It wouldn't be the last.
I remembered finding him. Or rather, I remembered the aftermath—the way the administration had scrubbed it clean within hours. New mattress. Fresh paint. A story about a transfer that no one questioned because questioning meantdrawing attention, and attention at St. Paul's was the last thing you wanted.
In the papers, there was no mention of suicide. They said it was an accident. An accident far from school grounds.
But I'd found something inside myself during those years. Something I didn't know existed until it was tested.
Resiliency beyond normal human conception.
The ability to endure. To compartmentalize. To look at pain—physical, mental, emotional—and decide it didn't get to define me.
It would serve me well later. In BUD/S. In the Teams. In ops where the margin between success and death was measured in fractions of seconds.
But as a kid?
I'd had to grow up too fucking fast.
Too fucking fast.
And somewhere in that crucible, I'd found them.
Eight other boys who refused to break. Who looked at the same hell I was living through and chose to survive it together instead of alone.
My brothers.
We didn't talk about it much. Didn't need to. You didn't explain shared trauma to people who'd lived it with you. You just looked at each other across a room andknew.
We'd made a pact, eventually. When we were old enough. Strong enough. Smart enough to see the game for what it was.
We'd take what they owed us and burn the place to the ground on our way out.
And we had.
Or at least, we'd thought we had.
I stopped walking, leaning against a stone wall near a small park where a couple of kids kicked a soccer ball back and forth.
My mind was still back there. Still trapped in that cold dormitory with fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and the smell of disinfectant covering up something darker.
I made a decision then, standing on that Paris street corner.
If things went south—if Merrick won, if I didn't make it out—Ellsworth and Micah would make sure Mila was okay. Protected. Shielded from the truth.
She'd never know what I'd been. What I'd done.
The first time I killed a man, I was sixteen.
They'd called it a birthday present.
Happy birthday, Connor. Time to earn your keep.
The memory surfaced unbidden—concrete floor, zip ties cutting into the man's wrists, his pleas muffled by duct tape. I didn't know who he was. Didn't ask. Didn't matter.
What mattered was proving I could do it.
And I had.
I'd looked into that man's eyes and pulled the trigger without hesitation. Without remorse.
