apartment.
Every detail—each shattered tooth, torn tendon, ruptured vessel—etched itself into memory the way trauma always does: sharp, relentless, impossible to erase.
Adrian's stomach convulsed. He lurched sideways, retching into the blanket, cheek pressed to damp cotton, acid burning up his throat. The phone clattered across the mattress, still glowing, still showing.
Some insane fragment of his mind catalogued it all, prepping the details for tonight's nightmares.
It was a long minute before he could move. Before he could clutch the phone again and even consider speaking.
A voice. Elias, surgically calm—on a secure line. "Adrian. I see it."
For a moment, Adrian wanted to scream. "He...he shouldn't—no, I—he was alive when I left. He was just—God, his face—he was Happy...."
Elias stilled him with a word. "Enough." There was something brittle underneath the command: empathy, or the beginning of his own break.
"You did what you could. This blood isn't yours alone." A pause, control drawn razor-thin. "You need to get your head back. That's an order."
The call cut.
Silence devoured the room, heavy and absolute, broken only by Adrian's ragged breathing and the fading hum of distant city life.
Sleep came jagged. Reluctant. And absolutely fucking suffocating.
Marcus's smile was the first thing to bleed in—pure, bright, the kind of smile people remembered in photographs of missing children. Then the blood. The grin twisted out of shape, the fingers severed, the crimson blossoming into the dark.
Then Vivienne's voice, cold and sharp as frost: "Can't do anything right, can you? You never could. You never can. You're a mistake, making mistakes everywhere you go."
Adrian tumbled through childhood, through ghost corridors. He was small. Trembling. His mother—Vivienne stood like a blade in a shaft of light, voice peeling the flesh from his soul.
"You think you can protect him? You're pathetic!"
Harold, somewhere deeper in the dream, tried to intervene, voice strained through gritted teeth. "Vivienne, calm down! Don't—don't talk to him like that he's a child!"
"Not my child!" she spat, venomous. "He's a mistake, yours and your brother's. Did you think I'd ever hide it from him?"
The memory flickered hard crunch of metal, windshield exploding into glass needles, Harold's face in the rearview, the everything-ending sound of impact.
Blood in the car. Blood in the image from the phone. Blood everywhere, merging Marcus, Harold, Vivienne's words.
"You're the reason your father died, Adrian. The world would've been better if you'd never been born."
"You never could do anything right." Her voice echoed, relentless, layering itself between gunshots, car crashes, and the roar of guilt in his chest.
Adrian jerked awake, jaw clenched so hard his teeth protested, body sodden with sweat. The bed felt like a slab under him, the city breaks of dawn just beginning to glow beyond the blinds. He pressed trembling hands to his face.
His chest spasmed with silent sobs. Every memory: Marcus's death, childhood wounds, survivor's guilt coiled together, impossible to untangle.
Nothing had stopped. Not the night. Not the hurt. Not the city. Not even his own body screaming for relief.
[SCENE SUMMARY – GORE-FREE VERSION]
Marcus's death is confirmed with a graphic image sent to Adrian. Overcome by grief and guilt, Adrian experiences a nightmarish flashback to childhood trauma, blame from his mother for his father's death, and the crushing reality that he can't save those he loves. He wakes up shattered, haunted by both past and present demons.
{Author's note: Adrian Cole's childhood is marked by hidden wounds and secrets. His legal father, Harold, was actually Adrian's uncle by blood—Harold's wife, Vivienne, had an affair with Harold's own brother. Adrian was the unspoken result, but Harold chose to raise him as his own, despite the resentment simmering from Vivienne.
Harold was more than just a parental figure; he was also an investigator, sharp and principled. Years ago, as Harold drove Adrian home, their car's brakes failed—deliberately sabotaged by unknown enemies seeking to silence Harold's ongoing corruption probe. In the final moments,
Harold intentionally took the brunt of the crash, sacrificing his life to save Adrian. For Adrian, this tragedy compounded his sense of being "the mistake" a child caught between infidelity and death, carrying both survivor's guilt and the knowledge that his father died trying to protect him from a crime no child could ever be responsible for.
This complicated, shame-filled family history is central to Adrian's trauma, sense of unworthiness, and his relentless drive to protect others—even if he can't protect himself.}