Chapter 1

I’m a top assassin.

Three years ago, on a rainy night, I was being hunted when a stranger took a bullet for me. As he lay dying, he grabbed my hand and begged me to protect his son—and to keep living in his place.

To escape my pursuers and keep that promise, I changed my face, took his identity, and stayed by the boy’s side as his father.

His wife was arrogant, cruel, and constantly cheating. For the child—and to protect my cover—I endured all of it.

Until today.

She drugged me.

When I woke up, a doctor was holding a blade over my chest. They were about to take my heart.

Lying on that operating table, I finally learned the truth: her family had been trafficking organs all along.

That man died three years ago because he discovered it, and she arranged the crash that killed him.

She murdered the man who saved me. Now she wants to kill me too.

She still thinks I’m the same weak doctor who gets out of breath after a short run.

She doesn’t know I’m resistant to anesthesia.

And she definitely doesn’t know these hands have held scalpels—and snapped far too many necks.

————

When I woke up, the first thing I felt wasn’t pain.

It was restraint.

My wrists and ankles were strapped down tight, the belts biting into my skin.

I didn’t open my eyes. Instead, I let my awareness move slowly through my body.

My throat was dry and raw. The back of my tongue tasted bitter. My nose was full of disinfectant. My chest felt like a stone had been set on top of it, and even breathing came with a heavy drag.

It didn’t take long for me to figure it out.

I’d been drugged. A strong anesthetic, and not a small dose either.

An ordinary man wouldn’t come back this fast.

His heartbeat would slow. His muscles would lag. His mind would feel like it was sunk in warm water, too dull to form a full sentence, let alone judge his surroundings.

But I wasn’t ordinary.

For years, injury, sedation, painkillers, anesthesia—those had all been part of the job. I’d built up resistance to the standard stuff a long time ago. With the same dose, I always woke earlier than most people. I recovered faster, too.

I didn’t struggle right away. I adjusted my breathing first.

I made it shallow, keeping the rise and fall of my chest to a minimum so I still looked unconscious. I had only just woken up. My strength hadn’t fully come back yet, and I had no idea what kind of place I was in. I needed to conserve what I had.

The darkness around me was quiet. Too quiet.

There was only the faint electric hum of medical equipment. Somewhere above me, not far away, a lamp was hanging. Even with my eyes closed, I could feel the light pressing down.

It felt like an operating room.

But not one in a real hospital.

There were no footsteps from a nurses’ station. No low voices from worried family members. No elevator chime. Nothing.

I started dragging my memory back, piece by piece.

A few years ago, my name was still Kane Walker.

That name was inconvenient in a lot of places, especially on any official document.

I used to be a mercenary. After I retired, I became something else—a lone cleaner. Some people paid to have me show up. Others paid to make sure I disappeared. I’d done more work for more dangerous men than most people could imagine, and I’d seen more blood and betrayal than most ever would.

Then one day, I became the target.

Bounties. Surveillance. Ambushes.

They followed me from overseas all the way back home. I changed routes, changed safehouses, changed contacts, but the hunt never stopped. Back then, every morning I woke up with my hand reaching for a gun, and every night I slept only after checking every exit. I lived like a wolf trapped in a shrinking cage.

The night everything changed, it was raining.

The roads were bad. Visibility was less than half of normal.

I’d already shaken the men behind me and was preparing to leave the city when I heard the impact around the bend ahead. A black sedan shot sideways through the guardrail, scraped along the roadside, flipped, and slammed hard into a tree.

Its headlights were still on. The wipers were still moving. But the front end had been crushed beyond recognition.

My first instinct wasn’t to save anyone.

It was to scan the area.

That was habit. First check whether it was a trap. Then decide whether to move in.

Only after I confirmed there wasn’t a second vehicle nearby, and no gunmen waiting in ambush, did I approach.

The man in the driver’s seat was already dying.

He was bleeding from the chest and abdomen, but his eyes were still unnervingly clear.

Later, I learned his name was Evan Cole.

A doctor.

The kind of man who should never have crossed paths with someone like me.

The crash had nothing to do with me.

And yet, that night, he was the one who saved my life.

I had barely pulled open the car door when I heard motorcycles approaching from the distance. Three of them. Helmets on. Guns out.

I hadn’t even had time to back away before the first bullet shattered the windshield.

The men hunting me had arrived at exactly the wrong time.

Evan barely had any strength left, but he still reacted on instinct. He lunged toward me and shoved me down.

The second shot grazed past his shoulder.

The third punched straight into his side.

I dragged him behind the wreck and used the overturned frame of the car for cover long enough to draw my gun and take out the bikers.

By the time the gunfire stopped, the rain had washed the road into a sheet of black glass. Blood ran across it in thin red streams, slipping beneath the tires and down the slope.

Evan was slumped against the car door, breathing in broken pulls, his face white as paper.

He knew he wasn’t going to live.

He didn’t waste time asking who I was, or when the cops would come. He just gripped my hand like it was the last solid thing left in the world.

“I have a son,” he said, his throat thick with blood, his voice barely holding together. “Noah... don’t let him... don’t let him...”

I said nothing. I just looked at him.

He seemed to have too much he wanted to say and no strength left to say any of it.

In the end, he only managed one sentence.

“Take care of him.”

That night, the real Evan Cole died.

And I lived.

I could have walked away.

I didn’t.

Part of it was because he had taken a bullet meant for me. The other part was because my own identity was already ruined beyond repair. If I kept moving under the name Kane Walker, the people hunting me would simply follow me to the next place.

Evan was dead.

But he had left me two things: a clean identity, and a child who needed someone to protect him.

Before I made my move, I investigated Evan Cole.

He was a doctor, and his background was almost too clean to be useful. Orphan. Medical school on scholarships. A clear work history. A small social circle. Very few close relatives. No one likely to suddenly step in and say, “That’s not how he used to be.”

He had a wife and a son, but the marriage wasn’t close.

More importantly, Victoria had a long-term lover. Whatever marriage existed between her and Evan had already rotted long before I arrived.

That suited me fine.

It meant I wouldn’t need too much close contact with her. It meant I wouldn’t have to act out intimacy every day. And it made slipping into his life far easier.

What came next was simple.

And absolute.

I cleaned up the scene. I arranged the story. I severed every trail that might suggest Kane Walker was still alive.

Then I changed my face, my records, everything I could touch.

I turned myself into Evan Cole.

During recovery from the surgery, my entire face was wrapped in bandages. I stayed in the hospital under the excuse that I needed time to recover from the crash.

The story released to the public was straightforward: another man had died in the car accident, while Evan had survived by sheer luck—badly injured, needing time to heal, and suffering from partial memory loss after head trauma.

Amnesia was the most convenient explanation.

It gave me a clean excuse to forget old coworkers, old habits, old details. It made the changes in my behavior less suspicious.

For the past three years, I had lived as Evan.

I quit the hospital under the excuse of lingering effects from the accident. I learned his way of speaking to deal with outsiders, to deal with Victoria. And I learned what a father was supposed to be so I could raise Noah the way Evan would have wanted.

At first, the boy was quiet.

He didn’t speak much. Whenever he looked at someone, there was always caution in his eyes, as if he’d already learned to judge whether it was safe before getting close.

Then, slowly, he started to trust me.

He would knock on my door when nightmares woke him in the middle of the night. He would slip crooked little drawings from school into my hand. If I came home late, I’d find him sitting on the couch, waiting.

I had promised Evan I’d take care of him.

For three years, I had kept that promise.

As for Victoria...

The last thing I remembered was the two of us sitting at the breakfast table. I drank the coffee she handed me, and then I blacked out.

When I regained consciousness, I was here.

I was certain Victoria had drugged me.

I just didn’t know why yet.

I tested my fingers again.

Better than before. The drug was wearing off. Not enough for real strength, but enough to tell me it wouldn’t last forever.

I pushed down the impulse to keep testing.

Right now, proving I could move wasn’t the priority. The priority was making sure the people outside still believed I couldn’t.

Then I heard it.

A soft swipe of a card outside the door.

A brief electronic beep.

The next second, the lock clicked open, and the sharp rhythm of high heels struck the floor.

A sound I heard every day.

Victoria walked in.