2. Killian
KILLIAN
Nine years ago. The Morrison house.
"Witnesses to the Castellano execution," Julian explains, his voice flat. The photographs slide across the table. Two faces stare up at me from glossy paper. A blonde girl, maybe six. A boy with a gap-toothed grin, around eight. "Clean sweep. Make it look like a home invasion."
I nod like I had dozens of times before. Just another problem to solve.
But standing in their kitchen at 2 AM, something feels different. The house smells of vanilla candles and freshly baked cookies. A child's crayon drawing clings to the refrigerator, stick figures labeled "Mommy," "Daddy," "Emily," and "Jake" under a smiling yellow sun.
I feel fucking sick to my stomach.
The parents sleep peacefully, her hand resting on his arm. David Morrison, construction supervisor. Lisa Morrison, pediatric nurse. Their only crime was driving past the wrong warehouse at the wrong time.
I move upstairs to the children's rooms. Emily curled under a pink comforter, surrounded by stuffed animals. Then, in Jake's room, the boy sprawled across his bed, mouth open in sleep. Eight years old. The same age I was when my mother disappeared, leaving me with a father who blamed me for it.
This blonde, gap-toothed kid looks exactly like I did at that age. Before the world broke me.
Standing in the doorway, I finally understand my grandmother's words: "Our worst moments don't define us, Killian. It's what we choose to do after them that matters."
For the very first time in ten years, I can't follow orders.
Instead, I stage a robbery, gathering valuables, jimmying the front door, scattering things around. Then, I go to the garage and start a small fire near the electrical panel. Not enough to spread quickly, but enough to trigger alarms and force an evacuation.
I watch from across the street as the family stumbles out in their pajamas, alive and coughing, but safe. By the end of the day, they'd be in witness protection with new identities.
I report back that they'd died in an electrical fire, bodies too burned for identification. Ross was suspicious but had no proof.
It took him six months to discover the truth. Six months to realise his most trusted enforcer had betrayed him for strangers.
That night changed everything. It planted a seed that took years to grow into this moment.
Prison became my answer, the only way to remove myself from Julian’s reach while staying visible enough that he couldn’t eliminate me. I spent the next eighteen months orchestrating my own arrest, feeding information to law enforcement, ensuring my conviction while protecting Order operations.
I started slipping people into the system quietly. Civilians. Witnesses. Anyone I could move without Ross noticing. I told myself it balanced the scales.
Then they handed me Gregory Hart, wrapped up with a bow. And I didn’t even hesitate.
In the final weeks before the hit, I stopped following orders entirely. I warned targets. Helped them disappear. Sabotaged the kills they assigned me.
Walking into that courtroom wasn’t surrender. It was the first free choice I’d made since I was fifteen. I can still hear the sentence being read.
“Fifteen years. No parole.”
My attorney shifts beside me, but I don’t look at him. I keep my eyes forward.
Fifteen years.
He is whispering something about appeals, but I tune him out. I don't give a fuck. I've got exactly what I wanted, for now.
I’m focused on the metal cuffs on the bailiff’s belt, the way they catch the light.
I've spent two years engineering this.
It’s a recalibration.
For the first time since I was fifteen, I’m fucking free.
For seven years I've run my palm along these walls. Tonight they feel different. Tomorrow, I’ll be free. Or as free as a man with an ankle monitor and an extensively engineered house arrest can be.
Seven years of meticulous planning, manipulation, and patience have led to this moment.
Tomorrow, I will be living under the same roof as Dr. Eleanor Hart.
The woman whose father I killed. The woman I’ve been obsessing over since the night at the Grand Metropolitan.
I saw her across the hotel ballroom, minutes before I turned her world into a crime scene.
Even then, through the grief, through the wreckage, I couldn't look away.
I knew I was going to ruin her the second I saw her. I didn't care about the Order or the hit. I just needed her, and that's never happened to me before. Not once in twelve years of following orders had anything stopped me dead like that.
I still don't know what I want from her. I’ve spent seven years telling myself I do. Told myself I had a plan. But the plan was always just: get to her. Get in the same room. Figure it the fuck out from there.
I have a contingency for everything. What to do if Webb refused my transfer.
What to do if the Order moved against her before I got out.
I've run every scenario. But I've never once been able to picture what happens after she opens her front door.
That's the part I can't script. That's the part that keeps me awake.
That's why it has to be her. It's always been her.
I sit on the edge of my narrow bunk, staring at the small photograph I've kept hidden from the guards all this time. It's not much: a newspaper clipping from a charity event she attended six months ago.
She's smiling in the photo, it's the radiant kind that transforms her entire face. The blue dress fits her perfectly, but all I can focus on is the gold flecks in her hazel eyes.
I told myself it was intelligence. That knowing her kept her alive. The truth is, I just couldn't stop.
For seven years I’ve been collecting these fragments.
Her research papers. Her theories on trauma.
The specific way she builds an argument in a lecture.
I’m going to use her own words to dismantle her.
I’ve built a version of her in my head, piece by piece, until I know her better than she knows herself.
Coffee, black, one sugar. Animal shelter on Saturdays.
She runs the Riverside Park route every Tuesday and Thursday, always pausing at the fountain because the lace on her left shoe never stays tied past the three-mile mark.
I don’t just know her schedule. I know the rhythm of it.
I know which cases frustrate her and which theories she’s trying to prove. Every emotional trigger mapped. I know because I've been watching. Even from prison, I've had eyes on her.
The Order's reach extends even into maximum security. Guards who owe favors, inmates with connections on the outside, lawyers who traffic information for the right price. I spent my first two years inside building a network, not for escape, but for surveillance.
Three months of phone cards bought me access to Harper, a hacker serving time for financial fraud.
His girlfriend on the outside owed money to people I knew.
She became my eyes and ears, following Ellie's routines; photographing her public appearances, gathering the information that fed my obsession.
Perez, the cell block trustee, had a cousin who worked maintenance at Ellie's office building. For the price of protection from the Cartwright Brothers, he made sure I knew her schedule, her habits, even which coffee shop she frequented.
The network is small and utterly invisible to prison authorities. They have no fucking clue I’ve built an intelligence operation from a six-by-eight cell. Each person knows only their place, never the full picture. But together, they gave me something more valuable than freedom. They gave me Ellie.
The rehabilitation program was a gift I hadn’t expected.
A new initiative, experimental, designed for high-risk offenders who showed potential for reform.
I learned about it through Harper’s girlfriend, who cleaned the offices of the review board.
She saw Ellie’s name on the intake schedule, listed as the lead clinical consultant.
That was all I needed. I didn’t care what the program was.
If it brought her to me, I’d make myself look reformed.
Step one was making myself the perfect candidate.
Two years of model behavior while the program was still in the sign-off period, attending therapy sessions, expressing the remorse I genuinely felt.
I learned to reveal just enough trauma to seem broken but not beyond repair.
Every session curated to look broken, not dangerous.
I built a version of myself designed to hook someone exactly like her.
Trauma from childhood abuse, check. Reluctant participation in violence, check.
Signs of genuine guilt and desire for redemption, check.
But ensuring she would be assigned to my case required more delicate work.
Dr. Mitchell, the board’s psychiatric consultant, owed Perez’s cousin a favor.
Something about a DUI that got buried. One conversation, one small push in the right direction.
“This Blackthorn case looks challenging. Might need someone with Dr. Hart’s specific expertise in violent trauma cases. ”
I even influenced the timing of inmates’ releases to make my application stand out. The Blackthorn name I’d made for myself opens doors, even behind bars. A word here, a favor there, clearing the field of competition.
The final thing was timing. I knew Ellie’s schedule through my network.
Knew when she finished her current case study.
Knew she had a gap in her research calendar.
A few whispered words from Mitchell to Webb about how this case could provide valuable data for her next paper, and suddenly I wasn’t just another convict.
I was a career opportunity. A stepping stone.
It took three months to orchestrate, but here we are. Every favor called in, every string pulled, every manipulation carefully executed to bring me to this moment.
I'm still thinking about her when a guard's voice cuts through my thoughts.
"Blackthorn. Visitor."