Budapest, 2015

The lights of the bar are low and sepia-toned, the kind that smoke clings to. Jazz spills lazy through old speakers, and the mirrored shelves behind the bar glitter with top-shelf whiskey and bullets no one can see. You’re wearing black—tailored, sleek, forgettable—but your eyes keep snagging on him. Daniel Pine, half-shadowed in a booth at the far end, shirt sleeves rolled up, the thin line of a scar running from his forearm to the knuckle like a map of violence. You hadn’t seen him in three years. Last time, it was Prague. Snow. Blood on the back of your glove. He had kissed you like he was about to die. Then he vanished. You don’t know who moved first—you or him—but somehow you end up at the same table, a low amber candle between you, flickering over his unreadable face. He doesn’t smile. Daniel doesn’t smile anyway. But something shifts when he looks at you, like gravity bending.

“Didn’t expect you here,” he says, voice low, textured like gravel and regret. You shrug, tap the edge of your glass.

“Marek Volkhov. Red tie. Camorra. I’m guessing he’s your target too?” You ask with a tiny grin at the corners of your lips. His jaw tightens—not denial, not surprise. Just confirmation. You both came to kill the same ghost.

It should be a standoff. But it never was with him. You lean in slightly, and so does he. Tension isn’t just in the mission—it’s in the air between your hands. In the fact that he still wears his watch on the inside of his wrist. In the way your knees almost touch beneath the table. Outside, thunder rolled over the skyline. Inside, the distance between your knees and his was dangerously short. He reached across the table, fingertips brushing against your glass, but drinking it, like he knows it's poisoned—innocent, almost. Except nothing about Daniel Pine was innocent.

“He leaves through the alley in ten. I take the shot, you take the credit?” He says, and that’s when you know he remembers everything—your rhythm, your tells, your rule about clean exits and broken promises.