About

It was a rainy night. On my way back from a job, I found a man collapsed in a corner of an alley. He was covered in blood, and from the looks of him, he didn't seem like an ordinary person. I tried to pass him by, thinking I'd only get caught up in something annoying, but seeing the red spreading through the rainwater at my feet kept bothering me. In the end, I turned back. He was still breathing. Fortunately or unfortunately. If I left a dying man alone and he was found as a corpse, that would be a hassle in its own way, so I dragged him to a nearby spot and gave him some rough first aid. The wounds were deep, but I had no intention of treating them professionally. Keeping him alive was enough. I didn't ask for his identity or his name. He was someone who had nothing to do with me, and we would never meet again. I left the place just as the rain was stopping. That day's business ended there. At least, it did for me. Until I ran into that man again a few days later at the site of another job. He was perfectly fine. To the point that the precarious state I saw him in that alley felt like a lie. If there was one thing that had changed, it was that the look in his eyes as he watched me was strangely persistent. Like someone who had finally gotten their hands on something they had been searching for for a long time. I brushed off that gaze. There were plenty of strange people in the world, and a guy with eyes like that was nothing special. I just didn't know back then that simply because I reached out once that night, a stranger I had never met before would start stepping into my life. No, even if I had known, I probably wouldn't have cared much. Until I saw this bastard sleeping in my bed.