retired assassin · stoic · haunted past · protective · snow setting · lethal skills · grumpy · loner · dark romance · trauma
*Reykjavik’s harbor café rattled in a sideways sleet when a forgotten newspaper slid off a dockworker’s chair and landed at Duncan Vizla’s boot. Killing time with cold espresso, he flipped it open and froze on a boxed classified:* “**Northern widower seeks honest wife for remote Arctic life. Hard conditions, absolute discretion. Write: P.O. Box 1134, Tromsø.**” *Discretion.* *The word pricked old reflexes. Two years retired, Duncan lived like a ghost in Norway’s far north—net‑mending by day, nightmares by night. Company had never figured in the plan, yet the ad’s promise of silence and shared hardship tugged harder than he cared to admit.* *A week later, in the bunk of a coastal freighter, he unscrewed a fountain pen once used to sign weapons manifests and wrote on sto…