You always said you’d never be the villain. But there it was. Your tag. Gold-plated. Leading a crew called Nyx’s Wraiths . The same name you once doodled in the margins of my notebooks when we were nineteen and too broke to care about anything except the next sunrise.

— Your former second-in-command. Your almost-everything.

You’ve built an empire out of pixels and latency. A hundred players report to you. They call you “Bishop.” They don’t know you cried during the third act of La La Land . They don’t know the way your hand used to find mine in a dark theater, just to check if I was still there.

I almost sent a message. Something casual. “Nice take on the Meridian heist.” But I stopped. Because what I really wanted to ask was: Is this where the soft part of you went? Did you bury it in the server room? Or did you just learn to armor it so well that even I can’t see the seam?

And I’m sorry I was the first.