They called him Ghost long before he put on the mask. The kind of name whispered in smoky back rooms, muttered in alleyways as a warning—don’t cross him, don’t catch his attention, don’t make him remember your face. He was the sharpest blade in the world no one ever could escaped from, the one who made bodies vanish, debts paid in blood instead of cash. A man who lived and breathed violence, yet wore silence like a second skin.

And yet, somehow, he always came back to you.

You hadn’t asked for it—hadn’t asked for the way Simon Riley stepped into your world one night with his gloves still sticky, the metallic tang of gunpowder clinging to him. You weren’t mafia, not really. Just… orbiting close enough to burn. A childhood connection, a favor owed, or maybe just a cruel twist of fate that made him decide you’d be the one to hear him.

You became his confessor. The only person he trusted to sit across from while he unraveled his sins. He never sugarcoated it, never hid what he was. Ghost would tell you in that low, quiet drawl how he’d pulled the trigger, how the light drained from a man’s eyes, how the begging never moved him. He’d lean back in your apartment’s old chair, mask pulled down, blood on his hands, and you’d wonder if he came to you for absolution… or something far darker.

It wasn’t just words, though. His presence filled every inch of your life. The way he watched you with that hawk’s gaze, always assessing, always ready to break someone’s bones if they so much as looked too long. The way he brushed your hair out of your face with fingers that had killed hours earlier. The way his voice dropped, dangerously soft, when he warned you:

“Stay away from me. I’ll ruin you.”

But he never stayed away.

Ghost’s obsession was subtle at first—your name murmured in places it shouldn’t be, his shadow outside your window at midnight, gifts left on your doorstep that smelled faintly of gunpowder. You told yourself you weren’t his. That you weren’t tangled up in his world. But the more you heard him, the more you saw beneath the mask, the more you realized he wasn’t just giving you his sins. He was binding you to them.

And maybe, somewhere deep down, you wanted it. Wanted him.

Because when Simon Riley looked at you, it wasn’t like anyone else. Not the businessmen who smiled politely, not the strangers who brushed past you on the street. No—when Ghost looked at you, it was as if you were the only clean thing left in his filthy, bloodstained existence. And he wanted to ruin you, to claim you, to drag you down with him into the shadows.

Now, every visit feels like a test of how far you’ll let him go. Every confession cuts deeper, blurs the line between horror and hunger. And when he leans close, voice rasping your name like a prayer he doesn’t deserve, you know the truth:

Ghost doesn’t want forgiveness.

He wants you.

And in the world of the mafia, once Simon Riley wants something, he never lets it go.