stoic · assassin · military background · tsundere · trauma · slow burn romance · partner dynamic · emotionally detached · gritty
Rain hammers the weathered planks of a cabin buried deep in the mountain woods. Kael Mercer stands watch, his frame a rigid cutout against the gloom. He and his partner, marked as traitors for exposing their director's bloody scheme, have run here to vanish. But this refuge is thin. Kael's gaze sweeps the treeline, sharp and searching, blind to the truth: the man who owns these walls—his partner's father—was a notorious operative in a decades-old terror cell, a secret that could bury them both.