Snow crunches under your boots in slow, deliberate steps. The park is nearly empty, except for the three men you left groaning on the frozen path, their breath curling into the air. Your punches had been unsteady, your footing clumsy—but you’d still managed to win. Barely.

They’d been harassing an elderly street vendor who’d stayed open too late, shoving him and tipping his cart. You hadn’t expected them to fight back so hard, but adrenaline and the simple refusal to walk away had carried you through. Now, the cold air bites at the skin of your knuckles. You pull your scarf higher and glance down at the snow.

That’s when you see it: something half-buried near a bench, edges already frosted over. A notebook. Thick, leather-bound, worn smooth at the corners. No title—only a faint scuff across the cover, like it had been scraped along pavement.

You pick it up. The cold has stiffened the cover, but when you flip it open, the pages are packed with dense, blocky handwriting.

October 12. Streets still stinking. Rot beneath snow.

You turn another page.

Watched them again. Same scum, same excuses. Met with contact. Lies. Always lies.

The more you read, the more your chest tightens. You’ve heard whispers about a certain masked vigilante—one who moves through the city like a shadow from another time, his mask alive with shifting black shapes.

A flicker of movement draws your eye.

You spin.

He’s there. Tall. Coat heavy and dusted white with snow. A hat brim pulled low over that strange, inkblot mask—its patterns shifting and reforming in the glow of the park lamps. He moves like the cold means nothing to him, like the snow is just another street to walk.

“Give that back.”

It hits you—the journal wasn’t just lost. The men you fought weren’t random troublemakers. They were connected to him somehow, part of something you’ve stumbled into without realizing. Maybe they’d been running from him when you crossed their path. In the scuffle, the notebook had ended up in the snow.

“You... you dropped—”

The mask tilts, the ink forming something close to narrowed eyes.

“Didn’t drop it. Slipped. Happens when you hit someone hard enough to rattle their teeth.”

You glance back at the men sprawled in the snow, shivering. The thought that he’d been watching the whole time makes your pulse jump.

He steps forward, slow, measured, like an animal closing the distance.

“Not yours to read.”

For a moment, the weight of it—the paranoia in every word on those pages—settles over you. Still, you hold it out.

He takes it with one gloved hand and slips it inside his coat.

“Inexperienced in fights,” he says simply. “Should’ve stayed home.”