The rain on the roof did not sound like water.
It sounded like his mother's screams.
Adrian moved through the downpour, a phantom gliding through a city of ghosts. The rain plastered his silver-blonde hair to his scalp, dripping down his face in cold rivulets. They could have been mistaken for tears, if his eyes had held any warmth left to cry.
They did not.
The city's watch patrols, huddled miserably under awnings and cursing the weather, never saw him pass.
To them, he was just another shadow in a city full of them. Their armor, meant to project the Adamantine Order's authority, was just another cage in a city of cages.
They were sheep, pretending to be wolves.
Adrian was the real wolf, and he was hunting.
His hideout was not a home. It was a wound.
An abandoned attic perched atop a derelict tailor's shop, on a street that the city had forgotten. The building sagged, leaning against its neighbor like a tired old man whispering his last regrets.
The only way in was a loose window frame three stories up.
A climb that would be suicide for most. For Adrian, it was just the front door.
He flowed up the side of the building, a silent specter against the wet brick. His fingers and toes found purchase in cracks that were nearly invisible. He slipped through the window, landing on the dusty floorboards with the silence of a falling leaf.
The room greeted him with its familiar stench.
Dust, damp wood, the faint metallic tang of old blood.
And the suffocating scent of his own solitary existence.
A threadbare blanket lay balled up in one corner, his only bed. A half-eaten loaf of stale bread, hard as a rock, sat on an overturned crate.
This was his kingdom.
A kingdom of shadows and silence.
He shrugged off his soaking cloak, letting it fall in a heap by the door.
He did not light a candle. He did not need one.
His left eye, the one that held the burning amber of a predator, cut through the oppressive darkness, casting a faint, eerie glow on the squalor around him.
He sat on the floor, the rough wood a familiar discomfort against his skin.
From within his tunic, he produced his tools. Two daggers, their leather-wrapped hilts worn smooth from use.
They were simple, brutal things. Blackened steel, perfectly balanced. No jewels, no fancy scrollwork.
They were not for show.
They were for ending lives.
He laid them on a piece of clean, dry cloth before him.
The ritual began.
From a small leather pouch, he took a flask of fine oil and a smooth, gray whetstone.
He uncorked the flask, the sharp, clean scent of the oil cutting through the mustiness of the room. He let a single drop fall onto the stone.
The rain on the roof, a steady, drumming rhythm, became the only music in his world.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.
The sound was a meditation. A prayer to a god he didn't believe in.
With each long, deliberate pass of the stone against the steel, he was not just sharpening the blade.
He was sharpening his mind. He was honing his hatred into a fine, razor point.
With each motion, he methodically wiped away the residue of the kill.
The face of Captain Valerius, twisted in a mask of shock and terror. The gurgling sound from his throat. The way his fat body had convulsed on the table.
He pushed it all away, packing it down into the cold, hard place in his soul where feelings went to die.
The daggers had to be perfect. Clean. Ready for the next name on the list.
His hands, though scarred and calloused from a life of hardship, moved with the unwavering precision of a master craftsman.
He finished, holding the edge of the blade up to the faint light from his own eye. It gleamed, a thin line of silver promising a quick, silent death.
He wiped both daggers clean one last time and placed them back in their sheaths.
The ritual was complete.
Now, for the litany.
He reached into the inner pocket of his tunic and pulled out his only other possession of value.
His father's journal.
The leather cover was cracked and softened by the touch of hands that no longer existed. It smelled of old paper, woodsmoke, and a faint, lingering scent of pine and steel that was uniquely his father's.
The scent was a physical blow. A ghost's hand squeezing his heart.
He ran a thumb over the cover, feeling the indentations where his father's fingers had rested.
He opened it.
His father's handwriting was strong and clear, the elegant script of a scholar, not the rough scrawl of a warrior. Another contradiction in the man who was his father.
The first page held the list. His inheritance. His curse.
A list of names.
His eyes fell on the first one. Valerius.
The thick, black line he had drawn through it seemed to mock him. It was a scar on the page.
One down. So many more to go.
His gaze drifted to the second name, just below it.
General Tiberius.
A harder target. Good.
The pig Valerius had died too easily.
Tiberius was a true wolf of the Order, a brilliant and ruthless tactician. Always on the move, always surrounded by his elite guard.
Hunting him would be difficult. Dangerous.
Adrian did not want easy. Easy would not fill the crushing void that Valerius's death had left behind.
As he stared at the name, the sound of the rain on the roof seemed to change.
It was no longer just a drumming. It was a soft, humming tune.
A lullaby his mother used to sing.
The past was a serpent. It always found a way to strike.
A memory, sharp and unwelcome, ambushed him.
He was seven years old.
The fire was warm on his skin. His father sat in his great chair, not with a sword, but with a block of pine wood and a small carving knife—the very knife Adrian now used to sharpen his daggers.
Kazimir's large, calloused hands, hands that had ended hundreds of lives, were impossibly gentle as they guided Adrian's smaller ones.
"No, son," his father's voice, a low, warm rumble that vibrated through his chest. "Don't force the blade. The wood has a heart. You have to let the steel find it. Listen to it. See?"
He guided Adrian's hand, and a perfect, thin curl of pine wood spiraled away.
The air filled with the clean, sharp scent of it. The smell of home.
He remembered the feeling of his father's hand completely enveloping his own.
The feeling of absolute safety. Of belonging. Of love.
The memory shattered like glass.
Adrian slammed the journal shut.
The sound exploded in the tiny attic like a gunshot.
He was on his feet, breathing heavily, his knuckles white where he gripped the book.
The past was not a serpent. It was a poison. A weakness.
He began to pace the small room, his movements jerky, agitated, like a caged animal. He felt trapped. Trapped by the room, by the city, by the ghost of the boy he used to be.
He caught his reflection in a shard of a broken mirror leaning against the far wall.
He froze.
A boy with wild, silver-blonde hair stared back.
A face too lean, too pale.
And his father's eyes. He saw his father's stormy gray eye, his father's determined jaw, his father's unyielding resolve.
The face of the man who failed. The legend who died.
The face of the man whose desire for peace had gotten them all killed.
Rage, pure and blistering, erupted from the void within him.
He hated it. He hated the face that stared back.
It was a constant, mocking reminder of everything he had lost.
"I am not you," he snarled, his voice a raw, broken whisper in the darkness.
He drew back his fist and drove it into the mirror shard.
It exploded. The sound of shattering glass was lost in a clap of thunder from outside.
A searing pain shot up his arm, sharp and brilliantly real.
He welcomed it. It was an anchor in the storm of his memories.
He stood there for a long moment, chest heaving, his fist dripping blood onto the dusty floorboards. The physical pain was a relief. It was simple. It was clean.
It pushed the memories away.
Slowly, the rage subsided, replaced by the familiar, cold resolve.
The ghost was back in control.
He tore a strip of cloth from the bottom of his tunic and wrapped it tightly around his bleeding knuckles. A practical, unsentimental action.
He was Adrian Volkov. Son of the Ashen Wolf. But he was not his father.
His father had a choice. He chose peace. That choice was death.
Adrian had a choice, too. He chose war. And he would live.
He walked back to the journal, ignoring the broken glass and the stinging in his hand.
He picked it up, his gaze falling once more on the name written there, the ink slightly blurred by a drop of his own blood.
General Tiberius.
The mission.
The mission was all that mattered now. It was his shield. His purpose.
His only reason to draw breath in this rotten world.
The General would be next.
And his death would be much, much louder.