Washington had a predictable smell: rain, exhaust, a fat, underlying tang of money that never bothered to hide. It suited me. Patterns were easy to move through once you recognized them.
My name on paper was Adrian Vale. Bank accounts, investments, a public life that didn't ask questions. Someone who could vanish for a week and return with an excuse about a remote conference. Useful cover. I wore it because it was practical. It worked.
What made the life under that paper different was not the money or the identity — it was the thing the Being put in me when I arrived. The Essence of the Art of Ninjitsu wasn't a philosophy or a training manual. It was a kit: instincts, compressed knowledge, reflexes, and the kind of spatial understanding that lets you be everywhere without being seen. I had lived before. I'd trained and killed in another life. Coming back into this one with that package inside felt like being given a tool and a map. I took pride in both.
I didn't work for anyone. I worked for whoever paid. There were no handlers. No middlemen. No personal loyalties to bend me. Business happened the way I designed it: through a website I built and ran myself. It was simple for everyone else — a clean interface, anonymized escrow, instructions, a single deposit, and an algorithm that handled staggered payouts. For anyone who tried to trace it, it was a dead end. It wasn't invisible because it was sophisticated in the way most people assumed sophistication looked; it was invisible because it used assumptions against itself. I liked that. Pride is a quiet thing for people who know how to disappear.
Tonight, money moved through one of those accounts. The Armitage Gallery in Georgetown had a charity auction, and it gave me everything I needed: wealthy people clustered in safe orbits, predictable exits, and a man worth removing. He called himself Broderick. He moved shipments. He smiled like it meant nothing. He had a ledger page in a frame — the item I wanted. That ledger was a thread. Pull the right thread and a web shows itself.
I entered like any well-bred guest. Tux, practiced smile, the kind of small talk that lands you in people's good graces and erases suspicion. The Essence did the rest — not by making me supernatural, but by making my body obey before my mind had to decide. Silence, timing, moving in the empty seams of other people's attention. I do not narrate kills. I do my work and leave evidence only where it must be: the body, the fact of disappearance, the absence of motive that draws knives and questions.
Broderick stopped breathing on the gallery floor. People spun; servers dropped trays; a charity volunteer screamed. It was all noise that hid what mattered. I left with the ledger pocketed under a coat, my cuffs clean, the satin of a napkin folded neatly where someone might tidy a scene. That was the rule I never broke: nothing for the world to use.
There were no cameras with usable footage. I design my entries and exits with a margin that leaves only blind angles and human mistakes — a guard looking at his phone, a security sweep timed with a toast, a swinging chandelier reflecting a dozen faces except the one that matters. It guaranteed one thing: there would be no photograph of me doing what I do. Only bodies. Only questions.
Payments posted to my escrow. No email addresses, no phone numbers. The commissions hit me in the backend ledger, flagged under innocuous titles. I checked it when I returned to the townhouse: credits cleared, instructions uploaded, a single-line note: No drama. Clean removal. Payment in full.
A message came through the site from a broker I'd never met. The text was short, professional. A number. A time. A location. I scheduled it through my own system, not through any third party. That was the point — my system shaped how the world could interact with me without letting them touch the wiring.
I don't honour gods or men. I answer balances and deadlines. Pride comes when the world thinks you are a rumour and you exist, concrete, in its gaps. I'd come to this life with two things most people don't have on day one: expertise and contempt for being catalogued. The Being didn't steal my pride. It made my skills obvious. I sharpened them.
If you leave perfect bodies, someone will notice. Patterns are a kind of truth, and agencies live to find truths in patterns. Raymond Reddington noticed. He always notices things that matter. He has people looking for things that move in the dark, and for weeks they opened cases on a thread of disappearances, odd shipments, men who did not take risk for the usual old motives.
He couldn't find me. That was deliberate. He couldn't pull a photo of my face from the footage because there wasn't one to pull. He couldn't place a handler or a courier because there wasn't one. He could only look at what remained: tidy scenes, high-value targets gone quiet, and a ledger or two misfiled in a shipping company now missing a contact. That pattern was enough for him. Enough to make a note.
In the margins of his world, he writes names. He puts people on lists. You don't want to be on Raymond Reddington's list. If he names you, other people start to look for you, even if they can't find you. A name matters because it makes you a thing he's catalogued. He catalogued me on sparse evidence and an instinct he keeps honed for advantage. He called me Revenant.
He did not reach me. He had no pictures. He had a codename and a curiosity. That was all.
I slept after the job with the window cracked and the night air like a gauze over my thoughts. Pride is an odd thing; it gives you confidence, then asks for more. In the morning, my escrow had cleared another transfer. My interface had a new client rating — five stars and a short review: Efficient. No drama. Would hire again.
Reddington's name circulated in a hundred separate ways through the undercurrent of the city. Men who worked with him made notes and moved differently. Men who worked for him watched other men's faces for a reaction that never came. They started to whisper the one name that made sense for what they were seeing: Revenant. A ghost that returned to collect debts. A thing that left no trace save the ledger of the dead.
That was fine. Names were for men who needed them. I had accounts and a system and the Essence the Being put in me. I had patience. I had the ability to be exactly what a job required and nothing more.
On my screen, the site's backend pulsed with a queue. Scripts cleaned logs and rerouted calls with a level of obfuscation that made current analysts' heads hurt. That was deliberate too: I built the thing so that others could not even understand what it did, much less trace it back to me. Pride again. The work of a man who had lived before and knew the advantage of being unreadable.
Payment confirmed. Instructions uploaded. Another name on the list. Another ledger to pocket. Another tidy scene for the city to notice and not explain.
You do not survive by being sentimental. You survive by being precise. I checked the blade hidden where I always kept it, slid the ledger into my couch, and went to bed. Sleep is a tool; it keeps the body calibrated.
Outside, Washington worked according to its patterns. Inside, I counted my margins and smiled. Reddington could name me in his private ledger. He could let the Task Force whisper my codename in meeting rooms none of them thought to lock. He could do what men like him do — make lists and use the people on them when it suited him.