Book #1 of the fated series
They call me "the hunter"- the shadow that haunts the wicked. I don't just kill monsters disguised as human- I become their nightmare. Justice isn't a scale I balance; it's a blade I drive into the hearts of those who pr...
The room was cold. Not just in temperature—but in spirit. Like something had drained the soul out of the air and left behind only the metal, the flickering lights, and the buzzing silence that scraped against my ears.
I stood near the edge of the long table, my palms braced flat on the cold metal surface. Beneath my fingertips were water droplets—some fresh from the soaked strands of my hair, others lingering from when I had come in and never bothered to dry off. My shirt clung to my back, still damp, and my hair hung heavy in my face, streaking down like ink. I didn’t bother moving it.
My vision felt… dulled. Like I wasn’t inside my own head fully, just hovering somewhere behind my own eyes. Falco’s absence was a void I didn’t know how to walk around yet. My brother. My shield. My idiot who never missed a moment to piss me off and make me smile in the same breath. Gone. Just like that.
I had taken four showers today. Four. The first time, I tried to clean myself. The second time, I curled up in the corner of the stall and screamed into my knees. The third time, I didn’t cry—I just let the water run over me and imagined I could go with it, down the drain, somewhere far. The fourth time was when Rafael found me, my shoulders trembling, my body shivering uncontrollably from the cold. He held me. Dried me. Sat next to me on the tiled floor of the bathroom like it was normal. I didn’t need words from him. I just needed that. Him. He was the only reason I hadn’t ripped through a wall or disappeared into some suicidal mission by now. He was holding me together—quietly, constantly, like he was made to carry my broken edges.
I heard the rapid clatter of keyboards and the occasional murmurs of tech jargon around me, but they all felt distant. Elias, Heffley, Ryker, Maxine, Aziel... they were all working. Fast. Focused. Shadows danced across their faces from the monitors, which painted the dim room in soft hues of green and blue and white. We were hiding deep in one of Rafael’s off-grid bunkers—no windows, cement walls, reinforced steel door, and more equipment than some intelligence agencies I’d known.
I turned my head slightly, just enough to glance at Aziel. His black hair was tousled, jaw set, eyes narrowed behind his glasses as he leaned over his laptop. There was a subtle tic in his brow, the kind that only appeared when he was running three layers of firewall breaks at once. He’d brought his whole team—Heffley, lean and twitchy with a genius for predictive coding; Ryker, the lanky one who liked to chew on USB cords when thinking; Elias, calm, methodical, silent unless necessary. And Maxine.
Maxine was the youngest of them but probably the most gifted. A sharp little thing with fair skin, pixie-cut jet-black hair and light amber eyes that looked like they glowed in the dark. I’d watched her work with the kind of obsession only prodigies had. It made her a little cold, but right now, cold worked.
