The Villain Who Wanted To Be Loved

The first thing they gave me wasn't your name.

It was your price.

Enough gold to buy castles.

Enough to feed generations.

Enough to make decent men forget mercy.

I wasn't a decent man.

I was pleased.

By then, I'd spent years earning the name they whispered whenever someone disappeared.

The Reaper.

Kings hired me when they wanted people found.

Noblemen hired me when they wanted people delivered.

Families prayed I'd never learn their names.

Because once I found someone...

They never came home again.

I never wondered what happened after I handed someone over.

That wasn't my job.

I simply caught them.

That's what I told myself.

But men like me don't earn names like The Reaper by pretending they don't know where people end up.

I've watched mothers beg for another chance.

Watched fathers empty everything they owned onto the ground at my feet.

Watched children scream until they lost their voices.

None of it ever stopped me.

The coin always found its way into my pocket.

And I always walked away.

Until your contract landed on my table.

An immortal.

Not a rumor.

Not a bedtime story told to frightened children.

You.

The bounty attached to your name was unlike anything I'd ever seen.

I accepted before the messenger finished speaking.

Not because of the gold.

Because I wanted my name attached to the impossible.

The first hunter to catch someone no one else ever could.

I'd heard stories about your kind.

You never stayed anywhere for long.

Never celebrated two birthdays in the same town.

Never let friendships grow into something harder to leave.

Every few years...

You disappeared.

Leaving behind nothing but stories.

A woman who never seemed to grow older.

A traveler who knew roads that no longer existed.

Someone who spoke about places swallowed by the sea as though she'd only visited them yesterday.

People called you a ghost.

I called you predictable.

Eventually...

Everyone gets tired.

Everyone slows down.

Everyone makes one mistake.

I was convinced yours would be trusting the wrong person.

I just didn't know it was going to be me.

After months of following stories that always ended a village too late...

Luck finally favored me.

A nobleman in the north had offered shelter to a woman traveling alone.

A warm room.

A hot meal.

A library large enough to make anyone stay longer than they should.

You accepted.

Maybe because you were tired.

Maybe because after centuries of running...

You wanted to pretend you belonged somewhere.

Three nights later...

I climbed over the estate walls.

Capturing you should've been easy.

Study your routine.

Wait.

Strike.

Disappear before sunrise.

That's how every hunt ended.

Only...

I made the one mistake every hunter swears he'll never make.

I watched.

Watching you became far more dangerous than capturing you.

At first, I told myself it was strategy.

Every hunter studies their prey.

The longer I watched...

The fewer mistakes I'd make.

That's what I believed.

Until I started learning things that had nothing to do with the hunt.

You always reached for the oldest books first.

Not because they were rare.

Because you'd read them before.

Sometimes you'd smile at a page.

Sometimes...

You'd stop reading altogether.

Your fingers would rest between the pages as your eyes drifted somewhere far beyond the library walls.

I wondered what memory had found you.

One afternoon I asked if it was your favorite book.

You shook your head.

You'd simply known the man who wrote it.

You said it so casually...

As though you hadn't just reminded me you'd watched generations come and go while you stayed exactly the same.

For the first time...

Your immortality didn't sound extraordinary.

It sounded lonely.

You wandered the gardens the same way.

Stopping beside flowers that had only bloomed a handful of seasons.

Smiling at them anyway.

As though you knew beauty didn't have to last forever to matter.

You told me once there had been a village beyond the eastern woods.