He nodded, already calculating what double meant.
I left without waiting.
Night air hit like warm water. My face throbbed. Ribs ached. Right knuckles were split.
Perfect.
I walked slowly, letting my heart rate settle, adrenaline bleed out. The streets were quieter now—late enough that even Bangkok's nightlife had started dimming.
For the first time in weeks, I let myself think about them.
The Nine.
We'd survived St. Paul's together. Bound by shared trauma and the desperate loyalty that only forms when you're certain you won't survive. We escaped together. Killed the headmaster together. Scattered across the globe, enlisting in different branches, making ourselves disappear into the machinery of violence governments pretended didn't exist.
We'd promised to stay in touch. Be there if needed.
And we had been. For a while.
But time turned brotherhood into memory. Shared trauma into something none of us wanted to examine. Calls became less frequent. Then stopped.
Were they still my friends? Or just kids who'd been prisoners in the same hell?
No.
Friends.
I knew that with the same certainty I knew fourteen ways to kill a man with a fork. If any of them called, I would move heaven and earth.
Even knowing what I was. What I'd become.
In a moment of weakness I didn't allow often, I wished I could see them again.
But I knew better.
Not after what we'd done. WhatI'ddone.
Happy reunions didn't happen in Kane Black's life.
There was only war.
I turned down the alley toward my apartment, shadow stretching long under fluorescent light from a noodle shop somehow still open. An old woman looked up as I passed, eyes tracking the blood on my face without comment.
Bangkok didn't judge.
That's what I loved about it.
Tomorrow I'd wake and do it again. Train. Wait. Fight. Exist in the spaces between assignments, managing the violence St. Paul's had planted in my bones and watered with pain until it grew into something I could never uproot.
And somewhere, the organization was hunting me.
Hunting all of us.
Let them come.
I'd survived worse than death.
I'd survived becoming exactly what they made me.
