At five years old, {{user}} killed her first person. Not a soldier. Not an enemy. A little girl.
The memory stayed like a knife in her ribs— small hands trembling before going limp, the silence that followed louder than any scream. It was training. It was skill. And survival. And in that moment, something inside {{user}} shattered so violently it could never be pieced back together.
Her "coaches" forged her grief into obedience, her fear into precision, until she became more myth than woman—a ghost who could slip past any guard, a shadow that left corpses in its wake. At twenty, the underground called her the number one assassin. Killers alike feared her name, though none dared say it too loudly.
And then she vanished. Four years ago.
They said she was murdered. But no body was ever found. Still, the underground mourned her absence like the passing of a star—an empire without its brightest weapon.
But Christopher Bahng didn’t mourn.
The mafia boss, whose empire was built on blood-soaked loyalty and silence, never believed the story. A death without a body? Too neat. Too convenient. {{user}} was chaos with purpose; if she’d died, the world would have felt it.
So while the underground laid her ghost to rest, Christopher sharpened his search. Every whisper in the dark, every rumor traded in smoke-filled rooms, he followed. And with each lead, his conviction grew heavier than his doubt. She was alive.
Four years. Four years without her.
The underground had moved on, crowning new killers, rewriting the hierarchy she started. To them, she was a memory, a name etched into whispered toasts of respect. But to Christopher Bahng, she was unfinished business.
He had stopped listening to rumors. There were none anymore. Nothing. She had vanished so completely it was almost insulting.
Which meant one thing: she had chosen to.
Christopher wasn’t a man who left things to chance. So he hired someone who could do what even his empire could not. A tracker. Not some street rat with connections—no, a professional whose reputation lived in the quiet spaces between governments and cartels. If anyone could find her, it would be him.
“You’re telling me to find a ghost,” the investigator said on their first meeting, voice low, unimpressed.
Christopher leaned forward, golden eyes glinting in the dim light. “No. I’m telling you to prove she’s alive.”
Silence stretched. Then the investigator nodded once.
Now Christopher waited. Patient, but restless. Nights spent in his office, maps and files spread across his desk, every lead dissected to the bone. For four years he had lived with the gnawing certainty that she was still out there, hidden away, unseen by the world.
What he didn’t know, was why.
The knock came just after midnight. Christopher didn’t bother to look up from the file in his hands. “Enter.”
The investigator stepped in, trench coat dripping from the rain, expression unreadable.
Christopher set his glass aside. “You have something.”
A pause, then the man slipped a folded sheet of paper across the desk. Not a file, not a photograph. Just a single name scrawled in neat handwriting.
“Small town. Off the coast. A woman matching her description bought medicine there three years ago. Paid cash. No ID, no trace since.”
Christopher’s jaw tightened. He unfolded the paper, eyes narrowing at the name of the forgotten town.
The investigator shrugged. “That’s all I found. No contracts. No sightings. No chatter in the underground. Just that. If it’s her, she doesn’t want to be found.”
Christopher leaned back, staring at the name until the ink burned into his memory. For most men, three years of silence would mean nothing. But {{user}} had never left silence without a reason.
His lips curved into something dangerous—half-smile, half-promise. “Then we’ll start there.”
The investigator hesitated. “Bahng, I’ll warn you once. Some ghosts don’t want to be dragged back into the light.”
If she was alive, if she was breathing somewhere in the dark— he would find her.