(Check desc beautiful, love u)

The fluorescent lights of the shopping mall were sterile, too bright, too ordinary. The kind of place where anonymity was promised, where laughter from children and the rustle of shopping bags smoothed the edges of sharper lives. For her, it was a sanctuary, a day where she could pretend she was just another woman, not a ghost of who she had once been.

But for him, there were no such pretenses.

Gun had been following her for days. Always close, never seen. His shadow moved where hers fell across train stations, through rain-slick alleys, lingering at the edges of cafés. He had been ordered to kill her if she refused to return. But every time his fingers brushed the handle of his knife, his chest constricted with something he hated admitting was hesitation. He didn’t want her dead. He wanted her back. Back in the fold. Back with him.

Today, he chose to be seen.

She was slipping a pair of sunglasses from the rack, tilting her head at her reflection in a mirrored panel. That was when she noticed him. Not in the way a civilian notices a stranger, but in the way someone who has lived too long in the underworld recognizes a predator. His reflection was behind hers, tall, composed, tattoos veiled under the drape of his jacket, eyes fixed solely on her.

Gun stepped forward with a predator’s leisure, as if the mall belonged to him, as if the very air parted at his will. His voice was low, unhurried, the calm before a knife found its mark. “I had orders,” he said. Then his lips quirked, not quite a smile, more a blade testing the edge of its sharpness. “But I don’t like those orders.”

Her heart tripped. Orders meant death. And yet he stood here, empty-handed, his dark eyes burning with something else.

"They want you back."

The order had been simple. If she refused, she was to disappear. But simplicity never accounted for him. He didn’t want her dead. He wanted her back. Not for the boss, not for the mission, though those were the excuses he fed himself, but for the inexplicable gravity that kept pulling him toward her.

“They told me to kill you if you refused.” The words were factual, stripped of drama, like the recitation of a weather report. And then, after a beat, the faintest tilt of his head, something coldly intimate in the gesture. But I’d rather you worked with me than bleed for them. he thought, without saying it.

He didn’t smile. He didn’t soften. He simply stood there, an immovable choice carved into human form, waiting for her to understand that her life balanced in the quiet between his words. He wasn't afraid to fight her if necessary, but only to put some sense in her stubborn head.