The fire had died to embers.Outside, the snow fell heavier, thick like ash after a great burning. Inside the cabin, Kabri sat motionless—knees pulled to his chest, eyes lost in the orange glow. The Glock lay far from him now, under a scarf. Useless. Finished.Jamil’s body hadn’t moved.Amir had stopped staring at it an hour ago. He’d covered it with a rug—just a gesture, not for Jamil, but for himself. A way to seal it. A way to say: this chapter is over.Now they just sat. Uncle and nephew. Blood and blood. Neither speaking. The only sound was the wind threading through the cracked walls, whistling like a lullaby for the dead.Then Kabri turned his head.“Amir.”The boy looked up.“I’m sorry.”He said it plainly. Without ceremony. Not for drama. Not for forgiveness.He said it like someone admitting to gravity.Amir blinked. His eyes were rimmed red. Not from crying. He hadn't cried—not yet. He was too full of something heavier than grief. Something more hollow than rage.“You’re so

Dust, in the form of snowflakes, swirled gently from the pine branches above. The wind had calmed, but in Amir’s chest, a storm raged.He stood over the two men—their bodies splayed near the cliff’s edge. Kabri slumped against the frozen soil, blood soaking through his coat at the shoulder. Jamil’s corpse, lifeless and cold, rested beneath a mound of hastily arranged stones, his face still visible through a parting in the covering, his mouth curled into a grim and ambiguous grin.Amir wasn’t crying out. The tears came quietly.He just stood there. Silent. Trembling. Weeping.There was something sacred about the moment.Something broken.Something final.They were both there—uncle and enemy. Mentor and monster. The man who raised him, and the man who tried to destroy everything.And Amir couldn’t separate them anymore.Kabri stirred slightly beside the mound, groaning in pain. The bullet had passed clean through the shoulder, but blood loss was setting in fast. Amir had managed to wrap

The shovel bit into the frozen ground like a blade through bone.Amir's hands were blistered, raw beneath the gloves. His breath came out in thick clouds, curling into the air like ghosts escaping his chest. The snow had not let up, and now it blanketed everything—trees, boots, the hilltop where two bodies lay side by side, wrapped in what remained of their coats and bloodied scarves.Kabri and Jamil.Brothers in death.The same way they were bound in life.He hadn’t planned to bury them together.That morning, when he’d found Kabri's corpse still cradling Jamil’s lifeless body like some grotesque echo of childhood, Amir had stood there for nearly an hour. Snow melted into his scalp, into his jacket, into his soul.Part of him wanted to drag Jamil’s corpse far away, let the wolves eat it. Another part wanted to light them both on fire and leave no grave, no shrine, no memory.But in the end, he chose earth.They were blood.No matter what they did.The hole wasn’t deep.Just enough to

Brussels. Midnight. Rain slid down the windows of the Europol headquarters like melting glass, warping the blue lights of computer monitors and the fluorescent haze of sleepless men. Inside, a storm of a different kind was unfolding.It began with a file—anonymous, encrypted, but laced with the unmistakable stench of truth.A book. A story. A grave confession.Titled: The Blood Oath Author: Amir Malik.The courier dropped it off in Paris. Interpol scanned it in Geneva. A former MI6 asset forwarded it to Berlin.And within 72 hours, it reached every backchannel that mattered.Every nation with a classified file on Kabri Al-Rashid or Jamil Saloum suddenly had new data to digest.A manuscript that wasn’t just story—it was blood-coded history. It carried names, dates, operations, betrayals, and truth buried beneath a thousand lies.In The Hague, analysts read through it, and one by one, they sat straighter in their chairs. It wasn’t just a personal memoir. It was a confession—and a w

The desert wind howled gently against the aged cliffside, whispering memories through the cracks of ancient stone. Amir stood barefoot in the sands of Tangir Valley, the same place his uncle had once knelt in silence before his first blood oath. Now, decades later, Amir returned not with vengeance, but with a letter.Not a letter he had written—but one left behind by a man the world could no longer forget.Kabri.Uncle. Assassin. Monster. Martyr.The letter had been sealed inside the back panel of a music box—Evelyn’s lullaby box.Amir had nearly thrown the box away when his daughter, Hana, found it humming the familiar melody. She pressed one key, and the mechanism cracked open.Inside: a folded note, creased with age, stained with something that could’ve been blood or ash.No date.Just Kabri’s handwriting.“If you're reading this, I'm gone. But if you’re reading this... maybe you're still alive.”“Amir, I was never a writer. Only a weapon. My words were lies when I was young. Then