Broken

They say every man has a line. A borderland in the soul he swears he’ll never cross. Mine was etched in the soft curve of her smile, in the quiet promise of a life after the noise. I was a ghost with a price, a problem-solver for the world’s ugly, secret wars. I lived by a simple creed: No flags. No faith. No family. I stayed in the gray, where the only morality is the contract and the only sin is failure.
They crossed the line.
It wasn't a grand betrayal, some cinematic conspiracy. It was a stupid, greedy mistake. A bad tip from a corner of the intelligence bazaar, where whispers are traded like currency and lives are the loose change. Someone pointed a finger at the wrong wedding in the Beirut hills. Called the groom a spy. Just another faceless ghost, they thought. Expendable collateral in a shadow war that never sleeps.
But the groom was me. The bride was my Halima. And the man who gave the order signed his own death warrant with a piece of lazy, lethal gossip.
They turned our beginning into an ending. They replaced the scent of orange blossoms and her perfume with cordite and blood. I held the future in my arms as it bled out, her dark eyes holding a final, silent question I couldn't answer.
The man named Cain Taggert was broken. Buried with her that day. What rose from the grave was something older, colder. A reckoning. Something no one every prayed to see.
This is the story of that reckoning. It’s the bloody arithmetic of one man’s error, calculated across continents. From the screaming chaos of a Damascus safehouse to the sterile, arrogant prison of a CIA ship adrift on a black sea. From the rain-slicked streets of London, where traitors drink tea, back to the sun-bleached ruins where my world ended.
They thought they’d killed a man. They didn’t know they’d unleashed a force of nature. They broke the only rule that mattered, and in doing so, they broke the world.
My world. Now I break theirs.
Listen. You can hear the foundations cracking.