The following evening, Adrian sat in his car across from the shelter again, the glow of the streetlamp painting his profile in pale light. He had been here every night since receiving the assignment, and though the job should have been routine, he found himself lingering longer than necessary.
Through the windshield he watched Elena Moretti move between the tables, refilling cups of soup, smiling at people whose names she seemed to know by heart. A man coughed violently in the corner, his frame shaking with sickness, and Elena crouched beside him without hesitation, pressing a hand to his back, murmuring something softly until his breathing steadied.
Adrian leaned back in his seat, fingers drumming once against the steering wheel. The gesture was small, almost invisible, but it betrayed what he felt inside. Unease.
He was not supposed to hesitate. Not after everything Vincent Russo had drilled into him.
Vincent's voice rose unbidden in his memory, sharp and cutting, the way it had been when Adrian was just a boy. "The world doesn't care about you, Kane. People don't save strays. They put them down. You want to survive, you learn to be harder than all of them. You learn to kill before they kill you."
Adrian closed his eyes and let the memory pull him back, as it always did when doubt threatened to claw its way in.
He had been twelve the night the fire swallowed his home. His father was long gone by then, a name he could not even picture, and his mother had worked herself into exhaustion trying to keep food on the table. When the flames consumed the building, Adrian was left with nothing but the smoke in his lungs and the sound of his mother's screams fading into silence.
He remembered stumbling through the streets afterward, coughing, starving, unwanted. The city was merciless to orphans. People stepped around him as though he were trash left rotting on the curb. Days blurred into weeks, hunger gnawed at him until he thought it might hollow him out completely.
Then came Vincent.
The man had found him huddled behind a dumpster one winter night, half-frozen, a rusted knife clutched in his shaking hands. Adrian had expected a beating, maybe death. Instead, Vincent crouched before him, his sharp eyes glittering beneath the brim of his hat.
"You've got the look," Vincent had said. "The look of someone who's lost everything, which means you've got nothing to fear losing again. That's the kind of boy who can be made into something useful."
From that night, Adrian became Vincent's shadow. The older man fed him, clothed him, gave him shelter. But every kindness came at a cost. Vincent's lessons were merciless. He taught Adrian to fight, to stalk, to shoot. He broke down any trace of softness, replacing it with precision and obedience.
Adrian had killed his first man at fifteen. The memory was as clear as glass. A rival who had crossed the family, drunk and stumbling out of a bar. Vincent had pressed the gun into Adrian's hand, his grip firm around the boy's wrist.
"Pull the trigger," Vincent whispered. "Or I'll pull it for you."
Adrian had pulled it. The sound was deafening in his ears, but afterward Vincent clapped him on the back and said, "Good. You'll never starve again."
And Vincent had been right. Adrian had risen quickly, his reputation growing with each assignment until he was no longer the boy who had lost everything. He was the weapon the family relied on, the one who never failed.
Yet now, watching Elena laugh with the children, Adrian felt that old fracture widening. The boy who once begged for scraps had never entirely disappeared. He was buried beneath layers of blood and steel, but he stirred when he saw someone offer kindness freely.
A soft knock startled him from his thoughts. Adrian's hand slid to the pistol at his side before he saw the source. A man in ragged clothes stood at his window, palm pressed against the glass.
"Spare some change?" the man asked, his voice rough.
Adrian's instinct was to ignore him, to remain stone, but his eyes flicked toward the shelter. Elena was standing at the door, waving the man over with a smile, calling out that dinner was still being served.
The beggar shuffled away from Adrian's car toward her, and for reasons he could not name, Adrian felt relief.
He started the engine, though he did not drive off. Instead, he followed Elena's movements with the same precision he always did, noting her path, the way she carried herself, the moments when she was alone and most vulnerable. Professional habits warred with something heavier inside him.
That night, back at his apartment, Adrian opened the folder again. Vincent's words rang in his head like a drumbeat. No hesitation. No weakness.
But the photo of Elena seemed to defy those words. She did not fit the pattern, and for the first time in years, Adrian began to question if Vincent had been wrong.
He lit a cigarette, though he rarely smoked, and let the bitter taste linger on his tongue. He thought of the first time he had met Moretti, years ago, when the politician had been little more than a local lawyer trying to keep his neighborhood from being swallowed by corruption. Adrian had been a starving boy then, stealing bread from a market. He remembered being grabbed by the shopkeeper, dragged through the street, beaten until he could barely breathe.
And then Moretti had appeared. The man had crouched, spoken gently, and told the shopkeeper to let him go. He had even paid for the bread. "The boy is hungry," Moretti had said. "Not a thief. Let him be."
Adrian had run away that night, never speaking to the man again. But he had never forgotten the look in Moretti's eyes. A look that said some people did not see strays as trash.
Perhaps that was why he could not lift the gun now. Perhaps that was why Elena's smile burned in his mind even after he closed the folder.
Adrian crushed the cigarette into the ashtray and leaned back in his chair. His life had been carved by Vincent's hand, each scar a reminder that mercy was weakness. But Moretti's kindness had left a scar too, one that had never fully healed.
And now it was returning in the shape of Elena Moretti, his target.
The perfect killer was beginning to crack.
The clock on Adrian's wall ticked past midnight, its sound steady and merciless. He had not turned on the lights, preferring the shadows that clung to the corners of the apartment. The silence pressed in on him, heavy and suffocating, until he poured himself a glass of whiskey just to hear the faint crack of ice.
He sat at the table with the glass untouched, staring at the closed folder. Vincent's voice echoed again in his head, as real as if the man were sitting across from him. "The only loyalty that matters is to the family. You start thinking about people as people, Kane, and you won't last a week."
Adrian had believed that for years. He had built his reputation on that belief. And yet, when he thought of Elena, he did not see a target. He saw a woman who laughed at children's jokes, who touched the sick without fear, who carried herself with the quiet stubbornness of someone who believed the world could be better.
The contradiction gnawed at him. Vincent had raised him to kill the softness in himself, but Elena had unknowingly resurrected it with a smile.
Adrian rose abruptly, pacing the length of the room. His instincts screamed that this hesitation would destroy him. If he failed the assignment, the family would not forgive him. Marco would send men after him, and Vincent himself might come to finish the job.
He stopped by the window, staring out at the city's sprawl of lights. Somewhere beyond those streets, Elena was sleeping, perhaps unaware that death had been circling her for days. The thought unsettled him more than it should have.
He pressed a hand to the glass, cool against his skin. A choice lay before him, sharper than any blade he had carried. Kill Elena Moretti and remain the perfect weapon, or spare her and betray the only family he had ever known.
Neither path offered peace. Both demanded blood.
His eyes lingered on the horizon until the first pale traces of dawn began to creep into the sky. The whiskey glass sat untouched on the table, the folder unopened but not put away.
Adrian Kane, the mafia's most feared hitman, was standing at the edge of a decision that would change everything.
And as the city stirred awake, he realized that for the first time in his life, he was afraid.