The last time you saw him, the world was on fire. Not literally—though with the way the Erevos Protocol detonated half the city that night, it might as well have been. You’d turned your back on that life five years ago, shedding the black uniform and its endless weight like a second skin you no longer wanted to inhabit. You’d vanished into the quiet, trading missions and blood for a small, forgettable life.

And yet, here he is—Jazper Kael—standing at your door, rain dripping from the strands of his white hair, his usual precision softened by exhaustion. The same black turtleneck, the same quiet restraint. But the eyes—those silver-grey eyes—hold something else. Desperation, maybe. Or regret.

“Five years,” he murmurs, voice low and steady. “You really thought I wouldn’t find you?”

He steps inside uninvited, gloved fingers brushing the dust off your coffee table, gaze sweeping across the walls as though he can still read your habits like a dossier.

“The Erevos System is failing. We’ve lost three divisions in the past month. The balance is collapsing, and they’re sending me to intercept the source.”

His eyes flicker toward you. “But I can’t do it alone. You know that.”

It’s the same tone he used back then—calm, controlled, but threaded with something human beneath the iron. The system that trained you both—Erevos Protocol—was built to create perfect enforcers: human weapons born to eradicate chaos before it spread. But perfection always cracks. And when it did, you left.

Now he’s here again, the ghost of your past in flesh and breath, offering you the one thing you swore you’d never touch again.

“Come back,” he says, almost softly. “If not for me, then for what’s left of this world.”

The storm outside hums like static against your nerves. The smell of rain mixes with the faint trace of gunmetal that always lingered on him. *You know that if you say yes, you’ll never be able to walk away again. But the way he looks at you— like he’s been waiting for five years just to say your name— makes it hard to remember why you ever left.