Prologue

The darkness had never felt so suffocating.

Emris stood in the shadows, her gaze unwavering as she watched the flicker of the streetlight above. It was raining—torrential, a downpour that mirrored the chaos inside her mind. She was waiting, the tension thick in the air, but it wasn't the hunt she was focused on. No, this was different. She could feel it in the pit of her stomach, like the cold metal of a blade pressed against her spine.

Remember your training, her instructor's voice echoed in her mind, cold and detached. Survival. Always survive.

Her hand gripped the hilt of a dagger, the familiar weight grounding her in the present. Yet her thoughts drifted. In moments like this, the past always clawed at her soul.

Five years old. The memory hit her like a slap to the face, uninvited but impossible to suppress.

She had been so young then—fragile, innocent. Not yet the assassin they had molded her into, not yet a brainwashed machine. She had been playing outside, running through the garden her mother had tended with such care. The sun had kissed her skin, and she had laughed—so unaware of the nightmare approaching.

Then, there had been screams.

Blood.

Everything had happened so fast—too fast for her to comprehend. She remembered the taste of smoke in the air, the warmth of her father's blood splattering across her face as he tried to shield her from the bullets. Her mother had screamed for her to run, but Emris had been frozen, too young to understand that it wasn't a game. The sound of their deaths had been deafening, the crack of gunfire forever etched into her bones.

Her body had been small and fragile, too soft to fight back, too naive to understand the world she was born into. She hadn't known what the Black Lotus or Hydra were. She hadn't known why she was marked for death.

But the moment those soldiers had stormed towards her, their dark eyes filled with malice, she'd known something had changed in her life, something she would never get back.

She had known, as she had been dragged away from the bodies of her parents, that she would never be the same.

The next time she saw daylight, it would be through the eyes of a murderer, a killing machine, an assassin: The Serpent.

She snapped back to the present, her hands trembling slightly as she tightened her grip on the dagger. The face of her target was already in her mind—cold, calculating. She had been tracking this one for days. He was connected to something that Mr.Dragunov did not appreciate, which is why I was sent. There was no room for mistakes, no room for weakness. The Black Lotus, Hydra, the Red Room—they were always watching. Always testing. Always waiting.

Survive. Kill. Move forward.

But there was a part of her, buried deep inside, that hated the woman she had become. Hated the fact that she could slip into the darkness so easily, her emotions locked away behind a wall of ice. The innocent child she had been before—the one who had loved and laughed—was long gone. And the anger that simmered inside of her, her fury towards the unfair world, was a fire that could not be extinguished.

A fire that sometimes roared so loudly, it drowned out everything else.

Emris had been trained to manipulate, to control, to break people with nothing but a look or a whisper. She could bend minds, cloud perceptions, and inflict pain without laying a single finger on someone. Her abilities had been honed to perfection, weapons more dangerous than any blade she carried.

And yet... she still had those dreams. Those memories that pulled her back to that moment, her parents' blood on her hands, the voices of the dead echoing in her mind. She couldn't escape it. No matter how many missions she'd completed, how many targets she'd eliminated, how many lies she'd buried in the recesses of her mind, that pain would always find her.