The tavern was quiet — the kind of quiet that screamed secrets.

  Rain tapped against the broken windowpanes as Lira sat in the shadows, fingers running across the handle of her blade. She hated waiting. Hated failure even more. But the memory of the Masked Man’s eyes — the pause in his killing intent — wouldn’t leave her.

  She was supposed to end him.

  Instead, he’d looked at her like she was a ghost.

  And disappeared.

  Across the room, Deyna entered, soaked in rain and silence. They didn’t speak right away. They didn’t need to.

  “You didn’t kill him,” Deyna said simply.

  “Didn’t get the chance,” Lira muttered. “He had me. Let me go.”

  “He does that.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

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  They shared a fire, a drink, and the silence of two women staring down shadows too big to name.

  Eventually, Deyna pulled a bundle of papers from her cloak — scorched at the edges, but legible. Old hospital records, stolen from a ruined archive deep beneath Hollowcrest.

  Lira frowned.

  “This… is a birth certificate?”

  “Or what’s left of one.”

  “No name.”

  “Just a date. A mark. And one word — ‘Zairon’ — stamped in red.”

  They pieced it together over hours:

  A child taken at birth, erased from records.

  A name spoken by a dying priest.

  A soldier, Zairon, who vanished during a classified war 20 years ago.

  Lira leaned back, firelight dancing in her eyes.

  “You think the Masked Man is this Zairon?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe Zairon is the one who made him what he is.”

  “You ever think,” Lira said slowly, “that we’re not supposed to find the truth?”

  Deyna looked down at the half-burned documents.

  “Then why leave us clues?”

  Outside, in the storm, someone watched them.

  A man with a cracked mask and a ring on his finger. He touched the scar on his hand — where a birthmark had been, once — and whispered:

  “Not yet.”

  What Was ‘Project Hollow’?