Chapter 10 - The Reaper's Last Mission
Twenty years after the night Noah found me beneath the snow, I returned to the same mountain.
I was older.
Slower.
But alive.
Noah stood beside me.
He was twenty-nine now.
A successful doctor.
A good man.
Goliath's collar hung from his hand.
The old dog had died peacefully years earlier.
Noah placed the collar beneath a tree.
“He saved both of us.”
I nodded.
“He saved more than that.”
Noah looked at me.
“What do you mean?”
“He saved the part of me I thought was already dead.”
Snow began falling.
The same kind of snow that had nearly killed me.
But this time, I wasn't afraid of it.
Noah smiled.
“You know what people call you now?”
I laughed.
“I don't care.”
“They call you the Reaper.”
“I know.”
“But they're wrong.”
“How?”
“You don't take lives anymore.”
I looked at him.
“What do I do?”
“You give people another chance.”
I smiled.
Maybe that was the greatest transformation of all.
I had spent twenty-five years building a reputation around death.
Then a nine-year-old boy showed me the value of life.
He didn't know my name.
He didn't care about my money.
He didn't care about my enemies.
He saw a man buried beneath the snow.
And he refused to leave him there.
That simple act changed everything.
The traitor who wanted me dead had believed my greatest weakness was mercy.
He was wrong.
Mercy had become my greatest strength.
The boy who saved me became my family.
The dog who refused to leave me became a legend in our home.
And the man they once called the Reaper finally understood the one thing he had spent his entire life missing:
A life isn't measured by how many people fear you when you're alive.
It's measured by how many people would come looking for you when you're lost.
I looked at Noah.
He smiled.
Then we walked home together through the snow.
May you like
And for the first time in twenty-five years, I wasn't walking toward a war.
I was walking toward home.
