The Ghost's Last Breath
The bullet that killed Ghost entered three centimeters below her right clavicle at 2:49 AM on a Tuesday, fired by a man she had trained personally.
She had been moving through the Prague compound's eastern stairwell when the red dot appeared on her chest. The laser sight painted her black tactical gear like a target at a firing range. Her body was already dropping into a roll when the first shot cracked through the silence.
Two rounds hit the vest. Kevlar caught them.
The third one didn't miss.
Ghost felt the impact before the pain—a punch of force that spun her sideways into the concrete pillar. Hot blood spread across her ribs. The tactical earpiece crackled with her handler's voice, calm and final: "You know too much about the organization, Ghost. Nothing personal."
Everything was personal when you were dying.
She cataloged her injuries with the detachment of fifteen years and 247 confirmed kills. Lower abdomen, through-and-through, possibly nicked the intestine. Blood loss moderate but accelerating. Combat effectiveness dropping to sixty percent and falling.
The corridor ahead erupted with muzzle flashes. Her own team. Men she'd worked with for years, now arranged in a perfect kill-box formation. They'd studied her tactics, knew her escape patterns, anticipated every move.
Professional. She would have been proud if they weren't murdering her.
Ghost returned fire twice—suppression, not kill shots—and vaulted through the nearest window. Glass shattered around her in a constellation of reflecting moonlight. For one crystalline moment she hung suspended in the Prague night, four stories above the canal, blood trailing behind her like a comet's tail.
The sniper round caught her before she hit the water.
Right lung. The shot punched through her back and exited below her collarbone, turning her controlled fall into a spinning tumble. She struck the canal surface hard enough to crack ribs. Water filled her punctured lung immediately. Cold. Dark. Heavy.
Ghost sank.
Her body knew it was dying. Oxygen debt. Hemorrhaging. Hypothermia setting in. Her vision narrowed to a tunnel of black water and darker blood. She had survived worse odds than this, her mind insisted, but her body disagreed with every failing heartbeat.
Darkness absolute.
And then—
—wrong—
Wooden wheels clattered over cobblestones. The smell of hay and horse sweat and unwashed wool filled her nose. Hunger gnawed at her stomach with teeth she'd never felt before, a bone-deep emptiness that spoke of weeks without proper food.
Ghost forced her eyes open.
Wrong hands. Too small, too pale, scarred in patterns she didn't recognize. She lifted them to her face and the movement felt alien, like operating a puppet with unfamiliar strings. The fingers trembled with weakness that had nothing to do with blood loss and everything to do with chronic starvation.
A carriage. Wooden benches. Rough fabric dress against skin that was too thin, stretched over bones that jutted at wrong angles. She was sitting in a moving carriage that smelled of decay and fear.
Memory slammed into her mind like a fist.
Not her memory.
A crown prince's laughter, cruel and bright, as his boot connected with her ribs. A queen's cold dismissal when she begged for food. Years of beatings, starvation, isolation. Being called "trash" and "worthless" and "the family's embarrassment." The announcement of her marriage—no, her sacrifice—to the Shadow Warlord, delivered with mocking ceremony.
Anya Valerius. The name surfaced from the fractured memories. Third daughter of House Valerius. Eighteen years old. Abused. Starved. Broken.
And five minutes ago, she had swallowed poison.
Ghost's assassin instincts kicked in through the disorientation. She scanned the carriage interior with professional speed. Glass vial on the floor, still wet. Bitter almond scent mixing with the smell of vomit—nightshade compound, crude but effective. This body had ingested enough to kill within ten minutes.
She was already dying. Again.
Her new heart was slowing, rhythm becoming irregular. Respiratory distress building. Approximately four minutes left before complete system failure. The body's previous occupant had wanted death badly enough to steal poison and swallow it in a moving carriage, knowing she'd die alone and unmourned.
Ghost assessed the situation with the cold calculation that had made her the world's deadliest assassin. New body. Unknown world. Hostile environment. Immediate threat: poison. Secondary threat: whatever she was being transported toward.
First rule of survival: stay alive.
She forced her new fingers to her throat and triggered the gag reflex. Her body convulsed. Vomit mixed with blood and poison splashed across the carriage floor in a violent purge. The spasms hurt—this body knew pain intimately—but Ghost had learned long ago that pain was just information.
The carriage lurched to a stop. Guards shouted outside in disgust and anger. Heavy boots hit the ground.
"The bitch is sick! Should we stop?"
"No. Lord Malakor wants his tribute delivered by dawn. Let her retch. Maybe she'll die before we get there and save him the trouble."
Laughter. The kind of laughter men use when they're afraid and trying not to show it.
Ghost tore a piece of fabric from her dress with shaking hands. The cloth was rough, stained, barely better than rags. She wrapped it around her left arm above the elbow, creating a makeshift tourniquet to slow the poison's circulation through her system. Not a cure, but it would buy time.
The carriage lurched forward again. Through the gaps in the wooden walls, she caught glimpses of a dying landscape. Forests where the trees were blackened and twisted. Sky locked in perpetual twilight. This wasn't Prague. This wasn't anywhere she recognized.
Ghost collapsed against the carriage wall and forced herself to sort through Anya's memories with systematic precision. The information came in fragments, trauma-shattered and incomplete, but she pieced together the critical intelligence:
The Kingdom of Drakenholde. A medieval fantasy world with magic and monsters. House Valerius, the royal family, weak and corrupt. Lord Malakor, the Shadow Warlord, an immortal monster who kept the kingdom from falling to creatures called Shriekers. The Pact that bound the royal family to provide tribute.
And her—Anya—chosen specifically because she was worthless. Sent to insult the Warlord. Expected to die of fear within hours of arrival.
They didn't know they'd killed their sacrificial lamb and replaced her with something much worse.
Ghost tested the body's pain threshold by pressing her thumb into a bruise on her ribs. The pain was sharp, familiar. This body had learned to endure. Good. She flexed her fingers, rolled her shoulders, assessed her new physical limitations. Malnourished. Weak. But flexible. Small hands meant delicate work was possible. Low body mass meant less noise when moving.
An infiltration specialist's build, actually. Just required different tactics.
Through the carriage window, she observed the guards. Medieval armor and weapons. Steel swords, no firearms. Discipline level moderate—they maintained formation but their attention wandered. Four men total. Two on horseback flanking the carriage, two riding on the driver's bench.
She could kill two before they realized what was happening. The other two would take more time, and in this weakened body, time was a luxury she couldn't afford.
Not yet.
The guards' conversation drifted back to her:
"How long you think the little lamb will last?"
"I give her two days. Generous estimate."
"I say she dies of fright the moment she sees him. Those shadow-tricks of his—"
"Five hundred years he's been doing this. Think he even remembers they're human anymore?"
Ghost filed away every piece of intelligence. Malakor was old. Powerful. Used fear as a weapon. The guards were terrified of him despite their bravado.
She pulled out the empty poison vial from where it had rolled under the bench and examined it. Crude glass, poor craftsmanship, but the poison itself had been effective enough. She wrapped it carefully in torn fabric and tucked it into the hem of her dress. Waste not.
The landscape outside grew darker. They had crossed some invisible boundary—she felt it as an unnatural cold that seeped through the wooden walls. The temperature dropped ten degrees in seconds. One of the horses whinnied in distress.
"We're in his territory now," a guard muttered. "Light the torches."
Ghost used the distraction to clean her face with water from a dented canteen. The poison residue left her lips numb, but the vomiting had been effective. Her heart rate was stabilizing. She'd live.
For now.
She caught her reflection in the canteen's metal surface. Hollow dark eyes. Pale skin stretched tight over sharp cheekbones. Dark hair matted and unwashed. A face that had forgotten how to smile.
Anya's face. Her face now.
The guards pounded on the carriage door. "Make yourself presentable for His Dark Lordship! We arrive within the hour!"
Ghost arranged herself into Anya's habitual posture—shoulders hunched, head down, eyes lowered. The body remembered defeat in its bones. She could use that. Let them see a broken girl. Let them dismiss her as harmless.
Predators always made that mistake.
Through the window, she glimpsed it: the Onyx Keep rising against the twilight sky like a black dagger. A fortress that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Towers that pierced the permanent dusk. Walls that promised no escape.
Ghost had infiltrated black sites on three continents. She'd survived torture, betrayal, and impossible odds. She'd killed men twice her size with nothing but her hands and her mind.
This was just another mission. Survive. Adapt. Overcome.
And if this Lord Malakor thought he was getting a terrified lamb to devour, he was about to learn what happened when you invited a wolf to dinner.
As the Onyx Keep's shadow fell across her face, Ghost made a mental note—predators always think they're at the top of the food chain until something higher comes along.
**