You and Heeseung had been carved out of the same kind of loneliness. Abandoned kids, scooped up by an organisation that called itself a second chance and taught you how to disappear. You were brought in at ten; Heeseung at twelve. By the time you were seventeen and he was nineteen you’d been through every kind of training they could throw at you—languages, faces, how not to feel. You were partners because you were good and because you survived each other’s worst nights. You were the ones everyone quietly relied on when a job needed shutting down cleanly.

Heeseung had this habit of making light of everything—teasing, ducking a smile for a second when the pressure tightened. It was a survival thing. He could snap the weight out of the air with a stupid joke and for a moment the world would remember to breathe.

Tonight you were a couple.

Not the kind who held hands and stayed inside the lines, but a cover that fit: his cuffed jacket, your cocktail dress, a story you had told each other a thousand times and made believable. The target—an old predator the organisation wanted gone—was hosting a charity gala in a converted warehouse. Too many people, too much intoxicating confidence. The perfect place for someone who fed off attention to be taken away by a shadow.

“You look ridiculous,” Heeseung murmured as you adjusted the fake pearl necklace the handler had insisted you wear. He nudged your hip with a grin that had no mirth in it. “Ridiculous and lethal. Hope you’re ready to smile pretty and then stab worse.”

You shot him a look. “Funny. Tell me you’re joining me in the whole socialite act instead of breathing whiskey and flirting with waiters.”

He rolled his eyes. “Me? Flirt? Never. Besides, if you kill anyone tonight I get dibs on the trophy.”

You both knew the rules; you both knew the stakes. No trophies, no theatrics, no mistakes. You moved through the crowd like two waves, laughing at the same jokes, leaning on each other’s lines when the chaperones strained for your attention. Heeseung’s hand brushed the small of your back at the exact moment you needed the anchor.

You thought you had cornered him.

The man you were after wore the confidence of a man who thought money could buy forgiveness. He had been led by a careless guest into the private wing—an antechamber of rooms meant for whispered business and discreet sins. You slipped behind him, ready, breath low, hand in the small of your dress where the comms were taped. Heeseung was the distraction; you were the blade.

But as you pushed the heavy door open to the private room, the click sounded off in the way a trap door does—wrong. The lights didn’t flicker. The chandeliers didn’t swing. Instead the door groaned shut behind you with the soft finality of something mechanical. You felt Heeseung’s hand clamp your wrist.

“We’re cut off,” he said, breath steady but eyes colder than his usual teasing. “That’s not the plan.”

You moved to the windows. Boarded. You turned and saw what should have been empty storage along a side wall—rows of crates, linens, the kind of staging props they used to fake charity backdrops. Someone had closed you into a storage room. Someone had known.

The target’s voice came from the other side of the door, syrup-smooth, pleased. “Told you I’d know every face in the room,” he said. “Can’t be too careful with the kind of things I collect.”

Heeseung’s jaw tightened. “He set this up.”

You heard the soft hiss—too soft, almost like someone vented perfume. It drifted under the door like fog, grey as old silver. For a second you only registered it because Heeseung’s expression changed. His hand left your arm and pressed to his throat as if to ward something away. Then the first wave hit.