The rain in the Pacific Northwest wasn't weather; it was an accomplice. A relentless, hissing downpour that turned the world to mud and muffled sound. It was washing away evidence, not cleansing anything.
Kyon stood at the tree line, the rented Jeep's engine ticking as it cooled behind him. He hadn't called. He'd felt it—a tectonic shift in the foundation of his world, a silent scream across a thousand miles. He'd taken the first flight, driven the last four hours through the storm. Now, he stood frozen, the Phantom Reflex screaming not of threat, but of aftermath.
The cabin was dark. Not the cozy dark of sleep. A dead dark. Vance, the head of security, had missed three check-ins. The perimeter team's comms were silent static.
He moved, not like a boxer, but like a soldier advancing on a razed village. The mud sucked at his boots. He found the first one ten yards from the porch—a young ex-Marine named Cole. He was face down in a rhododendron bush. His neck was bent at an impossible angle. Not broken. Wrenched. The kind of torque that spoke of immense, practiced strength, of hands that knew how to kill beyond guns.
The cold in Kyon's chest was not fear. It was the precursor to a black hole.
He found the next two together, near the generator shed. They'd been executed, close range, but not with bullets. The crushed temples, the grotesque, sunken contours of their skulls, suggested a blunt instrument of terrifying force. A hammer. A pipe.
He was walking through a slaughterhouse.
He found Vance on the porch. The big man was seated in a rocking chair, as if taking a rest. But his head lolled back, staring at the rain-lashed roof. His mouth was open in a final, silent shout. A thin, black-handled knife was buried to the hilt in the hollow of his throat. A kill of intimate, contemptuous precision. A signature.
The door to the cabin was open, swinging slightly in the wind.
The smell hit him first. Copper, thick and cloying, mixed with the sickly-sweet odor of voided bowels, and underneath it all, the faint, floral scent of his mother's lavender detergent. The combination was violently wrong.
He stepped inside.
The world dissolved into a red haze.
The living room was a canvas of carnage. It wasn't a robbery, not a struggle. It was a composition. The furniture wasn't just overturned; it was pulverized. The books from her shelves were shredded, pages plastered to the walls with what looked like… jam? No. Viscera.
In the center of the room, arranged with a horrifying deliberateness on the coffee table, were three objects: Vance's severed thumb, a single, blue eye that could only have been Cole's, and a human tongue, laid out like sacred offerings.
Kyon's breath hitched, a ragged, animal sound. His vision tunneled, pulsed with his heartbeat. No. No. No.
"Mom?" The word was a dry croak, torn from a place deeper than his lungs.
He forced his legs to move, following the trail of bloody footprints—not hers, too large—toward the kitchen.
He saw her feet first, clad in the fuzzy pink socks he'd teased her about. They were splayed on the linoleum, perfectly still.
Then the rest of her came into view.
Eleanor Wilson was on her back. Her sweater—the cream-colored one he'd bought her—was rucked up to her chin, revealing the ruin of her torso. It wasn't a stabbing. It was a… dissection. Precise, vertical incisions, too clean for rage, had been made. Her ribs gleamed, pale and terrible, in the grey light from the window. Her organs, carefully, almost surgically displaced, lay beside her on the floor in a wet, glistening mound. Her heart, a dark purple lump, rested atop the pile.
But it was her face that shattered the last of him.
Her eyes were gone. Hollow, weeping sockets. In each socket, nestled with grotesque care, was a single, brass .45 caliber shell casing.
And her mouth… her mouth was stretched wide in a silent, eternal scream, crammed full of dirt and uprooted seedlings—petunias, he realized numbly, from the little starter pots on the windowsill. To purge a weed, one must poison the soil.
On the counter beside her, held down by a river stone, was the familiar cream-colored paper.
The soil is now sanctified. The weed will wither. -V
Kyon did not collapse. He did not scream. Every sound, every sensation, was sucked into the void opening inside him. He heard a distant, high-pitched ringing, the sound of a nervous system tearing itself apart. He tasted copper and bile. He saw the room in strobes of awful clarity: the delicate pattern of her ruined sweater, the way the rain beaded on the window just inches from her outstretched hand, the terrifying neatness of the horror.
This wasn't a killing. It was a lesson. A statement written in flesh and bone and soil. They hadn't just murdered his mother. They had unmade her. They had turned her into a grotesque manifesto against him.
A pressure built behind his eyes, a tectonic agony. He stumbled back, his shoulder hitting the doorframe. His gaze fell on the bloody footprints leading out the back. One set. Large. Confident.
The world snapped into a single, crystalline point of purpose. The ringing in his ears became a mantra. Find. Kill.
He moved. He wasn't thinking. He was a projectile launched from the heart of a nightmare. He followed the prints out the back, across the muddy clearing, into the treeline. The rain was washing them away, but not fast enough.
He ran. Branches lashed his face. He didn't feel them. The cold ember of his strategic fury was gone, replaced by a white-hot star of pure, annihilating id.
He burst into a small logging clearing. And there he was.
A man. Standing calmly in the rain, his back to Kyon, looking out at the valley as if admiring the view. He was huge, easily 6'5", with a frame that was less muscle and more like stacked granite. He wore simple, dark, wet-weather gear. In one hand, he held a long, heavy forestry hatchet. The blade was dark and wet.
He turned slowly. His face was ordinary, forgettable. Mid-forties. Clean-shaven. His eyes were the color of a winter pond. There was no malice in them. No excitement. Only a profound, empty professionalism. This was the Gardener. This was the tool.
"Mr. Wilson," the man said, his voice calm, almost polite. "I was told you might come. You were not the objective. But you are a… complicating factor."
Kyon didn't speak. Language was dead. Sound was dead. There was only the image of his mother's hollow eyes, the feel of her cold hand in his memory, and the shape of the man in front of him.
He charged.
It was not a boxing move. It was a tackle, a feral, weight-driven lunge. The man moved with shocking speed for his size, sidestepping and bringing the hatchet handle around in a short, vicious arc. It cracked against Kyon's temple.
Lights exploded behind Kyon's eyes. He stumbled, his footing lost in the mud. The world tilted. The man didn't press. He reset, watching.
Kyon rose, shaking his head. Blood mingled with rain on his face. He charged again, this time feinting a wild right hand before diving for the legs. The man anticipated, bringing his knee up. It caught Kyon in the sternum, driving the air from his lungs with a sickening whump.
Kyon rolled in the mud, gasping. He was a world champion, a destroyer of men in a ring with rules and gloves. This was different. This was raw, utilitarian violence. The man was a mechanic of death.
"You are emotional," the man observed, pacing slowly. "It makes you predictable. Weak. This is why you were never a true threat. You are an animal. We are architects."
Kyon got to his knees, his lungs burning. The words filtered through the red haze. Architects. They had architected what was in the kitchen. The rage crystallized into something even more dangerous: a focused, homicidal clarity.
He stood. He didn't charge. He adopted his stance. Shoulders down. Hands up. The phantom of his discipline clawing its way back.
The man almost smiled. "Better."
He swung the hatchet in a tight, efficient chop. Kyon slipped it, the blade whistling past his ear. He fired a jab. It landed on the man's jaw. It felt like hitting a brick wall. The man didn't flinch. He reversed his grip on the hatchet and slammed the poll-end into Kyon's ribs.
A sharp, wet crack. Agony. A rib, maybe two.
Kyon grunted, backing away, his breath coming in ragged, pained hitches. The man advanced, a relentless, patient force. He wasn't trying to knock Kyon out. He was systematically breaking him down, as he had broken down the security, as he had broken down Eleanor.
Find. Kill. The mantra was still there, but it was being drowned in a sea of pain and growing helplessness.
Kyon tried a combination—jab, cross, left hook to the body. The man absorbed the shots on his forearms, his expression unchanged. He retaliated with a short, powerful shove that sent Kyon sprawling into the mud again.
Kyon's head swam. The rain pounded down. He could hear his own heartbeat thudding in his ears, a frantic, failing drum. He saw flashes—the shell casings in her eyes, the petunias in her mouth. A sob of pure, impotent rage tore from his throat.
The man stood over him, hatchet held loosely. "It is done. The message is delivered. Wither, Mr. Wilson. Or we will find the new soil you try to root in, and we will salt that too."
He turned to walk away. Dismissing him. A completed chore.
Something in Kyon's mind, stretched to its breaking point, snapped. Not into madness, but into a memory. A primitive, brutal memory from the orphanage. A bigger boy. A brick. A moment of no technique, no art, only survival.
As the man took his second step, Kyon's hand closed around a half-buried rock in the mud. He didn't stand. He lunged from his knees, a desperate, uncoordinated thrust, and drove the jagged edge of the rock into the back of the man's knee.
The man roared, more in surprise than pain, and stumbled. It was enough. Kyon was on him, no longer a boxer, but a savage. He wrapped an arm around the man's thick neck from behind, sinking a rear-naked choke. The man dropped the hatchet, his hands coming up to claw at Kyon's arm. He was stronger, far stronger. He began to pry the arm loose.
Kyon saw the hatchet in the mud. He released the choke, snatched it, and with a wordless scream that ripped his throat raw, he buried the blade in the side of the man's neck.
It wasn't a clean kill. The man gurgled, a fountain of arterial blood erupting, hot and shocking in the cold rain. He thrashed, his hands grasping at the embedded steel. Kyon, kneeling on his back, held the handle, driving it deeper, twisting. He watched the life leave those winter-pond eyes, watched the professional calm replaced by the primal shock of the architect becoming the rubble.
When the man finally went still, Kyon didn't let go. He stayed there, kneeling in the churned, bloody mud, the rain washing over them both. The white-hot star of his rage dimmed, leaving behind a vast, scorched emptiness. He had found. He had killed.
And it meant nothing.
His mother was still in the kitchen. The message was still delivered. The void inside him wasn't filled; it was now a cavern, echoing with the sounds of hatchet blows and gurgling breaths and a silent scream full of dirt and flowers.
He stood, leaving the hatchet where it was. He looked at his hands, covered in mud and another man's life. He started to shake. Not from cold. From a shock so deep it was rearranging his molecules.
He stumbled back to the cabin. He couldn't go inside. He stood on the porch, looking at Vance's corpse, listening to the rain on the roof. The high-pitched ringing was back, now a permanent tenant in his skull.
He took out his phone. His hands were trembling so violently he could barely dial.
Lena answered on the first ring. "Kyon? What's wrong?"
He tried to speak. Only a cracked, broken sound came out. He tried again, forcing the words through a throat lined with ground glass.
"They… they… Mom…" He couldn't say it. The images were seared onto the back of his eyelids. "Send police. Send… cleaners. The cabin. It's… it's all red."
"Kyon, what happened? Are you hurt?"
"There's a body. In the woods. I killed him." The words were flat, factual. "He killed her. He… he…"
A wave of nausea hit him. He vomited over the porch railing, heaving until there was nothing left but acid and agony.
"Oh, God," Lena whispered, understanding dawning in her horror. "Don't move. Don't touch anything. I'm calling it in. I'm coming. Just… breathe, Kyon."
But breathing was the problem. Every breath brought the smell. Every heartbeat pounded the images deeper. The artistry of the violence. The message. They hadn't just broken his heart. They had broken his mind. They had shown him a horror so profound it had rewired him, replacing the circuitry of ambition and anger with a single, smoking fuse labeled REVENGE.
And at the end of that fuse was no longer just Orlov.
It was The Consortium.
It was the garden.
It was every root, every branch, every hand that had ever touched a tool.
He slid down the wall of the cabin, sitting next to Vance's corpse, and waited in the rain. The champion was gone. The monster was gone. All that was left was a scarred, hollow vessel with one purpose, and a brain that now hummed with a terrible, familiar, and permanent ringing—the first, true bell of CTE, tolling for the man he used to be, and heralding the brutal, unstoppable force he would have to become.