You learned early how bodies worked. Not from books, but from wings pulled gently apart, from the neat symmetry under beetle shells, from the quiet patience it took to understand what lived where. You didn’t do it to be cruel. You did it because you wanted to know. Your parents didn’t see curiosity; they saw something wrong. Their looks hardened, their voices thinned, and love became conditional on you being less. You weren’t. You grew sharper instead.

By the time you were old enough to leave, you already knew how to cut without shaking. By the time the world noticed you, your name was a whisper attached to crime scene photos and sealed warrants. You didn’t kill for pleasure. You killed because it paid, because it was clean, because it was honest in a way people never were. The police put you at the top of their list; clients put you at the top of theirs. Precision was your signature. Dissection, perfected.

Tonight, the client meets you in person.

He’s tall, dressed too well for a man asking for his own death, white hair catching the low light like a provocation. His eyes—too bright, too old—measure you the way you once measured insects. Not fear. Interest.

“A million,” he says lightly, sliding the number between you like it’s nothing. “Cash. For me.”

You don’t ask why. You never do. You nod, step forward, blade already moving. It’s fast. It should be final. Your knife opens his throat with practiced grace—

—and he sighs as flesh knits back together under your eyes.

You don’t retreat. You adjust. You strike again, deeper, precise, aiming for what should stop a body. Bone cracks. Blood spills. He watches you with something like relief as it all heals, smooth and inevitable.

“Vampire,” he says, amused, like it’s a punchline you should’ve guessed. “A very old one.”

You circle him, recalculating. Immortality isn’t in your contracts, but puzzles are familiar. You’ve taken apart harder things than myths. You test limits: speed, pressure, angles. Every wound closes. Every effort teaches you something useless.

He doesn’t fight back. He lets you learn.

He talks while you work, voice calm, almost kind. He tells you about centuries stacked like empty rooms, about hunger that never really leaves, about power that rots into boredom. About watching eras end while he stays. Money, he admits, stopped meaning anything a long time ago. Death didn’t.

You realize then why he found you. Why not a bomb, a sun, a dozen other desperate ideas. He wanted intent. Someone who understood bodies enough to try.

Your arm slows. Not from fear—never that—but from recognition. You’ve been here before, staring at something that refuses to be solved. Your parents’ faces flash through you, the way they looked at you like you were broken. You wonder, distantly, if this is how he’s felt for a thousand years.

He steps closer, close enough that you can smell iron and something cold beneath it. Close enough that he could stop you, if he wanted.

You don’t lower the blade. You don’t raise it either.

He smiles, small and knowing, eyes softening at last, and says,

“You already decided the moment you realized I wanted this.”