The cough didn't sound like a death knell; it sounded like wet gravel shifting in a plastic bucket.
Jonathan leaned against the farmhouse's porch railing, clutching a rag to his mouth. When he pulled it away, the white cotton was dappled with blooms of bright, oxygenated red. At thirty-four, his body should have been at its peak. Instead, it was a biological betrayal. The Stage IV adenocarcinoma was a silent assassin, more efficient and cold-blooded than Jonathan had ever been in his previous life. It was eating him from the inside out, turning the "Wraith of the Adriatic" into a man who got winded climbing a flight of stairs.
"Dad? Are you coming in? The eggs are getting cold."
The voice was his North Star. Ten-year-old Leo stood in the doorway, his hair a chaotic nest of blonde curls, wearing a t-shirt three sizes too big. Behind him, the smell of sizzling butter and cheap coffee drifted out—the scent of a life Jonathan had never earned, yet stubbornly occupied for the last eight years.
"On my way, sprout," Jonathan rasped. He tucked the bloody rag into his back pocket, smoothed his flannel shirt over his protruding ribs, and forced a smile that didn't reach his sunken eyes.
Inside, Sarah was moving with the practiced grace of a woman who managed a local clinic and a dying husband simultaneously. She didn't look up as he sat down, but she placed a hand on his shoulder. Her touch was warm, a sharp contrast to the permanent chill in his bones.
"You took your pills?" she asked softly.
"With the coffee," he lied. The pills made his head cloudy, and today, for some reason, the fog felt dangerous.
For the last three days, the hair on the back of his neck had been standing up. It was a vestigial instinct, a ghost limb from a decade spent in the shadows of Prague, Beirut, and Moscow. He told himself it was just the tremors from the chemo. He told himself he was being paranoid. But then he saw the car.
A black sedan, parked on the shoulder of the county road half a mile down the drive. It had been there since dawn. In this part of Montana, nobody sat in a sedan at 6:00 AM unless they were broken down or hunting. And there was no steam coming from that hood.
"Jonathan?" Sarah's voice broke through his trance. "You're staring again."
"Just thinking about the fence," Jonathan said, forcedly stabbing a piece of toast. "Post in the south acre is rotting. Needs pulling."
"The fence can wait. You have an appointment at two."
He nodded, but his mind was already calculating trajectories. If someone came through the front door, he had a Glock 17 taped to the underside of the dining table. If they came through the back, there was a serrated Ka-Bar hidden in the pantry behind the flour sacks. He was a man who lived in a fortress disguised as a home, a dying king guarding a kingdom of dust.
The Shadow at the Gate
After breakfast, Jonathan watched Sarah drive Leo to school. He waited until the dust cloud from her SUV settled before he walked to the mudroom. He didn't grab a hammer for the fence. He grabbed a pair of high-end binoculars.
He climbed the ladder to the hayloft in the barn, his lungs burning with every rung. By the time he reached the top, he had to sit in the hay for five minutes just to stop the world from spinning. Pathetic, he thought. The great Jonathan, brought low by a few rogue cells.
He leveled the glass.
The sedan was still there. Through the windshield, he saw the glow of a mobile terminal. Then, the driver leaned out to flick a cigarette butt.
The man had a jagged scar running from his earlobe to the corner of his mouth.
Jonathan felt a coldness that had nothing to do with the mountain air. That scar belonged to Viktor "The Butcher" Volkov's primary enforcer. He was a man Jonathan had supposedly killed in a pier-fire in Odessa seven years ago.
The past wasn't just coming back; it was knocking on the door with a grudge.
The Weight of Iron
Jonathan descended the ladder, his movements slow and deliberate. His strength was gone, but his muscle memory was a permanent record. He went to the floorboards beneath the heavy workbench in the back of the tool shed.
With a grunt of pain, he pried them up.
There it was. A Pelican case, vacuum-sealed. Inside lay the tools of a trade he'd renounced for the love of a woman who didn't know his real last name. A suppressed HK45, three flashbangs, and a specialized sniper rifle broken down into its components.
He touched the cold steel of the handgun. His hands shook—not from fear, but from the neurological decay of the cancer.
"Not today," he whispered to his own trembling fingers. "Give me one more day."
He knew why they were here. Volkov didn't care about the money Jonathan had stolen when he went dark. Volkov cared about the precedent. You don't "retire" from the Syndicate. You exit in a pine box. By living, by being happy, Jonathan was an insult to Volkov's entire empire.
Suddenly, his phone buzzed. It was a text from an unknown number.
> The boy has your eyes, Jonathan. But he has his mother's smile. Let's see how long he keeps it.
>
Jonathan felt a surge of adrenaline so violent it momentarily masked the pain in his chest. He looked back toward the road. The sedan was gone.
They weren't coming for him first. They were going for the school.
The Dying Embers
Jonathan didn't call the police. The police meant questions, and questions meant Sarah finding out that her "contractor" husband had spent his twenties putting bullets into the heads of oligarchs.
He threw the HK45 into his waistband and grabbed a heavy canvas jacket to hide the bulge. He stumbled as he reached his old Ford F-150, a dizzy spell threatening to dump him into the gravel. He gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles white, and stared at his reflection in the rearview mirror.
He looked like a ghost. Sunken cheeks, pale skin, a man already half-gone.
"You want a monster?" Jonathan growled, his voice a low, terrifying rasp that hadn't been heard in eight years. "I'll show you what a monster does when he has nothing left to lose."
He keyed the ignition. The engine roared to life, a mechanical beast ready for one last hunt. As he sped down the driveway, he reached into the glove box and pulled out a single, small vial of adrenaline he'd kept for emergencies. He didn't hesitate. He jammed the needle through his jeans into his thigh.
The world sharpened. The pain receded into a dull hum. For the next hour, the cancer didn't own him.
The Wraith was back