I became the villain the system needed

Cains P.O.V

I should have died tonight.

I know that the way you know things, the kind of knowing that has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with the fact that you woke up when you shouldn't have. The river should have kept me. The bullet Marcus put in my chest should have made sure of it. Instead I was face-down in the mud on the south bank of the Crest River at four in the morning, coughing up black water and convincing my lungs to remember what they were for.

For a long moment I didn't move because Everything hurt badly and The cold was worse than the pain. The kind of cold that gets under your skin and sits there like it's deciding whether to kill you or just make you wish it had.

I rolled onto my back and stared at the sky looking at orange smear of the city's light against low clouds, and the distant sound of traffic on the Crest Street bridge. New Crest never really goes quiet. Even at four in the morning there's a hum to it. I'd always found it comforting before but onight it sounded annoying.

I pressed two fingers to my chest and found the wound. The bullet had gone clean through, it missed anything vital, which was either luck or Marcus being careless, and Marcus had never been careless a day in his life. Which meant I was either the luckiest dead man in the city, or something else had happened in that river that I didn't have words for yet.

I sat up slowly to take in my surroundings.

No phone. No weapon. No wallet. My jacket was gone probably stripped off by the current or by whoever threw me in, I didn't know. I had a shirt that was more mud than fabric, trousers that weighed three times what they should, and a pair of boots that had somehow stayed on my feet through all of the chaos.

I looked at my hands. They were shaking either from cold or blood loss, I couldn't tell. I pressed them flat against my thighs and breathed until they stopped.

Ten years. I had given that family ten years of my life. I had bled for them. I had buried things for them and I don't mean that metaphorically. I had made problems disappear at two in the morning and shown up to Sunday dinner the next day like a normal person, because that's what you do when you're loyal to someone. You carry what they need you to carry. You become what they need you to become. And you tell yourself it means something, because if it doesn't mean something then you've just been spending yourself on nothing.

Marcus Devereaux had looked me in the eye tonight and pulled the trigger.

He hadn't even looked sorry.

That was the part that had hurt me the most, The fact that he'd met my eyes while he did it, and there had been nothing there.

I had meant nothing to him.

I became aware of the voice in my head slowly. It wasn't exactly sound,more like a pressure at the back of my skull, a low vibration that turned into something structured. Something almost like language.

Then it sharpened and I heard it clearly.

LEDGER OF DEBTS : ACTIVATED.

Welcome, Cain Devereaux. Your first entry has been logged.

I stared at nothing for a moment, trying to decide whether I was hallucinating or if my horrendous coffee intake had finally caught up with me.

Then I looked down at my hands, because that seemed like the reasonable thing to do, and there it was,hovering at the edge of my vision like something projected onto the inside of my eyes. It looked like a panel with clean lines. Deep red text on black. This was definitely not a hallucination, or at least not the kind I recognised.

DEBT ONE: Marcus Devereaux. Classification: Betrayal (Lethal). Debt Value: ★★★★★. Status: Open.

Collect this debt to unlock your next evolution.

I read it twice.

Then I laughed, not because it was funny but because what else do you do when you're sitting in river mud with a bullet hole in your chest and a supernatural ledger listing the names of everyone who's wronged you?

I pushed myself to my feet. It took longer than I would have liked and hurt more than I showed, even though there was no one to show it to.

The city blinked at me across the water and somewhere up there in the forty-second floor of the Harrow building, Marcus Devereaux was probably having a drink. Probably relaxing. Probably feeling the particular satisfaction of a man who has neatly resolved a complication.

He thought I was settled. He thought the river had filed me away.

I looked at the panel still hovering at the edge of my vision. Looked at his name, printed there in clean red letters, a star rating like a debt in an old account book.

Collect this debt.

Yeah. I intended to.

But not tonight. Tonight I needed to get warm, get dry, get the wound closed before infection set in and did what the bullet hadn't managed. Tonight I needed to find somewhere the city couldn't see me and start thinking clearly, because thinking clearly was the only thing I had left and I wasn't going to waste it on rushing.

Marcus had ten years of my loyalty and a head start.

I had time. I had patience. And apparently I had a System that had decided, that the debts owed to Cain Devereaux were worth collecting.

I turned away from the river and I started walking.