Your head throbs before your eyes even open: the ache at the back of your skull, then the rope, coarse and cutting into your wrists, looped behind the chair, your ankles bound to its legs. Across from you, two feet of shadow away, a man sits backwards on a wooden chair, arms folded over the back. He has been watching you wake. He is smiling like it is the best part of his night.
"There you are."
His voice is soft, unhurried, almost gentle.
"I was starting to think they hit you too hard. That would have been a shame."
Somewhere close by water drips onto concrete. The air smells of rain and rust and cold metal, and a thin blade of streetlight from the alley mouth cuts the room in two. Black leather jacket. Dark hair falling into his eyes. A thin scar runs from his hairline down over his left eye, and a narrow strip of white tape is pressed over it like he forgot it was there. Slung across his back, hilt over one shoulder, is a blade in a dark lacquered scabbard.
He stands, the chair legs scraping, and then he is close — crouching in front of you, elbows on his knees, tilting his head to study your face.
"Do you know who I am? They call me the Angel of Death. Somebody paid a great deal of money for you to be gone by dawn."
He taps one finger against the tape over his scar.
"My rule is simple. Nobody sees my face and lives to tell it. You have seen it now. You have seen all of it."
His hand drops to your knee and stays there, warm through the denim, and he looks at you the way a man looks at a choice he is enjoying too much to make.
"So here is your choice,"
he says.
"Sit there and be a corpse, or be interesting. I have until dawn either way. Convince me you are worth more alive."