Grumpy begginigs
The city at 3:00 AM doesn’t have a pulse; it has a death rattle. The only people awake are the ones who are hunting, the ones who are hiding, and me, who currently wishes they had a functioning emotional spectrum.
I was sitting on the rusted roof of an abandoned mattress factory, three stories above an alleyway that smelled precisely like stagnation and a lack of moral fiber. My boots—heavy-duty, tactical, and currently sporting a smear of blood that I’m pretty sure wasn’t mine—dangled over the edge.
My phone was buzzing. Loudly. Insistently. It was Silas. The screen read:
ANSWER YOUR DAMN PHONE, YOU CHICKEN FRIED FUCK.
It was his favorite insult of the week. Last week it was “Sentient Dildo.”
Progress, I suppose.
I sighed, a low, tired sound that was immediately eaten by the wind. My favorite pastime was aggressively making tea and ignoring the world, but Silas was clearly in “emergency mode,” which usually meant he was about to make ME have an emergency.
I didn’t answer. I needed a minute.
Instead, I looked down at my tactical knife. This was “Lucille.” Lucille was part of what I liked to call my Emotional Support Knife Collection. Some people have stress balls. I have multiple blades, most of which have killed people. I find it much more stabilizing. I wiped a stubborn smear of grease off the serrated edge, watching the blade gleam in the sickly yellow glow of a distant streetlight.
The target tonight had been what I consider the human version of a headache.
A mid-level dealer named Rocco or Rico, who thought that because he owned a flashy white suit and two generic bodyguards, he was “the main character.” Main characters are the first to get written out of my scripts. He was loud, arrogant, and had zero spatial awareness, which made him incredibly annoying to trail.
The job...Well, the job had gone horribly. If you asked a textbook assassin, it was a disaster. If you asked me, it was just another Tuesday.
It had started with me crawling through a septic tank (great visual, I know), which already put me in a foul mood. It ended with me jumping through a second-story plate-glass window, landing in a dumpster full of rotten tomatoes, and having to perform an improvised tracheotomy with a ceramic soup spoon.
There was far more blood than strictly necessary. And now I had a shard of a vase (specifically, an ancient Ming dynasty knock-off, according to my artistic assessment) embedded in my left bicep.
It was when I was stepping over the broken body of one of his guards that the poor guy, gurgling his final breath, gasped:
“Wha the fuck is wrong with you?”
I didn’t even look down. I just kept moving.
“You mean today, or like, in general? Because the septic tank thing has me in a dark place.” He didn’t reply. Rude.
See? I’m not as mean as I could be. I left him with a philosophical quandary as his final thought. I want people to be more grateful for that.
And now, I am here. I need to reset my “I’m not a monster” counter.
I rolled up my sleeve and finally looked at the vase shard. It was a good two inches deep. This was going to hurt. It was going to require focus. It was going to require that singular, crystalline dissociation that I’ve spent the last twelve years perfecting.
Flashback
You don’t just learn how to pull a Ming vase out of your arm. You don’t just learn how to disappear.
For me, the dissociation started there.
I was two years old when I was taken. I have no memory of the before. My first clear thought is of the mansion. It was a sprawling, pristine monster of marble and terror, hidden behind gates that looked like spears and a mile of ancient oak trees. It was a factory, but not for furniture or steel. It was a factory for broken things.
They called it “The Collection.”
We were women and children, kept in cells that were nicer than any prison but had much less hope. The walls were cream. The floors were polished. The air always smelled like bleach and expensive perfume, a combination that still makes me want to scream.
We were groomed. We were cataloged. At eight years old, I wasn’t just “a kid.” I was Lot#74. I was being prepped for “The Finale”—the auction where the highest-bidding monsters bought us. To be a maid. To be a pet. To be tortured. To be killed. The options were vast.
I remember the women. The beautiful, hollowed-out women who were brought in, prepped for a week, and then gone. I remember the younger children, the ones who were Lot #12 or #45, and the sound of the cells opening in the night. The way they fought for a moment before they were dragged away.
I remember learning to be silent. If you were silent, they didn’t see you.
I remember learning to disappear while sitting in the center of the room.
We were shown to “customers” through heavy glass. One night, I saw a man who didn’t look like the others. He looked like a wolf who had dressed up as a businessman. He stared at me with an intensity that made my skin crawl. He pointed to Lot #743.
That was when the timer started. In three days, I would be sold.
I spent those three days in a catatonic state. The matrons, the women with ice-water eyes who made sure we looked pristine, thought I was broken.
Good.
If they think you’re broken, they don’t lock your chain tight enough.
The night before the auction, there was a transfer—a new batch of children coming in. Chaos. Confused shouting. The bleach smell was overwhelming. A cell was left open. My cell.
I didn’t think so. I didn’t breathe. I didn’t feel it.
I left the body of the little girl I was supposed to be behind. I became a ghost.
I slipped out of the cell, through the marble corridor, past the sleeping guards (sleeping because I’d learned how to add the sleeping drops that were meant for us into their coffee—dissociation is a great tool for observation), and out a service entrance.
The air outside was shocking. Cold. Crisp. It didn’t smell like bleach. It smelled like wet dirt and pine.
I ran. I was eight years old, and I was running into a world I had only seen through glass.
Age 8-10
I ran until my lungs burned. I didn’t stop until I found the main road.
The road was the boundary. On the other side was a city, a jagged cluster of yellow lights and distant traffic. Between the road and the city was a vast, deep valley. This became my sanctuary. This became my classroom.
For two years, I was a feral thing.
I lived in the dirt. I slept in a hollowed-out concrete culvert. I ate out of dumpsters behind restaurants at 4:00 AM, my tiny hands learned to move without disturbing a single aluminum can. I was Lot #74, but now, I was nobody.
Dissociation wasn’t just a mental state anymore; it was my tactical advantage.
The world was not a good place. The mansion had taught me that. The road taught me that it was also a noisy, unpredictable place. I spent months watching the patterns. People move in lines. They have habits. They are predictable. If you learn the pattern, you can find the gap.
I watched everything.
I learned the delivery schedules of the bakery. The time the police cars rotated. The way shadows change with the streetlights.
But I also knew I wasn’t safe. I was merchandise. Those people from the mansion... they wouldn’t just write me off. They would search.
I was scared. I was an eight-year-old child living in a culvert. Fear is an efficient fuel, but it’s a fuel that burns you from the inside out.
I needed to protect myself. I needed to learn how to fight. But who would teach a feral child?
I found them. Not in a gym. Not in a dojo. I found them in fight clubs.
Near the culvert, in the basement of a condemned body shop, men (and some women) gathered. It was the lowest rung of the underground. No rules. Bare knuckles. There was no glory. Just survival and ego.
I became the ghost of that basement.
I would watch from a grate in the ceiling, or I would slip inside and crouch behind a stack of tires. My small body was invisible.
Dissociation is great for observation.
I didn’t just watch the punches. I watched the eyes. I watched the feet. I learned the precise physical signal—the tensing of the shoulder, the dilation of the pupils—before a man throws a hook. I learned the physics of a chokehold not by doing, but by watching fifty men pass out.
I watched the way people take pain. Some people scream. Some collapse. Some just... turn off.
I decided I would turn it off.
I watched the “dangerous” people. The ones who didn’t fight for ego, but for money, for life. I learned from them.
One night, when I was ten, I made a mistake. I was so intent on watching a specific striker that I didn’t hear the big man, the owner of the shop, sneak up behind me. He grabbed me by the scruff of my shirt.
“What are you doing here, you little rat?” he growled.
He raised his hand. I didn’t think. I didn’t breathe.
I grabbed his thumb, locked my tiny knuckles (the technique from the striker, the watching) and snapped it backwards. Then I bite him. He roared. He dropped me. I ran.
I went back to my culvert. I lay in the dark, my heart a trapped bird in my chest.
I’d done it. I had used what I had watched. I wasn’t just Lot #74.
A few nights later, when I was back at my grate, watching, a man stepped out of the crowd. He was older, with hair like silver wire and a face like a dried-out riverbed. He wasn’t like the fighters. He was neat. Efficient. He stood in the shadows and just watched.
When the night was over, and I was slipping out, he was waiting for me. He didn’t grab me. He just leaned against the wall.
“Impressive trick with the thumb,” he said. His voice was gravel and calm.
I didn’t answer. I was poised to run.
“They’re going to catch you eventually. And you bite one of my men.” he said. “A smart animal moves in the shadows. A smart human has a plan. What’s your name Kid?” “Ivy. Like the vines in the valley. The vines that grew in darkness and suffocated everything they touched.” “Good name. Fits you.”
He offered me a bottle of water. I took it.
He said his name was Silas. He said he was a “recruiter” of sorts.
“I have a business. I need people who can see patterns and vanish when the work is done. You have the raw material. I can give you the tools. Food. A bed that isn’t made of concrete. All I ask in return is loyalty. And that you work when I tell you.”
It was the first trade I had ever been offered that wasn’t for my soul.
I joined him.
I was ten years old, and I was officially starting the training that would turn me into a monster.
AGE 10-16
Silas’s world was not neat. He was not a good man. He was a professional. He was a broker of illicit services, and one of his specialties was assassination.
His “factory” was a training warehouse. It was the culvert, but with equipment and less dirt.
I became one of the best. And I did it faster than anyone else.
Silas noticed. While the other recruits—mostly angry teenagers who wanted to prove something—were posturing and screaming, I was silent. I was watching the patterns. I was using my two years of survival data.
He taught me advanced skills. He taught me the biology of murder—the femoral artery, the carotid artery, the difference between a stab that hurts and a stab that kills. He taught me ballistics. He taught me how to hot-wire a car, how to pick a safe, how to disappear online.
But his specialty was the blade.
“The gun is a coward’s tool,” Silas would mutter. He had multiple gun scars on his own body, which made his philosophy a bit rich. “The knife... the knife is intimate. It is personal. It requires you to look your problem in the eye while you solve it. It forces you to make a choice.”
I love the knife.
Guns were loud. Guns made a mess of the patterns I liked to observe. But the knife was like a valley. It was the vine that grew in the dark. It was a ghost.
I didn’t just train physically. I read. I studied anatomy. I studied chemistry (dissociation is great for remembering complex formulas for poison). I watched classic film noir (not because I liked it, but to learn how to dress in silhouettes).
I was sixteen when I started my first official missions. I was no longer an “apprentice.” I was an “asset.” My name was becoming a legend in certain circles. “The ghost of the culvert.” A rumor of an efficient, silent killer who left no pattern behind.
I was efficient. I was cold. I was dissociated.
I was perfect.
PRESENT DAY
3:20 AM
“Okay,” I said to the vase shard. “On three.”
“One.” Dissociate.
“Two.” Ignore the pain.
“Three.” Pull.
I yanked. The vase shard slid out with a sickening squelch, followed by a sudden spray of blood. My vision blacked out for a second, then snapped back into focus. It hurt. It hurt so much it made my hands shake, which was a bad pattern.
But it was done. I looked at the glass. It was beautiful in a gruesome way. The pattern on the glass was now stained red. Aesthetics.
I was 20 years old. I lived by myself in a neat, clinical apartment. By day, I was invisible, traveling from city to city, tracking my targets, adding data points to my collection list. By night, I worked. I was efficient. I was the ghost of the culvert. The only real contacts I had were Silas, who kept feeding me work (and insults), his adorable wife (poor woman) and a few other people I’d met along the way who didn’t ask too many questions.
It was a perfect pattern. Stable. Cold. Productive.
My phone buzzed again.
This time, I didn’t get a text. I got a call.
Silas’s number was flashing.
The pattern was broken. He didn’t call. He texted. Calls were for emergencies.
I flipped it open.
“I’m busy, Silas, who died?” I said. My voice was monotone. I was pressing a medical adhesive strip onto my arm, watching the blood soak through the first layer. “I am currently contemplating the void. It’s my 3:30 AM existential crisis. Can this wait?”
“No, it can’t, Little chicken,” Silas snapped. His voice was cracked with tension. “I have a situation. A big one.”
“Pablo’s bodyguards found a pulse? The Maya’s vase was actually cursed?”
“We both know it was you and that damn recorder. We have visitors. High-level visitors. Romanov.”
I start to laugh but when I catch the name of those people my breath catches. My hand froze on the medical kit.
“Uh Uh,Royalty. And this has been my business since when?” I asked, my voice was getting very, very flat.
“We signed a deal this evening. They want to use our networks.”
I knew exactly what that meant. “The high families.” The global network of traffickers, money launderers and drug dealers.”
“Again, why are you calling me?”
“Because, Ivy,” Silas said, and for the first time in years, I heard something close to fear in his voice, “I want you to meet them. And they’re coming here at my club. Like right now. And they want the best of my team.”
My phone went silent.
I stared at the text on my phone with his message still ‘’to read’’.
And then I looked at my arm, the blood slowly seeping through the adhesive strip.
“Since when does someone demand my presence in a deal? And for you to know you can tell them no.”
“Ok maybe i chirped about my daughter being a killing machine”
“You what? You stupid old fucker, I’m gonna kill you.”
‘’Please kid?’’
‘’Don’t please me. It’s 3:00 AM. I’m covered in blood and dirty. I will not come there to meet your new friends. Or maybe I could come and kill you all..’’
‘’They are pretty guys.’’
‘’And hear how i give a flying fuck.’’
‘’Rude. I’ll give you 30 minutes to shower and change.’’
The asshole hung up and left me there to think how I could kill him without his wife getting sad.
Thirty minutes later I was ready, showered and highly pissed off.
The Velvet Cage was a subterranean cathedral of sin. Deep crimson velvets, tarnished gold leaf, and the heavy, expensive scent of oud and cigarettes. The bass line thrummed through my marrow.
I was on time but Silas didn’t deserve me being on it so I sat in the corner booth, back to the wall. “Look who’s back from the dead,” Mindy whispered, sliding in.
“Tequila,” I said, sliding her a shot. “How are you, baby?” “Good. I caught a good card in my collection.” I said, the code sliding off my tongue.
Mindy’s eyes widened slightly.
“Good. I’m glad you are here, I missed you.”
“Me too” I murmured, watching the stage.
The lights dimmed. A spotlight cut through the haze. The dancer was a vision in sheer silk, her movements a hypnotic blend of grace and violence. She didn’t just dance; she commanded the air around her. I watched her, mesmerized by the way she could be so exposed yet so untouchable. It was a luxury I never had.
“Silas is waiting,” she whispered to me, her eyes soft. “He’s at his spot. With company.”
“Yeah I know. I’m arriving late on purpose. Will you be sad if I kill him?”
“Sweetheart, yes.”
“I’ll find you a hotter one.”
“Go before they start to think he was lying.”
“I’ll stay here then.” I smirked but stood up while she was laughing.
I walked toward the VIP lounge, my hand ghosting for a moment, over the knife tucked into my waistband. Like someone could do something to me.
Silas stood up as soon as he saw me, his face lighting up with a genuine warmth that felt out of place in this den of vipers.
“There she is! My kid. Ivy.” He tried to hug me but I stepped back shocked.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Ivy..”
“Oh it’s you, for a moment I saw a big grumpy chicken”
He pulled me into a hug, but my body stayed rigid looking behind him. Three men sat at the table. The air shifted instantly. And a strange silence descended on us.
Their eyes locked instantly on me. On my face.
“Want a picture?” I asked, my voice cold.
“No need,” the oldest one said. He had dark black hair and eyes that had seen too many murders. He downed his scotch in one go, his gaze never leaving my face. He wasn’t looking at me like a man; he was looking at my structure. He was looking at me the way a jeweler looks at a stolen gem.
“We are the Romanovs,” the middle one, Niko, said with a shark-like grin. “This is Alex, and he is Ivan.”
“Yeah I figure that. Pleasure” I sat near Silas, mumbling while drinking my scotch.
I analyzed every micro-expression. Ivan was looking at the little scar under my eyebrow with a strange, haunting familiarity. Alex was gripping his glass so hard his knuckles were white.
“So Ivy,” Ivan said, his voice a low vibration. “We didn’t know Silas had a daughter. You don’t look like him.”
“I’m adopted,” I snapped. “And I don’t like being stared at.”
“We aren’t staring, Ivy,” Niko said, his smile widening.
‘’Yes you are.’’
“Have we met somewhere?”
“You are still breathing,so no,”.
“Ivy, can you at least try to be nice?”
“They’re still breathing. That’s me being fucking nice, hamburger.”
“They are partners.”
“So, no problem then. They’ll get used to it.” I smirk at the three shocked men, that seams became statues. They are watching me a little too much.
I looked at Silas, grumpy, embarrassed old Silas, but he was busy pouring more drinks, oblivious to the silent war happening across the table. They were here for business but now, from their look it wasn’t for that anymore. Not more just partners. Not enemies either.
Did I kill some of their people?
No. I don’t think it’s about revenge.
These men are looking at me like I am a piece of history they thought they’d burned.
And suddenly, the room felt very, very small.
I should kill them.
I am starting to feel something that I didn’t recognise.
I can’t off them.
So I stand up.
‘’Well…welcome to the group, nice to meet you. I have better things to do so…Silas don’t call me for the next 16 hours.’’ I murmure and before anyone could answer I disappeared.
