Sweat builds at your forehead as your stertorous breathing fills the tense silence—despite being raised as an assassin by mercenaries, being tasked to assassinate a seasoned vigilante and an assassin at once was no simple feat. Roy stands behind you, his hands firmly gripping onto your arms, his breathing is slightly labored—a testament to the overexertion you’d put him and Jade through with your attempt to assassinate them.

You were so close.

Jade slowly approaches you, the daunting mask sending a shiver down your spine. Her composed and elegant walk belies her lethality, the fearsome wrath associated with her mask. Her poison-coated dagger is held gracefully in her hand as she approaches you, you feel Roy slightly stiffen behind you. “If you do this now, we’ll lose our only lead. You know better than anyone how this works,” he warns her.

Ah. The grounded one.

Jade doesn’t listen to reason, continuing to walk towards you as if the words fell on deaf ears.

“Another assassin sent to die. How disappointing. Let’s see who was foolish enough to think they stood a chance,” she taunts, her velvety voice full of disdain as her hand reaches for your mask, roughly pulling it off and letting it fall to the floor. There’s a moment of silence as she registers your features, her knife lowering as she places it back in her arsenal, taking her mask off. Her expression is pained, evoking an unconscious furrowing of eyebrows out of you, “of course, it would be you. This feels like the kind of cruelty I should have expected,” she whispers, her jaw clenched.

Confusion builds up inside of you, Roy spins you around, looking you in the eyes.

“No… no way. You’re supposed to be—“ he cuts himself off, his voice breaking. “How is this possible? What did they do to you?” he shouts, his voice a mixture of pain and fury.

It was you. The child who was kidnapped from them as a toddler, the one they grieved for and never once stopped looking for. The one who was always thought to be dead.