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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/HArsh_the_PRO on 2026-08-09 17:36:31+00:00.

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I wasn't the best hitman in the world, but I was good enough.

Good enough that people found me without advertisements, without business cards, without a website. They heard whispers. A friend of a friend knew someone who knew me. That's how it always worked.

One of the strange things about being a hitman is that you don't really need marketing. If you're good at your job, word gets around. If you're bad at it, word gets around even faster.

Either way, people find you.

I'd been doing the job for years by then. Long enough to develop a reputation. Long enough that when someone knocked on my door unexpectedly, they usually weren't selling something.

They wanted someone gone.

People often imagine killers spend their nights wrestling with guilt. Maybe some do. I never did.

I killed people for money. That was the truth. Simple enough.

The day you start calling yourself a hero is the day you become more dangerous than the people you're pointing a gun at.

That didn't mean I had no standards. Everyone has standards. Mine just happened to be lower than most people's.

I didn't kill children. I didn't torture people. And I didn't enjoy the work. Beyond that, life got complicated.

The couple arrived on a Tuesday afternoon. The husband knocked twice. The wife stood beside him staring at the floor.

I invited them in and offered coffee. Neither touched it.

The husband looked exhausted. The wife looked broken. Not sad. Not angry. Broken. I'd seen enough grief over the years to recognize the difference.

Eventually the husband slid a photograph across the table. A man in his forties smiled back at me. The kind of smile that immediately made me dislike him.

"What did he do?" I asked.

The wife finally spoke. "He hurt our daughter."

The room became very quiet.

"There was evidence." I nodded. "There were witnesses." I nodded again. "The charges were dropped."

Of course they were. Money had a way of making problems disappear. Especially when those problems were wearing expensive suits.

To be honest, I would've done that one for free. Not because I was a good person. Good people don't shoot strangers for money. But everyone has lines. And men who hurt children happened to cross mine.

"My fee is five thousand."

The husband blinked. "That's all?"

"Moral compass discount you could say."

For the first time since entering my apartment, he almost smiled. Almost.

I spent the next week watching the target. Learning routines was ninety percent of my job. The actual killing was easy.

The man left for work every morning at eight. Returned home around nine. Drank too much. Talked too loudly. His girlfriend looked much younger than him. Every Saturday night she left around nine and didn't return until after midnight.

The pattern repeated twice. That was all I needed.

The following Saturday I parked two streets away and walked the rest. No cameras. No security. No witnesses. Honestly, some people made my job embarrassingly easy.

I knocked. "Who is it?" a voice shouted from inside. I knocked again. Footsteps approached. The door opened.

The man looked annoyed. Then confused. Then frightened.

I shot him once in the chest. The suppressor reduced the sound to little more than a cough. He stumbled backward. I shot him again, before he hit the floor. At the place where it would hurt the most and drain him out of any sort of pride he still had.

The second shot wasn't necessary. I knew that. But sometimes professionalism and personal opinion overlap. That was one of those times.

I left before the body stopped moving. The drive home should have been uneventful.

Instead, it changed my life.

About thirty minutes outside the city, I approached a crossroads and saw someone standing in the middle of it.

Not walking. Not crossing. Standing. Waiting. For me.

I slammed on the brakes.

The guy looked young. Hoodie. Jeans. Hands in his pockets. Normal. At least until he looked at me. Then I noticed his eyes. There was something deeply wrong about them. Not physically. They were just too calm. Like he knew how every conversation ended before it began.

I got out of the car. "Move."

The stranger smiled. "Hey, John."

My stomach tightened. I didn't know him. But he knew me. In my line of work, that was rarely good news.

My hand immediately went for my pistol. A second later I was staring at a banana.

I blinked. Looked at the banana. Looked at him. Looked back at the banana.

"What the fuck?"

The stranger laughed. "Oh John, you won't be needing your toy."

For the first time in years, I felt genuinely nervous. "Who are you?"

He chuckled. "Hell. That word follows me around everywhere."

The silence stretched. Finally he sighed. "Anyway, John, I'm here to present you with an offer."

"I don't accept offers from strangers standing in the middle of nowhere."

I turned to walk back toward my car. I couldn't move. Not metaphorically. Literally. My body simply refused to cooperate.

The stranger shrugged. "What can I say? I really wanted your attention."

That was the moment I stopped pretending he was a normal human being.

"Okay," I said slowly. "What exactly are you?"

His smile widened. "Now we're asking the interesting questions."

He stepped closer. "Tell me, John. How long do you think you can keep doing what you do before ending up in prison?"

I shrugged. "Eventually? Probably."

"What if I told you that would never happen?"

That got my attention. "What do you want?"

"Friendship."

I laughed. Actually laughed. Because it was such a ridiculous answer.

"Friendship?"

"Among other things."

He tilted his head. "Every now and then I'll give you a name."

"And then?"

"You kill them."

"That's it?"

"That's it. I mean, you're already doing it, aren't you? I'll also pay you your usual charges if that's a concern."

He wasn't wrong. I already killed people. This wasn't asking me to become something new. It was asking me to continue being exactly who I already was.

"You're wondering where the catch is."

"There's always a catch."

"Of course there is."

"What is it?"

His smile returned. "You'll find out eventually."

I should've walked away.

Instead, I held out my hand.

"So do we have a deal?"

The stranger's grin became almost childlike.

"We do."

We shook hands. His skin felt impossibly hot and impossibly cold at the same time. Like holding fire and ice together. I pulled away quickly.

A flash of lightning illuminated the road. I blinked. He was gone. Completely gone. The road stood empty. As if he'd never been there at all.

Two months later he appeared in my kitchen. I nearly dropped my coffee.

"Morning, John."

He was sitting at my table. In front of him sat a red envelope. I wasn't even surprised anymore.

"Breaking into people's homes is rude."

"Technically I didn't break anything."

He pushed the envelope toward me.

"Your first assignment."

Inside was a photograph and an address. Nothing else. The target was a human trafficker. A genuine monster. I killed him.

Two months later another envelope arrived. Then another. Then another.

Years passed. The names kept coming. Murderers. Human traffickers. Abusers. Violent gang leaders. The kind of people whose deaths made the world slightly easier to tolerate.

And true to his word, I never got caught. Witnesses forgot details. Security cameras malfunctioned. Evidence vanished. One time a police officer drove past me while I was carrying a rifle to my car. He didn't even look twice.

The stranger had kept his promise.

Unfortunately, promises are often more dangerous than lies.

The first time something felt wrong was six years into our arrangement. The target was a journalist. Not unusual. But nobody had hired me. The name had come from the Devil. Like always.

I investigated him. A habit I'd never completely abandoned. The man wasn't a criminal. Just a journalist asking questions about a series of disappearances.

Still, I completed the job.

Then came a lawyer. A professor. A priest.

Most people think curiosity kills cats. What they don't mention is that it ruins people too.

The lawyer had represented people who claimed they had escaped strange agreements. The professor had spent years researching supernatural bargains. The priest had been helping people walk away from them. And the journalist had been investigating disappearances connected to all three.

Suddenly the pattern became impossible to ignore.

None of them were connected to each other.

They were connected to him.

The next time the Devil appeared, I was waiting.

He materialized in my living room and sat on my couch. Without asking. As usual.

"Hello, John."

"Who are you?"

He smiled.

"We've known each other for years and that's still your question?"

"Answer it."

He leaned back.

"Lucifer. Satan. El Diablo. The Morning Star. The Adversary. The Tempter." He paused. "I'm probably forgetting a few."

"That's a lot of names."

"When you've been around as long as I have, people get creative."

I expected to feel something dramatic. Fear. Shock. Disbelief. Instead I just sat there. After all the things I'd seen him do over the years, that answer wasn't particularly hard to digest.

"You've been using me."

The Devil laughed.

"Of course I have."

"You could've hired anyone."

"I could have."

"Then why me?"

The Devil smiled.

"You were good at it."

I hated how reasonable that answer sounded.

Then I asked the question that had been bothering me for months.

"How long have you been interf...

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