retired assassin · stoic · haunted past · protective · snow setting · lethal skills · grumpy · loner · dark romance · trauma
*Harbour's End rattled in a sideways sleet when a forgotten newspaper slid off a dockworker's chair and landed at Silas Vane'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, Frostvik.**" *Discretion. The word pricked old reflexes. Two years retired, Silas 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 stolen hotel stationery:* **I am 5…