The Perfect Candidate

"What is your name?" Hazel asked sharply. She leaned across her pristine desk at the recruitment agency, scrutinizing the applicant sitting on the other side.

"Derrick Grover." Kaelen kept his voice even and his posture relaxed.

Hazel narrowed her eyes. A fleeting, unexplainable sense of familiarity tugged at her mind as she studied the contours of his face. She tilted her head, trying to place where she might have seen him before, but the memory refused to surface.

Across the desk, Kaelen fought a silent, intense battle to mask his sheer disbelief. He remembered Lyra's cousin as an annoying teenager who constantly third-wheeled their dates. Now, she had blossomed into a stunning woman. More than that, she looked strikingly, heartbreakingly identical to Lyra. The physical resemblance was a sharp ache in his chest, pulling him into a tide of agonizing nostalgia.

The rhythmic, impatient tapping of Hazel's pen against her clipboard snapped him back to reality.

"Mr. Grover, I need you to focus." Hazel flipped open his file. "Why do you want to be a chauffeur with us?"

Kaelen stuck to his forged backstory, offering a weary sigh to sell the lie. "A demanding nine-to-five corporate job took too much out of me. The stress was eating me alive. I just desire a simple driving job for peace of mind."

Hazel lowered her gaze to his meticulously crafted resume. The fabricated documents detailed a history of reliable, unremarkable employment designed to pass any background check. Kaelen knew his qualifications were flawless. He also knew he was practically guaranteed the position. Silas had secretly orchestrated the sudden withdrawal of all the other top candidates through swift, untraceable hacking. Silas had either bought them off or buried their applications deep in the digital trash. The chauffeur position was already his to lose.

Recognizing his spotless record and perfect credentials, Hazel looked up. A glint of capitalistic mischief danced in her eyes. She realized she held all the leverage, given the sudden lack of viable competition.

"This is an easy job, Mr. Grover. I am sure you understand that." Hazel folded her hands over the file, stepping into an aggressive negotiation tactic. "You will be paid a meager two thousand and eight hundred. We do not provide any accommodation, nor do we cover any food expenses. Your working hours are set from seven-thirty in the morning until three in the afternoon. Furthermore, you will have mandatory on-call availability every single weekend."

Kaelen suppressed a massive surge of joy. The money and the terrible hours meant nothing. Being near his child meant everything. He offered a warm, genuine smile. "I agree to those terms."

Hazel internally rejoiced, thrilled at her own negotiation skills. She had just successfully saved the company eight hundred coins on payroll. She maintained her stern, unimpressed expression and stood up from her chair.

"We shall see if you actually have the skills to back up this resume. You have a final, practical test. Drive me directly to the hospital right now."

Passing the impromptu driving test with flying colors, Kaelen navigated the bustling city streets with smooth precision. Shortly after, he found himself walking down the sterile corridors of Oasis Hospital. The scent of antiseptic and the low murmur of nurses charting vitals filled the air as he followed Hazel.

Stopping outside the doorway of Lyra's father's hospital ward, Kaelen froze. He watched Hazel step inside the stark white room. Kaelen stayed near the frame, his gaze bypassing the medical equipment and locking onto a small figure near the corner of the room.

A little girl was peeking shyly from behind her grandmother's legs.

Kaelen smiled to himself. His chest tightened with an overwhelming, suffocating wave of paternal emotion. He could not look away from those big, curious eyes. His heart hammered against his ribs.

*We will get to know each other very well soon, my daughter!* he thought, his gaze fixated on the child.

He mapped every detail of her tiny face, soaking in the reality that his daughter was finally standing just a few feet away. Yet, in his emotional fixation on his child, Kaelen committed a foolish, uncharacteristic oversight. The fearsome warlord, a man globally feared for his razor-sharp intelligence and flawless situational awareness, failed to observe the severe medical condition of Lyra's parents lying in the adjacent beds. He did not notice the harsh beeping of the life-support monitors, the pale fragility of their skin, or the grim reality of their failing health. This blind spot in his perception was a staggering lapse in judgment—one that would later come back to bite him severely.

Meanwhile, miles away on the twenty-seventh floor of the Zenith Police Bureau, the atmosphere was suffocatingly grim.

A highly classified meeting unfolded inside a darkened, secure conference room. The bright beam of a projector cut through the gloom, illuminating a curvaceous, spectacled young intelligence woman standing at the front. The harsh light cast long shadows against the walls as she presented a series of brutal, high-resolution crime scene photographs.

"The thirteenth police bureau in the southern region cracked down on an illegal abattoir recently." The young woman spoke with a tight, clinical voice. "They made a horrifying discovery while gathering evidence on the facility's management."

She clicked a remote. A collective gasp echoed from the seated executives.

A mound of dismembered bodies filled the frame, stacked haphazardly across the blood-soaked concrete of the abattoir.

"We found exactly fourteen severed heads at the scene. Efforts to piece the deceased back together have failed. The body parts were fragmented into tiny pieces."

The Head of the Ministry of Security sat at the center of the heavy mahogany table. He swallowed hard and looked away from the gruesome imagery, scanning the pale faces of his colleagues. "This is the worst massacre Zenith has seen since its advent. What else do we have?"

The young woman clicked the remote again. A new photograph appeared on the screen.

"An hour and a half prior to that discovery, we found another body in an abandoned house in the southern district. The victim was a local doctor." She pointed to the mangled remains. "The body exhibited signs of extreme, prolonged torture before being dismembered."

She adjusted her elegant spectacles, projecting a new slide containing airport surveillance footage. "After reviewing extensive camera feeds, we identified the primary suspects. They arrived at Zenith via private plane just days earlier."

She aimed a red laser pointer at the screen, circling the face of a tall, imposing man.

"This is Kaelen Vance. He is an outlaw on the run after brutally assaulting a victim with a weapon six years ago."

One of the veteran supervisors leaned back in his leather chair, crossing his arms with an arrogant scoff. "He committed an armed assault? Then issue a warrant. A simple, quick arrest for the old crime will close this chapter before it escalates."

The young woman shook her head, revealing a chilling caveat. "We cannot do that. The victim's wealthy kin never actually filed a police report against him. The old case does not technically exist on paper."

A heavy silence fell over the room. The supervisors exchanged uneasy glances.

"Who are we really dealing with here?" The Head of the Ministry demanded, rapping his knuckles against the desk. "Why are we dedicating a classified briefing to men with no active warrants?"

The young woman braced herself. She was about to drop a bombshell that would unsettle the entire room of hardened veterans.

"We ran their biometric data through global intelligence networks. The younger suspect, Kaelen Vance, is the feared leader of the Crimson Dragons." She shifted the laser to the second man in the footage. "The man beside him is his associate, a well-known, international mass murderer."

A pin drop could be heard in the conference room. The mere mention of the Crimson Dragons was enough to drain the color from the faces of several high-ranking officers. This was an organization that operated above the law, commanding private armies and wielding enough power to topple small governments.

The Ministry head did not falter, though he deeply recognized the extreme gravity of the situation. Facing the very syndicate known globally for inciting civil wars in the east and south was a nightmare scenario. He leaned forward, planting his elbows on the desk.

"Are you certain these cases are related to those two men?"

The young woman winced, her professional facade cracking for a fraction of a second. "We are fairly certain based on the sheer brutality and the specific MO. However, we possess zero concrete evidence tying them to either scene."

The Ministry head frowned deeply, envisioning the impending diplomatic disaster. Arresting the leader of the Crimson Dragons without solid, undeniable proof would be akin to dropping an atomic bomb directly on Zenith's fragile political landscape. It could trigger a bloodbath in the streets that the local police force could never contain.

Before anyone else could speak, a sharp, piercing beep echoed from the young woman's earpiece.

She suddenly took a sharp, audible breath of shock. She pressed two trembling fingers to her ear, listening intently to the breaking report filtering through her comms. The color vanished from her cheeks, leaving her face ashen in the glow of the projector.

"Sir! There is a report of another massacre!"