The rain in the city never really cleans anything; it just moves the filth around. I sat in my office, the neon sign of the diner across the street flickering like a dying heart. I am Frank, a man who knows where all the bodies are buried because I helped dig some of the holes.

I started as a ghost, a vet with a chest full of medals and a head full of nightmares. I knew how to find people who didn't want to be found. I used that skill to climb. I didn't want money—not at first. I wanted the kind of power that makes the world stop spinning when you say so.

I spent a decade collecting secrets. I found the bribes, the affairs, the blood-stained ledgers of the city's elite. I played them against each other, a puppet master in a trench coat. By the time I was forty, I didn't just have the secrets; I had the keys to the city. The Mayor, the Chief of Police, the judges—they all came to me for "consultations."

I had reached the top. I was the shadow king of a concrete jungle.

But the crown is heavy, and it's made of thorns.

To secure the final piece of the puzzle—the evidence that would make me untouchable—I had to make a trade. I gave the council the location of a "leak" in their organization. I told myself it was just a low-level informant, someone expendable.

It was my brother.

He had tried to warn me, to tell me that the power I was chasing was a parasite that would eat me alive. I had dismissed him as a sentimental fool. I had signed the paper, thinking it was a formality.

The call came an hour after I was officially named the "Special Advisor to the City." My brother had been "eliminated" in a staged accident.

Now, I sit in the highest office in the city, looking at the rain. I have the power to change laws, to move millions, to crush any enemy. But every time I close my eyes, I see my brother's face. The power I fought for is now a mirror, reflecting a monster I don't recognize.

I won the game. I own the city. And I would give every single brick of it back just to hear my brother laugh one more time. But the rain keeps falling, and the silence is the only thing that's truly mine.

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