What makes life worth living? When you know you cannot save anything — when you watch everything being rebuilt only to see it decay anyway. Such a naive idea, wanting to keep everything safe and frozen in time. Such a selfish thought, to deny a story its final chapter.
Torch stood beside Mrs. Veuren as she sat in the garden reading a book about stones. His body was present. His mind was somewhere else entirely — running through every possible suspect, mapping every movement he had catalogued over the past week. Two figures. Two enemies. Two vipers living under her roof, poisoning her from the inside while she read about rocks in her garden chair.
Mrs. Veuren noticed. She chose, as she often did, to let him be.
It had been a week since Torch watched them at the kitchen window. A week since the farmer's lab confirmed what his instincts had already told him. Every night since, he had been slipping out of his room and tracking them — watching where they went, what they touched, how long they spent in each room. He wrote everything down. Times, movements, patterns, details that meant nothing alone and everything together.
He couldn't move yet. The shape of it was too large for two people acting alone. This was something bigger — or so he told himself, in the way a man tells himself things when he needs more time to think.
Day after day he watched the farmer's results come back empty — nothing found to counter the poison. Day after day Mrs. Veuren's sharp, precise timing slipped a little further. He reached out through back channels, found a black market doctor, sent the samples. Nothing. The poison clung to the bloodstream like a leech, slow and deliberate, designed to be invisible.
What confirmed his suspicion that something larger was at work was the hospital visit.
The doctor ran blood tests. Clean results. Nothing abnormal. The farmer, working alone with second-hand equipment and one functional hand, had found it. A hospital full of staff and machines had not.
On the drive back, Mrs. Veuren noticed Torch had stopped turning the Rubik's cube. He was staring at his phone instead.
What she saw: a servant distracted.
What the screen said:
Sir Radle — this poison is custom made. Nothing like it has been documented. Another dead end.
That evening they sat together in her room. Torch by the window, watching the darkening garden. Mrs. Veuren in her chair, book open across her lap.
Mrs. Veuren: "Torch. You're getting better — it makes me glad to see you daydreaming. To see you not flinching at every sound. I hope that one day you find a real new beginning. A goal worth reaching. Someone you can tell your deepest fears to."
Torch: "Mrs. Veuren. You showed me the way. You forged me into someone new."
He paused.
Torch: "But how do I find someone — how do I move forward — when I'm watching you wither and there is nothing I can do about it?"
Mrs. Veuren: "So you noticed."
A quiet moment.
Mrs. Veuren: "It's alright, Torch. Aging is written into every living thing. Every house. Every story. It's nature's way of clearing space for the next one. Every story must reach its end. That is how a new journey begins."
Torch: "Death. I can't stop it — only delay it. It comes to remind us we belong somewhere beyond this. But when I see someone deliberately trying to write the last chapter of your story for you — I can't feel anything but disgust at my own helplessness."
Mrs. Veuren: "What do you mean?"
Torch told her everything. The kitchen window. The milk. The farmer's lab. The custom poison clinging to her blood. Every dead end. Every night of watching.
Mrs. Veuren was still for a moment.
Then she smiled — small, dry, the smile of someone who has lived long enough to find even this darkly familiar.
Mrs. Veuren: "Who would have thought — even in the fortress I built myself, my past would still find the door."
She set her book down.
Mrs. Veuren: "Twenty years ago I lived in a house full of people who treated money as something closer to a god than a tool. They worked every angle available to them, regardless of the cost to anyone else. When I tried to leave, it took them less than a day to find me. They had eyes everywhere — police, informants, anyone who could be bought. They weren't looking for me out of love or worry. I had been raised on their money. To them I was a debt that hadn't been repaid."
She looked at her hands.
Mrs. Veuren: "I was a slave to a life I never chose. One day they put me to work in their black market — organs, traded like sweets from a corner shop. I couldn't bear it."
She paused.
Mrs. Veuren: "Then one day a man came in to collect a package. Tall. And his skin — it wasn't a color skin is supposed to be. Pale in a way that looked like something had happened to it. Boiled, almost. He placed his order without looking at me. Then, just before he left, he said: 'Tomorrow morning at noon, an attack will happen. Try not to die in it.' "
Mrs. Veuren: "The words landed so lightly. Strangely refreshing, for a reason I still can't explain. I asked him why he was telling me. He said he wanted to save one life before taking a hundred others."
Mrs. Veuren: "The next day at noon — no warning, no call to surrender. Just gunfire. I hid in a pile of bodies, eyes open, doing my best impression of a corpse. Three hours of shooting. Then silence. No prisoners. Only the dead."
Mrs. Veuren: "The pale man found me. His face was burned. His eyes looked less like organs and more like stones set into his skull. He grabbed my arm without gentleness and said: 'Good job surviving this long. But this is where you die.' Then he wrapped me in a blanket and threw me into a car."
She almost smiled at the memory.
Mrs. Veuren: "I was terrified. And somehow, underneath the terror, enormously relieved. He drove in silence. Eventually he said I could stop pretending to be a corpse. He handed me five thousand euros, stopped the car, and gave me a paper with an address. Then he left."
Mrs. Veuren: "I was somewhere I had never been. A village with five houses. The same village where I eventually found you."
Mrs. Veuren: "I rebuilt from that five thousand. Six, then eight, within a year. The village asked nothing about my past. Everyone there lived by one unspoken rule — mind your own. The old me died in that pile of bodies. The woman sitting here now is what was reborn."
She looked out toward the garden.
Mrs. Veuren: "Twenty years of quiet. Then word reached me that my family had begun to suspect I was still alive. A new generation runs the house now — but the greed carried perfectly. I felt my body begin to slow when I heard the news. I assumed it was age."
She let out a long breath.
Mrs. Veuren: "I never thought they would move so quickly."
Torch sat with it.
The shape of what he was facing clarified completely. Not two people acting alone. A generation. An entire structure of inherited greed with resources, reach, and patience. The time for watching and cataloguing was over.
The chess match had begun in earnest. And now Mrs. Veuren knew the board as well as he did.
That night Torch did not wait beneath the kitchen window.
He was already inside — behind the counter, still, breathing slowly in the dark.
The kitchen door opened. Two figures moved through the dark with the particular quiet of people who had done this many times. They opened the fridge. One produced a tube — grey and metallic, catching the fridge light — and began emptying it into the milk carton.
A whisper between them:
Figure 1: "Make sure to get all of it in. The boss said she should have been dead two days ago. We don't get paid if it's not done by tomorrow."
The man never finished the sentence.
A knife came through his back. The tip emerged from his chest. He dropped without a sound that mattered.
In the cold light of the open fridge, the woman turned and saw Torch standing over the body — face expressionless, eyes flat, blood already on his hands.
Before the scream could form he was already moving.
Knife. Chest. Again. Again. Again. Again.
The kitchen wall learned a new color. The ceiling too. Torch stood in the middle of it and turned to find the man still alive, crawling toward the door with what remained of his strength.
Torch: "Still breathing?"
He crossed the kitchen slowly.
Torch: "Don't worry. I'm not going to ask you anything. I'm only going to ask you to die."
He stepped down onto the man's shoulder. The crack was loud and total. Then the knife found his neck and the kitchen was finally quiet.
The door opened.
Mrs. Veuren looked at the walls, the floor, the ceiling.
Mrs. Veuren: "Thank you for removing those two. Did you have to redecorate the entire kitchen in the process?"
Torch: "Red is my second favorite color."
By morning the kitchen was clean. Mrs. Veuren had arranged a crew through channels that left no paper trail — people who understood that questions were not part of the service. No bodies remained. No evidence that anything had happened in that room beyond the faint smell of bleach under the coffee.
She knew the black market she had used was connected, in some thread or another, to the family she had fled. Using it was a message as much as a service.
I am still here. I did not die on your schedule.