Elias Ward

Rain slid down the city like it was mourning something forgotten. Elias Ward walked through the night with the quiet precision of someone who had studied humanity from the outside his entire life. Since childhood, he’d known he was different. Doctors used words like psychopathy, but to Elias, it was simply the truth: he felt no fear, no guilt, no empathy. Emotions existed in others like distant constellations—visible, predictable, irrelevant. He learned early how to mimic what he lacked. A nod, a polite smile, the correct pause before responding. These gestures allowed him to blend in, though still people sensed something cold behind the fa?ade. They avoided his eyes without knowing why. Elias preferred it that way. Distance made the world clearer. His life became a series of controlled routines: observing, calculating, mapping the behavior of others like lines on a blueprint. He moved through the city without leaving ripples, a ghost with a heartbeat. Nights were his favorite—quiet streets, empty cafés, shadows that didn’t ask questions. He didn’t seek connection. He didn’t believe in it. The café on 3rd Street was one of those forgotten places he gravitated toward—dim lights, chipped tables, a clock that could never decide on the right time. It suited him. It kept the world at arm’s length. But that night, she walked in. A woman with steady eyes and rain-damp hair, carrying an unsettling calm into the room. She didn’t flinch when her gaze brushed against his. She didn’t shift uncomfortably or instinctively recoil the way others always did. Her presence didn’t disrupt the silence—she seemed to belong to it. Elias watched her as she settled into the corner, as if she had stepped into the one place in the city untouched by chaos. Something faint flickered inside him, a subtle fracture in the numbness he had worn like armor. Their meeting was simple, unspoken—yet it echoed through the quiet of his mind. For the first time, he felt the pattern shifted