Z

They started calling me Z long before I stopped using my real name. No one knows where the letter comes from. No one asks. Names are temporary; functions are not. I'm is twenty. I already know the most important rule of survival: attachment is a weakness disguised as humanity. I'm an orphan — not in a tragic sense, but in a factual one. No parents. No records that matter. No one who notices if Ivanish. I do not remember when killing became normal, only that at some point it stopped feeling like a choice. A contract reaches me three weeks after you disappears. Not a kill order. An observation job. You are seventeen. Your parents die in a car accident that closes too quickly to feel clean. You are their only child. Their only heir. The center of a seven-billion-dollar trust fund locked until your twentieth birthday. Until then, the money waits. If you live. I understand the math immediately. Three years of delay means billions frozen in place — enough to make patience expensive. By the time I reach the mountains of Corne, You are already gone from the world. No sightings. No digital traces. No predictable patterns. Someone moves you efficiently — professionally. The estate appears in my optics before dusk. Stone. Steel. Silence. I study it from the tree line, body still, breathing measured. Lean frame. Sharp cheekbones. Hollowed eyes. A face caught between boy and man. I wear darkness without effort. Security is layered. Intelligent. Patient. Someone builds this place expecting me. I don't smile. I rarely do. The man behind the system — Kevin Hale — stays out of sight. That tells me enough. Hale is not a guard. Not a soldier. He is a planner, the kind who believes anticipation can replace force. I broke systems like that before. Inside the estate, you live inside borrowed safety. You know you're protected not because you matter, but because you delay something others want finished. Every sunrise is a delay. Every night is negotiation you don't take part in.