Eyes Beyond the Night

Prologue :

The rain hadn't stopped in hours.

Lucien Vale sat in the back seat if his black Maserati, the low purr of the Ding engine blending with the steady drumming of water in the roof. Outside the city blurred - neon bleeding into wet asphalt, colors stretching and wrapping in the rain-speckled glass.The smell of wet concrete sleeper into the car whenever the driver cracked the window to clear the fog.

Up ahead, his men waited in the mouth of a narrow alley, their figures half-swallowed by the shadows beneath a flickering streetlamp. The deal would be over soon - clean, quick, forgettable.

Until he saw him.

Across the street, framed in the doorway of a rundown bar, stood a lone figure. Rain soaked through his clothes, plastering dark hair to pale skin. He didn't move, didn't flinch, even as the storm wrapped itself around him like a shroud.

Lucien leaned closer to the cold glass, his gaze narrowing. Thought the destroyed pane and the silver curtain of rain, he caught the man's eyes - empty, distant, locked on something far beyond the street, far beyond the night itself.

There was no curiosity in them, no fear, no spark. Only a hollow, unyielding stillness that felt heavier than the storm itself.

From the shelter of the car, Lucien felt the distance between them like a taut wire - silent, invisible, unbreakable. And yet something about that emptiness tugged at him. It was the same hollow stare his mother had worn the day before she died.

The memory rose unbidden: her sitting at the kitchen table in the dim light, hands around a cup she never drank from, eyes fixed so where in the past him, past the walls, past the world. The silence had been unbearable then, and now it pressed against him again, carried on the gaze of a stranger in the rain.

He should have looked away.

Instead, he stayed, watching as water traced thin lines down the man's face, indistinguishable from tears. The city moved around him - cars splashing through puddles, lights shifting and fading, doors opening and closing - but he remained, a statue carved from something fragile and unbreakable at once.

Lucien didn't know why it mattered. He didn't take interest in strangers. Lives came and went in his world without a trace. Yet there was someone who seemed carved from absence defined by the weight of what was missing.

A sharp knock at the car door pulled him back. His driver leaned in, voice low "they are waiting."

The rain outside felt colder now, sharper. The kind of night that swallowed sounds and sins alike.

He cast one last glance through the storm. The man in the doorway hadn't moved.

Then Lucien Vale stepped out - not to toward him, but toward the kind of work that never washed clean.

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