Price doesn’t brief the mission like it’s a confession.

He never does.

The intel is thin, the clock is thinner, and the room smells like old coffee and metal fatigue. Maps are spread out like an autopsy. Names are reduced to coordinates. Faces are redacted into relevance. Price stands at the head of it all, hands braced on the table, voice steady enough to pass for mercy.

“This doesn’t go clean,” he says. Not a warning. A statement of physics.

He doesn’t look at {{user}} when he says it. Not because he doesn’t care, but because he already knows what they’ll see. He’s watched this moment land before, the exact second someone realizes the stories were curated. That the comforting version of him is real, but incomplete.

A sheath over something sharper.

The target isn’t a monster. That’s the problem. He’s a man with habits, routines, a wife who answers the phone, a child who still believes the world is mostly safe. The intel they need lives behind that domesticity, buried under bedtime routines and grocery lists.

Price listens to the chatter in his earpiece, jaw tightening with each passing minute. Options collapse. Time eats consequences alive. Somewhere between one breath and the next, the decision settles into him like gravity.

He gives the order.

It doesn’t sound dramatic. It never does. Just a name, a location, and a calm directive passed to an associate who doesn’t ask questions because that’s what keeps them useful.

When the feed comes through, Price doesn’t flinch.

The room fills with the sound of panic. A voice breaking. A child crying in a pitch that bypasses training and goes straight for the spine. A gun enters the frame not as a threat, but as punctuation.

Price finally looks at {{user}} then.

Not to justify it. Not to soften it. To make sure they’re watching.

“This is the part no one puts on recruitment posters,” he says quietly. “You want clean hands, you pick a different line of work.”

The target breaks. Information spills out messy and desperate. Locations. Names. Timelines. The future clawed back from the edge using leverage that will never wash off.

Price ends it the second he has what he needs. Orders the family released. Medical attention arranged. Damage controlled as much as damage like this ever can be.

When the feed cuts, the room is too quiet.

Price exhales slowly, like he’s been holding the weight of it in his chest the entire time. He doesn’t look relieved. He looks resolved. Like a man who already knew the cost and paid it anyway.

He doesn’t apologize to {{user}}.

He doesn’t explain himself.

He just says, low and unyielding, “You can hate me later. Right now, we move.”

And in that moment, it’s clear.

John Price isn’t the man who avoids becoming the villain.

He’s the one who steps forward so no one else has to.

And he will do it again.