Death never haunted me. I’d been trained to watch it, clean it, and catalog it.

But his memories in the aftermath were louder than any dying scream.

The gray sky held the kind of chill that didn’t touch your skin so much as seep through it, nestled in your ribs, and sucked in your lungs. My chunky combat boots crunched slowly on the dirt along the uneven gravel path, the cemetery extending around me until I couldn't see anything but death. Only death.

There were no other visitors. Just the wind threading itself through the skeletal branches above and the squish of my boots over wet shrubs and half-dead grass. I didn’t need directions anymore. I’d made this walk fifty eight times since he died—thrice a week, without fail. Because I thought the routine could shape the silence into closure.

It couldn't.

The cemetery gate sagged on its hinges and screeched when I pushed it open—metal on metal, long unserved, then swung closed behind me slowly, as though the place knew how to keep its own. Rows of slate markers leaned slightly left or right. Lichen scrawled over names no one remembered. The flowers on most of the graves had wilted weeks ago, withered petals curled inward, and long forgotten.

I hated this place.

Not because it reminded me of death. But because it pretended to remember it.

They make promises they never intend to keep. They say: he mattered. They say: this piece of stone will carry him when your memory forgets. But the truth is that the stone forgets faster than the living do. It weathers unlike the memories.

I slowly tiptoed across the burials because if I stopped, it meant he really was gone. And I wasn’t ready for that kind of ending, not for now at least.

Stuffing my hands in my trench coat pockets as I walked, my fingertips brushed against the edge of the USB drive I’d brought. Just touching it gave me a sense of balance.

It wasn’t a keepsake. It was a canary—preloaded with a booby-trapped document that phones home over a quiet DNS pattern and a beacon that only lights if someone mounts the drive. A coin-cell and a thumb-sized microcontroller kept the rig alive in the cold.

The wind had picked up, swaying the hem of my coat, and for a second, I imagined I could hear his voice carried in it—half a joke, something careless and charming that used to make me smile without thinking.

But the memory stopped short. Just static after the first syllable. Just like my grief had begun to. Yet the aftertaste of vengeance was still there.

I passed a marble angel with its face eroded smooth and wondered if that was better than a face that lasted. At least this way, it didn’t have to lie about who it used to be.

The path curved left. I kept my eyes grounded beneath me, my body already having memorized the route.

I hadn’t cried in months. Not because I didn’t want to. But because I didn’t trust what would come out if I started. I’d buried him the same way I buried every operation I’d ever run— compartmentalized and untraceable.

But he wasn’t an asset. He was Howard. Five years. One apartment. One life. And one fucking line in a coroner’s report that told me he was nothing but an entry.

Death by remote intrusion. Cause: system breach. Initial trace flagged one name—Felix Hart. A weak packet signature. But it was an echo, not a confession. Enough for VIREX to close the case, but not enough for me to believe it.

I had repeated those lines to myself every morning, like a litany.

My feet stopped a few feet short and just stared. I always did this — waited for the punch. The punch never came. I wasn’t sure if that meant I was numb or just done pretending to feel anything for marble and dirt.

The cemetery had quieted around me. No crows, no wind, just the faint creak of branches overhead like brittle bones stretching. I inhaled deeply and it hit the back of my throat — the smell of frost and faint decay, of things forgotten and things pretending not to be.

His name was carved deep, pristine as ever.

Howard E. Reeve
1989–2024
Systems Architect. Loyal Until the End.

Right.

I stood there, hands still in my coat pockets, watching that lie gleam under the overcast sky. "Loyal until the end" — my idea. It sounded virtuous when I picked it, back when grief was still fresh and I needed something positive to hold onto. But now? Now it read like a joke. Like he’d fooled me one last time and made me pay to etch it in stone.

I crouched, not reverently, my legs just felt jittery from the overwhelm.

“This is starting to feel one-sided, you know.”

My voice came out hoarse, quieter than I intended. Not that it mattered. If Howard ever did listen, he never told me what he heard.

I brushed some dried pine needles off the corner of the headstone. It was habit more than anything else. A pointless kindness for a man who may have been keeping something from me — or protecting me from something I wasn’t meant to know.

But I couldn’t let go. I had unfinished business, and his name was stamped all over it.

I reached into my coat and pulled out the USB drive. Another breadcrumb. Another clue. Another notch in the long, brutal process of killing a ghost that didn’t want to stay dead. Or maybe it was just a slow undoing of a man I’d once thought I knew — and still wanted to believe in.

The coldness of the metal seeped under my skin. Just like him.

“I’ve got something new. Berlin IPs. Private subnet. The encryption style mirrors Hart’s but it’s messy, and a bit… rushed. If it’s him, he’s slipping. If it’s not, someone’s working real hard to make it look like he is.”

I left the USB where it always lived—behind the cracked vase, the one the groundsman never fixed. Routine is a better lure than novelty. Its cheap plastic casing was scratched and faded, but the slow blink from the battery-backed status LED still pulsed—one flash every twelve seconds by design. It wasn’t decoration; it was an invitation to anyone patient enough to notice.

The contents were theater. The only thing that mattered was the touch—the mount event, the resolver’s fingerprint, the route they’d take back to wherever they felt safest.

I knew exactly what I’d loaded: a tamper-proof canary file, a decoy archive to make them greedy, and telemetry stitched to a sandboxed endpoint. I didn’t know who would touch it. That was the point.

“I’ll find him. I’ll gut the truth out of him. And when I’m done, I’ll burn every version of him that ever touched my life.” I stared unseeingly at the mound of soil over his grave.

I bent back on my heels, elbows on my knees, the cool wind scraping past my jaw. My eyes burned, but not enough to cry. I hadn’t cried since the autopsy, perhaps because I didn’t know which part of me was supposed to mourn.

The truth was, something about the whole thing never added up.

Howard wasn’t supposed to be home the day he died. He had a flight, a briefing, an airtight routine. And yet… he was there. Logged in. In my system. Using credentials that should’ve been impossible to access. I’ve rewritten the timeline a thousand times in my head, trying to make it make sense. He probably must’ve had a reason. He had to.

I didn’t tell VIREX. Not all of it. They saw a breach and a dead body and checked their boxes. I saw a fracture. One I didn’t know how to fix. One I didn’t know whether to forgive.

And then I saw Felix Hart’s name crawl up the flagged report. The man they think killed him. Or the man someone wants us to think did.

Something was off. Has been off for months. And my gut — the one part of me that hadn’t been fully dissected by my moping — kept whispering the same thing:

Howard’s death wasn’t random.

And Felix Hart wasn't running. He’s playing chess—or someone was, and he’s the most convenient name on the board.

I stood slowly, dusting off the dirt clinging to my coat.

“Next time I come back,” I said to the stone, “I’ll bring a name.”

Some moments don’t fade. They ferment.

I can’t remember what I had for breakfast the day Howard died. But I remember the socks he wore.

Gray and mismatched. One had a tiny frayed thread at the ankle.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed, scrolling through something on his phone. Light from the hallway cut across his jaw like a knife — clean angles, soft shadows. I stood in the doorway with my coffee going cold and some part of me already knew. Not consciously. But my bones had already filed the report: This is the last time.

I didn’t say anything.

He looked up and smiled — that slow, boyish grin that made people think he was safe. He was never safe. I just didn’t know it then.

“You’re staring again,” he teased just like always.

“And you noticed,” I shot back, lips twitching in an unwilling grin. We always joked like that — close enough to the edge to be clever. Never close enough to fall.

I walked past him, brushing my shoulder against his, and sat down at the desk to check the system logs. My machine had been running a passive net scrape overnight — a sweep of anonymized chatter on a few red-flag darknet boards. Nothing high-grade, just routine.

Except it wasn’t.

The logs were fragmented on my Kali terminal. That was the first sign. Someone had paused the sweep at 03:47, ran a subroutine with no signature, then resumed the scan as if nothing happened. If I hadn’t checked the timestamps in the list, I never would’ve caught it.

I turned my head. “Did you touch my system?”

Howard didn’t react, his eyes still glued to his phone. “Nope. Why would I?”

Because someone did. Because your shoes were still by the server rack. Because the authentication token used was a Level-6 override — mine.

But I let it go. I didn’t press. I still don’t know why.

Maybe because love makes you slow. Or stupid. Or both.

It was two hours later.

I’d gone out to pick up spare drives and network patches from the lab. I was gone thirty-four minutes. I have the receipts, the timestamped footage. I counted every second like it might rewrite the outcome.

By the time I returned, the apartment smelled like burning ozone and metal fatigue. I remember that.

The door was unlocked.

The lights were off.

And Howard was dead.

I stood still, my voice stuck in my throat, unsure if I was hallucinating.

He was still in the chair, slumped forward, eyes wide open like he was mid-thought. No blood. Not even a sign of struggle. Just the awful, unmistakable stillness of someone who had been turned off.

Was it self-destruction, sabotage, or something more operative — a ghost in the wires with a scalpel for a hand?

At first I thought it was suicide. We were trained for so, when anything too confidential was to leak. It was unaffordable in our job.

But it wasn't. Perhaps it was a cyberattack — neurological interference. There were rumors inside VIREX of tech that could disrupt synapses remotely. But I saw no signs of that. I checked his pulse even though I knew. I whispered his name like repetition might reverse entropy.

Howard.

Nothing.

Then I noticed the terminal. Still glowing and running.

He’d been logged in. Into my account.

Someone had pinged a buried VIREX node. I traced the final input with shaking hands — it wasn’t just an intrusion. It was a launch. Howard had executed something he shouldn’t have even known existed.

And then... nothing. Just a flatline. On the screen and biological.

The ER notes logged a non-sustained ventricular tachycardia that collapsed into silence—clean shutdown, with no ischemic markers. On his right palm, a thumb-sized patch of erythema where he braced the chassis, like he’d closed a circuit he wasn’t meant to.

The system was locked. The node erased itself. VIREX closed it as a foreign-initiated rogue protocol inside forty-eight hours and pushed the paperwork uphill.

Felix Hart's name appeared in the metadata fragment found later. He’d used the system as a proxy. He’d been watching. Maybe orchestrating.

But the logs had Howard’s keystrokes all over them.

He didn’t die by accident.

He was inside something he never should’ve touched. And he used my keys to open the door.

I told VIREX what they needed to hear. Breach. Fatal exposure. Suspect tagged. Asset lost. We moved on.

But I didn’t.

Because the man I loved — for five years, through firewalls and lies and long nights spent configuring secure comms under red light — had secrets I was never meant to see.

And he died with them.

Sometimes I wonder if I really loved him or if I just loved the shape he made in my life. The convenience of someone who knew the hours I kept, the tools I used, the burdens I carried.

Maybe love is just shared access. Maybe betrayal is what happens when the access outlives the trust.

Either way, I buried a man I didn’t fully know.

But I would.

...

Author's Note:

Lmaooooooooooooo

Pls don't judge the story by the first chapter. Ik it's not perfect but I was too excited to not post it.

But yeahhhhh this story just came in my head on a random morning after continuously losing chess and I wanted my dopamine back so yea hahahaha

So this story is more on the mystery/thriller side. I wanted a break from writing cliche romances and wanted to dip my toes into something different this time. BUT the subgenre is more inclined towards the enemies to lovers romance trope, something I was not quite a fan of before. But it's kinda growing on me and I wanted to try it lol

However it is more like enemies to lovers to enemies to lovers and it goes on (I haven't thought of the ending yet as always. I'll just follow the main character's lead. Whatever she does would be the ending. I'm sorry it's not in my control).

While I do have an outline for what the plot would be, I would still just write whatever my gut tells me because I cannnottttt stick to one plan for heaven's sake lol. So there's that.

Plussss this is probably going to be one of the most difficult books I've ever written. I've never read anything like this let alone write it. So I had to spend like days and hours researching things and it has taken me forever. And the fact that these characters are way older than I am, I'd have to think way ahead to make them sound and look mature. There's also a lot of tech jargon in here (I love that kind of stuff) but I won't try to overdo it so y'all don't get confused. Just enough to make it seem cool lol

The main inspo was that I've always wanted to work in the intelligence/army departments when I was young . I always thought it was soo cool when I used to see them in the movies. Even my mom wanted me to go with that but things just didn't work out and I never applied for it. (So ig I can fantasize it in this story)

Okay that's enough ranting. I really hope U guys like this story. I will do my best to keep it interesting and keep the chapters short. I actually wrote like 4k words so I had to split it into 2 chapters. So I'll probably post the second chapter by tomorrow. But updates won't be that frequent.

Again, thank youuuu for reading ❤️❤️ it means the world to me

I'll see U in the next :)

- M.F