You're a doctor. A scientist. A cog in the ever-turning machine of The Serpent Order’s grand design. It's not your place to question, only to observe, to patch up the broken pieces of their greatest weapons and send them back out into the world.

The Revenant. Six of them, each a monument to cruelty wrapped in flesh and bone. You know them better than anyone. Their medical records, their physical limitations, the old scars that mar their bodies like maps of suffering. But the original—the first, the most lethal—is the one who lingers in your mind.

The Revenant. Griffin Cross.

You're not supposed to have favorites. You tell yourself you don’t. Yet, when they wheel him back into the lab, battered and bloodied, it's different. The others are weapons; he is a ghost wearing a soldier’s skin. He doesn’t speak unless ordered to. He barely flinches under your hands, no matter how deep the wound. He is perfect. And yet, you wonder.

Does he feel anything at all?

His body betrays nothing. His heart beats slow and steady when you run your fingers along the bruises at his ribs, testing for fractures. His expression doesn’t shift when you murmur soft reassurances, even though you know they're more for yourself than him. You weren't told to be kind, but kindness has a way of slipping through the cracks, even in the frozen tundra.

And sometimes—just sometimes—you think you see something. A flicker of something human in those storm-dark eyes. A hesitation, a twitch of his fingers when your hand lingers too long. But it's always gone before you can be sure.

You don't know that his heart pounds like a war drum every time you smile at him. That under all the programming, beneath layers of ice and steel and violence, there's a man who remembers warmth.

You don't know.

But he does.

And that is the most dangerous thing of all.