The kitchen smelled faintly of old wood and chamomile. The house was still, wrapped in the quiet blanket of rural night. No cars, no city noise, just the distant rustling of trees and the soft hum of insects outside.

  Kazou sat at the wooden table, his fingers wrapped around a half-cold cup of tea Wojciech had brewed hours earlier. The moonlight crept in through the lace curtains, painting ghostly patterns on the floor. He hadn’t been able to sleep. His mind was a web of faces and memories—Natalie, Casimir, the river, the blood. And always, in the background, the low, seductive voice of a man smiling as he spoke of endings.

  Footsteps creaked behind him. Kazou turned.

  Wojciech stood in the doorway, wearing a thick wool sweater and linen trousers, as if he hadn’t slept either.

  “You’re still up,” Wojciech said softly. "Kuroda."

  Kazou nodded, looking back down at his tea. “Couldn’t sleep.”

  Wojciech walked over and pulled out the chair across from him, sitting with a soft grunt. “Neither could I. Some nights are like that. Ghosts don’t care about the time.”

  Kazou glanced up. “Ghosts?”

  Wojciech gave a tired smile. “Old men see ghosts everywhere. In cups, in chairs, in the silence.”

  He reached for the teapot and poured himself a cup. The sound of the liquid was loud in the quiet room.

  “Have I ever told you what I used to do?” he asked suddenly.

  Kazou shook his head. “You said you worked the land.”

  “I do now,” Wojciech said, staring into his cup. “But that’s not all I’ve done.”

  The silence stretched again. Kazou waited, sensing something heavy was about to shift.

  “I was a killer once,” Wojciech said finally. “In the seventies. For the state.”

  Kazou froze.

  "You were… in the army?"

  Wojciech shook his head. “Worse. I wasn’t wearing a uniform when I killed. I wore suits. Cheap coats. Sometimes a priest's collar. I worked for people who didn’t have titles, but had power. Deep, cold power. They told me who needed to disappear, and I made sure they did.”

  He sipped his tea.

  "It started in '72. I was thirty. My brother had gotten caught smuggling books from France, philosophy, political theory, you name it. The regime wanted obedience. Not questions. They offered me a choice: disappear like him… or work."

  Kazou leaned forward slightly, his throat tight. "So you became a hitman?"

  “Yes,” Wojciech said, looking directly at him now. “I carried out twenty-six state-sanctioned murders between 1972 and 1980. Dissidents. Foreign diplomats. Journalists. Even a Catholic bishop, though that one got blamed on the Soviets.”

  "And your son… Marek?"

  "Never knew," Wojciech said. "His mother, my wife, thought I worked as a border inspector. I’d go away for weeks. Come back tired. I told her it was paperwork. But the smell on my hands wasn’t ink. It was cordite.”

  Kazou swallowed.

  “I buried the worst of it when the regime fell in ‘89. Burned my documents. Took my boy and came out here. I thought maybe if I planted enough trees, I could drown the blood in roots.”

  He chuckled. It was a dead sound.

  "Did you ever regret it?" Kazou asked.

  "Every day," Wojciech said. “But regret is a poor leash. It doesn’t stop the dog from biting.”

  “You remind me of the ones I used to kill,” Wojciech said, eyes narrowing slightly. “Not because of what you’ve done, but because of what you believe. You walk around like your conscience is a curse. That’s how the best men die.”

  Kazou looked down at his hands. “I think I became a scientist to help people. But now, all I see is the trail of people who’ve been hurt. And Casimir... I created him.”

  “Then finish it,” Wojciech said simply. “End it, before more ghosts are born.”

  Kazou met his eyes. “You’d help me kill him?”

  “I’m too old for vendettas,” Wojciech said. “But I can teach you what I know."

  Kazou didn’t respond. He only nodded, slowly.

  Outside, the wind rustled through the apple orchard like a whisper from another life.

  ***

  The winter of ‘74 clung to Warsaw like a suffocating shroud.

  The streets were slick with frozen slush, and the sky hung low and colorless, a slate ceiling pressing down on the city. Streetlamps buzzed faintly. Frost rimmed the windows of parked cars, and people moved with hunched shoulders and hurried steps, heads down, eyes averted. You didn’t make conversation in a city like this. Not when there were ears in the walls.

  Wojciech Szulc stood beneath the awning of a shuttered newsstand across from a concrete building that housed the offices of Tygodnik Demokratyczny, a political magazine, state-approved but edging too close to subversion lately. He wore a charcoal trench coat, plain black gloves, and a gray wool scarf tight around his neck. He blended in. That was the point. His brown eyes scanned the street, never stopping for too long, never making contact.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  He was thirty-two. Clean-shaven. Hair neatly combed. A cigarette hung loose from his lips, more for rhythm than addiction.

  The name of the target: Piotr Król. Editor. Forty-three. No criminal record. Married. Two children. Suspected of passing coded criticism of the state through subtext in his essays. The command came down from a lieutenant colonel at the Ministry of Public Security.

  "Make it look like a robbery. No political noise."

  Wojciech didn’t ask questions. That was rule number one.

  He glanced at his watch. 16:42. The man would be leaving in three minutes.

  A tram rattled past, and behind it, the office door creaked open. Król stepped out, adjusting a wool cap on his graying head, coat pulled tight against the cold. His briefcase hung from one hand, the other tucked into his pocket. He looked tired. Gentle. Someone's uncle. Someone’s father.

  Wojciech flicked his cigarette into the snow.

  He followed.

  They cut through Plac Zbawiciela, the ornate church casting long shadows over the white-blanketed streets. Wojciech kept a careful distance, his footfalls swallowed by snow. He carried no obvious weapon. Just a length of piano wire tucked beneath his coat and a Tokarev TT-33 pistol hidden in a holster sewn into the lining. Old, reliable Soviet make.

  Król didn’t notice him. He crossed into a side street, quieter, where the buildings grew smaller and the snow was less disturbed. Wojciech’s heartbeat in measured time, a rhythm he’d trained himself to maintain. No nerves. No guilt.

  Król turned down an alley. Wojciech’s pace quickened.

  Two steps. Four. Six.

  The wire slid into his hands with a practiced flick, glinting faintly under the dim light.

  Then...

  A movement. Król turned slightly, catching the faintest crunch of snow.

  Wojciech acted without thinking.

  The wire caught his neck cleanly. Król gurgled and flailed, the briefcase falling with a wet thump. He kicked backward. Wojciech braced his stance and tightened the garrote until the struggling stopped. It didn’t take long. The air turned still again.

  Wojciech exhaled through his teeth.

  He lowered the man slowly, cradling the body against the wall to avoid noise. No witnesses. No blood. Just a frozen alley and the hollow sound of wind.

  He opened the briefcase and pulled out its contents — papers, a book, and a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. Nothing subversive. Just… ordinary.

  Wojciech stared down at the body. There was something too quiet about Król's face. The disbelief. The disappointment, even in death.

  He’d done this six times already.

  It never got easier.

  He left the scene staged like a failed mugging — Król’s wallet still there, but papers scattered, a shoe removed. Enough to confuse the narrative.

  By the time he returned to his apartment that night, his hands had stopped shaking.

  ***

  Otwock, Poland — 1988

  The frost hadn’t yet melted from the grass. It clung stubbornly to the thin blades in the park like some leftover sadness from the night. The air carried that particular kind of cold that seeped into bones — not brutal, but persistent. The sort of cold that refused to be ignored. Still, Wojciech Szulc stood there, hands on the handle of the stroller, not even flinching.

  He had grown older, but not visibly weaker. Forty-three, with a leaner face than he once had, and a gait that could still match a man ten years younger.

  The stroller creaked slightly as he pushed it along the gravel path. Beside him, Anna hummed a lullaby absentmindedly under her breath. She held a small paper bag with bits of bread for the birds and gestured to one waddling pigeon near the path with a faint giggle.

  “I think that one remembers us,” she said.

  Wojciech smiled. “Then we’re probably feeding it too much.”

  Anna laughed, soft and easy. She leaned in toward Marek, brushing her fingers along their son's cheek. “He’s so quiet.”

  “He gets that from you,” Wojciech replied. “I was a screamer, apparently. My mother used to tell me she couldn’t sleep for two years.”

  He said it without hesitation, though it wasn’t entirely true.

  He remembered very little of his mother. She died when he was thirteen. Stomach cancer, they had said. A vague diagnosis, like so many things in the People’s Republic. He remembered the hospital bed, the smell of iodine and boiled cabbage, and her hand — so pale, almost paper-like — resting over his with the weight of finality.

  That was when the state came. First the letters, then the visits, then the “opportunities.” They saw something in him: intelligence, discipline, a willingness to obey. Not everyone got pulled aside at seventeen and offered a future. It had seemed like a gift. A scholarship, they said. Service to the country. A future in the Ministry.

  He took it. Of course he did. What else could he have done?

  Anna handed him a piece of bread absently and bent to toss a few crumbs to the birds. Her scarf slipped slightly, exposing her neck. The skin there was smooth. Warm. Innocent.

  He looked away.

  His eyes drifted toward Marek again. The baby slept soundly, one tiny hand gripping the edge of the blanket, his mouth making small, sucking motions.

  Wojciech swallowed.

  He remembered the way Piotr Król had gasped for air. The way his feet kicked against the alley wall. The sharp, panicked inhale that didn’t come. And the silence afterward — that horrifying, cavernous silence. It always returned in moments like this. When the world was too quiet. When there was no noise but wind and thought.

  The way Król’s lips had parted slightly before the end haunted him more than the gurgling. It wasn’t pleading. It was confusion. Disbelief.

  It had been so long ago.

  But the faces didn’t fade.

  They rarely screamed. Most never got the chance. That was the technique — get in fast, clean, and efficient. That’s what they taught him. That’s what he mastered.

  Wojciech blinked, watching Anna lift Marek from the stroller, holding him against her chest as she kissed his tiny brow. The boy stirred and opened his eyes. Pale blue, the color of winter rivers.

  “He’s growing so fast,” she whispered.

  Wojciech nodded. “Soon he’ll be running from us.”

  Anna looked up and smiled. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  He said nothing.

  They stood in the middle of the park, surrounded by old Soviet-built apartments and muted lives. It was a quiet Sunday. Church bells rang in the distance, their rhythm distant and hollow. The pigeons scattered briefly as a dog barked somewhere nearby.

  He thought about the old pistol still buried in the garage. The TT-33. He hadn’t touched it in years. He never would again, if he had his way.

  He thought about the names. The files. The handlers. Men who only went by code names — Lis, Wilk, Pantera. None of them alive anymore, or if they were, they were ghosts like him, folded into the Polish countryside, keeping bees or building shelves, pretending they were never wolves.

  He had kept his secret. All these years.

  Anna didn’t know.

  Marek certainly didn’t.

  He had become what he pretended to be. A farmer. A father. A man who read manuals on irrigation systems and yelled at chickens.

  But sometimes, at night, when the wind hit the trees just right, he heard the old Warsaw again — the one that stank of coal and fear, the one where men like him walked alleys in silence with guns tucked into their belts and orders stitched into their hearts.

  He had buried that version of himself deep beneath the soil.

  But it wasn’t gone.

  It stirred.

  Like a weed.

  Just waiting for the right light.

  As he stood beside his family, watching the birds flit through the air, Wojciech felt the tug of that other life, not with longing, but with awareness.

  There might come a day when he would have to become him again.

  And if that day came, Marek would never know.

  Because monsters protect their children, too

  Even if they do it with bloodied hands.