The Massacre of the Grenadiers

Life as an Intelligence Officer was surprisingly mundane. Niva spent her days sifted through reports, managing low-level informants, and mapping the shifting loyalties of the city's gangs. The pay was good. Donlane had retired, spending his days in the sun, his back slowly straightening, though his hands would never lose their roughness.

The only blight on her existence was her superior officer. Major Granold Rolnifeld.

He had risen fast, fueled by his family name and his undeniable charisma. They rarely spoke, communicating mostly through terse memos and clipped briefings. When they did meet, the air crackled with unresolved tension and old arguments.

Then came the Cytrox file.

It landed on Niva's desk on a rainy Tuesday. An informant, a nervous dockworker looking for a payout, claimed the independent fighter group 'Cytrox' was planning a massive strike. The target: The Road of Lion, the city's ceremonial avenue. The date: Two days from now.

At first, it looked legitimate. Maps, timelines, even a list of explosives. But something gnawed at Niva. It was too clean. Too easy. Intelligence wasn't a puzzle with all the pieces in the box; it was a mosaic made of broken glass.

She dug deeper, pulling double shifts, ignoring Granold's orders to "finalize the report." She tracked down a captured Cytrox foot soldier held in a black site. He was terrified, not of the law, but of something else. Under pressure, he broke.

"The Lion is a decoy," he whispered, his eyes wide. "They aren't targeting the road. They want the head."

The plan wasn't to bomb an empty street. It was to assassinate Mayor Hewond Lynnia. The Mayor was scheduled to greet citizens at the City Market—miles away from the Road of Lion—at the exact time of the reported attack.

Niva ran to Granold's office, bursting in without knocking. He looked up, annoyed, a glass of expensive brandy in his hand.

"They're going for the Mayor, Granold," she panted, slamming the file on his desk. "The Road of Lion is a diversion. They'll be at the City Market."

Granold picked up the file, leafing through it dismissively. "The intel on the Road is solid, Niva. Multiple sources. We have units mobilizing there now."

"That's what they want! They want you looking the wrong way!"

"You're seeing shadows, DeRosa," he sneered, tossing the file back. "Maybe if you spent less time trying to outsmart me and more time following protocol, you'd understand how this works. We secure the Road. End of discussion."

"People will die, Granold!"

"Dismissed, Officer."

Two hours later, the explosion didn't happen on the Road of Lion.

It happened at the City Market.

The initial reports were chaotic. Gunfire. Smoke. Panic. Cytrox militants, disguised as fruit vendors and cloth merchants, had opened fire the moment the Mayor's carriage stopped. Tripwired grenades hidden under cobblestones turned the market square into a slaughterhouse.

Mayor Hewond Lynnia was dead. Alongside him lay thirteen civilians.

Niva stood in the command center, the radio chatter a cacophony of failure. Granold stood by the map table, his face pale, the arrogance drained away. He looked at her, and for a second, she saw the boy from the academy, scared and wrong.

She didn't say "I told you so." She simply turned and ran.

She drove like a madwoman, siren wailing, but the streets were gridlocked with terrified citizens. She abandoned the car and ran. She tried to call her father. The line was dead. She tried again. Static.

Please, Papa. Please be at home.

She reached the perimeter of the City Market. The police line was holding back a sobbing crowd. Niva flashed her badge, pushing through the officers who tried to stop her.

"Officer! You can't go in there!"

She didn't hear them. The smell hit her first—cordite and iron. The market was a ruin of overturned stalls and shattered stone. Bodies were covered with tarps, the triage teams moving slowly among them.

She walked through the carnage, her breath hitching in her throat. She counted the tarps. One. Two... Mayor Lynnia... Five...

Then she saw it. Near a crushed flower stall, a hand protruding from beneath a yellow sheet. A large, rough hand. On the back of the hand, a birthmark shaped like a crown.

The world went silent.

Niva fell to her knees. She pulled back the sheet. Donlane DeRosa stared up at the smoke-choked sky, his eyes wide with a final surprise. He had come to the market to buy flowers. For Heline.

She took his hand. It was still warm. The King of the Sewers, fallen not in his kingdom, but in the light he had worked so hard to give her.

"Niva!"

The voice was distant. She didn't look up. Granold was running towards her, his uniform disheveled. He stopped a few feet away, breathless. He looked at the body, then at Niva's face. He saw the crown on the hand. He saw the badge on Niva's chest, now stained with her father's blood.

He reached out a hand. "Niva... I..."

She stood up. She didn't look at him. She looked through him, past him, into a future that was now as empty as the sewers. She didn't scream. She didn't cry. The part of her that had been broken at the academy simply turned to dust.

She turned away from Granold, from the body of her father, from the failure of the system she had trusted. She walked into the crowd, her figure blurring with the smoke and the shadows.

Granold watched her go, unable to move, the weight of thirteen innocent lives and one broken soul crushing him into the pavement.

She was never seen in Thornus again.

The history books called it the Massacre of the Grenadiers. They mentioned the Mayor. They mentioned the tragic loss of civilians. They never mentioned the Intelligence Officer who knew the truth, or the King who died buying flowers.