Chapter Seventy: Echoes in the Ice

The gym inside Eve's estate held nothing but silence and the heavy, rhythmic thud of bare knuckles against leather.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

No wraps. No mask. Sweat ran into her eyes and stung there, and she didn't slow down to wipe it away. Every strike carried a chaotic, volatile charge she couldn't quite bleed out of her system no matter how hard she hit. The raid should have given her peace. She'd dismantled Marcus's operation, stared down his decoy's terrified face, proven beyond any doubt exactly who still owned this war.

Instead her head stayed entirely, infuriatingly full of him.

Some things are better left unknown, Eve.

Valentino's voice looped in her ears on a track she couldn't shut off, drowning out every tactical thought she tried to force to the front. She could still feel the phantom pressure of his fingers locking around her wrist in that penthouse room, immovable, deliberate. He'd used her real name. Not Viper. Not the Ice Queen. Eve — a name she hadn't handed to anyone outside her own squad in longer than she could easily measure.

She threw a vicious right hook that sent the bag swinging wild against its chain, then stopped, breathing hard, forehead pressed to the cool leather. She hated this particular flavor of vulnerable. Hated that a masked stranger had found a gap in armor she'd spent years reinforcing and left her feeling this thoroughly unmoored. He knew things about her past that she couldn't access on her own. He knew about Italy. And instead of handing over a single useful answer, he chose riddles in the dark, filling her head with wanting instead of truth.

"You're going to break your knuckles hitting it like that."

She snapped around fast, hand darting toward a waistband that held nothing tonight but training gear.

Aria stood in the doorway, arms crossed, eyes tracking the split skin across Eve's knuckles and the tight, suffocating line of her jaw. "Ryan finished combing the data we pulled before we torched the safehouse. Found fractured routing numbers tied to the shadow network." A beat, deliberate. "They trace back to Specter."

The name cut clean through everything else in Eve's head. Specter. The phantom architect behind the Board's entire treasury. Her actual target, buried somewhere underneath every smaller fight she'd been picking since coming home. The one person who might hold the blueprint to whatever program had carved the hole in her own memory in the first place.

"Did you trace them?" Her voice dropped automatically into its coldest register.

"Trying." Aria watched her carefully, the way she'd taken to doing more often lately. "But the encryption's nothing we've seen before. Layered behind corporate firewalls thick enough to belong to a government. Whoever's actually running Specter's accounts is hiding behind infrastructure worth billions. Real infrastructure. Real audits. Real shareholders somewhere, probably having no idea what's running underneath their own company."

Eve turned back to the bag, eyes narrowing as something cold and unwelcome started assembling itself in the back of her mind. A billion-dollar infrastructure. A shadow network with no visible seams. A masked man who moved like smoke and carried himself with the unmistakable authority of someone who already owned considerably more of the world than he let on.

The truth isn't a prize, Eve. It's a cage.

Was Valentino protecting her from something. Or was he protecting something from her — steering the Ice Queen's attention anywhere except toward the one throne she actually needed to see clearly? Every possessive touch, every dark half-answer, could just as easily be strategy dressed up as intimacy. He'd been filling her mind with shadow for weeks now. She was only just beginning to wonder whether that had ever been an accident.

"Tell Ryan to double the scrapers." Her voice came out dead level as she caught the swinging bag and forced it still with one hand. "Cross-reference Specter's accounts against every major European tech and shipping conglomerate on record. If she's hiding behind a billionaire's empire, I will tear that empire down to the studs to find her."

Aria nodded and turned to go, then paused in the doorway. "Viper. You've been bare since that alley."

Eve caught her own reflection in the mirrored wall — face fully exposed, sharp and unyielding, nothing left between her and the room anymore.

"Good," she said quietly, to the space Aria had already left behind. "Let them see me. Let *him* see me. The mask is gone. I'm done playing by his rules."

She reached for her water bottle, mind already locking onto a collision course she could feel building somewhere just past the horizon. Valentino wanted her doubting herself, wanting him, distracted by riddles instead of answers. Fine. If he wouldn't hand her the truth, she'd go find Specter herself, and drag every last shadow he was hiding behind out into the light along with her.