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I’ve always hated the basement.
Not because it’s cold—though it is, a deep kind of cold that clings under your skin—but because of what it holds.
Secrets. Rumours. Monsters.
And one of those monsters once trained me.
Verlaine.
My mentor.
The King of Assassins.
The man whose name alone made grown men sweat, the man children whispered about like a ghost story.
But the man I find here, hunched over a small metal table in the farthest corner of the Port Mafia basement, doesn’t look like any legendary killer.
He looks… fragile.
His hair hangs in pale strands around his face, thin and drifting when he moves. The lamp above him flickers, casting his shadow in broken shapes across the walls. He doesn’t turn when I step off the last stair.
He heard me.
He always hears me.
But he keeps writing.
The pen scratches softly against paper—slow, careful, almost tender. I don’t need to see the letter. I already know who it’s for.
Rimbaud.
Always Rimbaud.
Even though he’s dead.
I stand behind him quietly, letting my presence settle into the room, letting him choose when to acknowledge me. That’s how it always was when he trained me—his pace, his rhythm, his silence. I learned to breathe around him instead of with him.
Finally, he speaks without lifting his head.
“Gin.”
Just my name. Nothing more. But it’s enough to make my spine straighten on instinct.
“Yes, Verlaine-san.”
“I need more envelopes.”
I place the fresh stack on the table. “I brought them.”
He pauses for the smallest moment, the pen freezing above the paper.
Not gratitude. Not surprise.
But something close to… relief.
I shouldn’t know what relief looks like on him. I shouldn’t be able to read him at all.
He taught me everything I know about killing—quickly, silently, without doubt, without hesitation. He taught me that emotions get you killed.
And yet here he is, wearing emotions openly, but not in a way I ever understood.
A cracked cup leaking grief.
He resumes writing.
I watch his hand tremble.
I shouldn’t stare.
I shouldn’t care.
But I can’t help it.
Because I don’t understand how someone like him—someone whispered about like a blade given life, someone whose footsteps made entire rooms tense—could be reduced to this.
A man writing letters to a grave no one visits.
“…Do you ever send them?”
The question slips out before I can stop myself.
His pen stops.
My heart does too.
For a moment I think I overstepped, that he’ll snap at me the way he used to when I was younger and clumsier.
But instead he exhales—a low, unsteady sound.
“No,” he says. “Rimbaud is gone. There is nowhere left to send them.”
His voice is soft. Too soft. Like it hurts him to say it.
I swallow hard.
This—this man before me—this isn’t the King of Assassins.
This is a ghost wearing his skin.
“Then why write them?” I ask quietly.
He lifts his head just enough for me to see his eyes. Bright. Cold. Burning. But underneath that… there’s something raw.
“Because someone must speak to him,” he murmurs. “Even if he cannot answer.”
There’s a tightness in my chest I don’t recognise. Sympathy? Pity? No. Verlaine wouldn’t want pity.
But I can’t understand it. I can’t reconcile the mentor who taught me to slit throats without blinking with the man who writes love letters to a corpse.
It doesn’t make sense.
It shouldn’t make sense.
And yet—here he is.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
His voice cuts through my thoughts like a blade.
I freeze. “…What?”
“You’re wondering how someone like me,” he says slowly, “could break.”
I tense, unable to deny it.
He lets out a hollow, humourless laugh—something I’ve never heard from him before. It echoes against the concrete walls like something sharp snapping in half.
“Even kings bleed, Gin.”
I look away.
Because I trained under him. I owed my life, my skill, my survival to him. And yet I never knew he was human enough to hurt.
“I won’t let anyone touch your letters,” I say quietly.
At that, his hand finally stops shaking.
“…Thank you,” he murmurs.
The word is so soft I barely hear it.
So gentle it doesn’t sound like him at all.
I step back toward the stairs, but I look once more before leaving.
And there he is:
Verlaine, the man feared across continents, the assassin who carved legends into every shadow—
writing another letter with trembling fingers, like each word is a prayer to someone who can’t answer.
Someone he can’t forget.
And I realise something that makes my stomach twist:
Power doesn’t prevent loneliness.
Strength doesn’t fend off grief.
Even the strongest fall apart when no one is watching.
Except I am watching.
I always am.
And maybe that’s why he calls for me—
his student, the only one who sees him not as a king, not as a killer,
but as a broken man still trying to write to someone who will never write back.