Chapter 5- Welcome to midnight

Valentina didn't wait to find out who.

She shoved the folder into her jacket without looking twice at what was inside, only dimly aware that it was heavier than paper, denser, a small drive sealed inside plastic rather than the loose sheets stacked everywhere around her.

She was on her feet before she'd finished deciding to stand.

Voices reached her from the stairwell, muffled by the alarm, flattened by something that wasn't quite human.

A modulator, she realized, Whoever was coming down didn't want to be recognized by sound any more than by sight.

Then the shooting started.

Three sharp cracks somewhere above her, followed by a fourth that didn't come alone.

A man's shout, cut off halfway through.

She didn't let herself think about whose voice that had been. She couldn't. Not now.

"Dio mio," she breathed, the words slipping out before she caught them, thin and useless in the vast, cold room.

She ran, low, between the shelves, scanning the walls the way she used to scan a blueprint, looking for anything that shouldn't belong in an archive.

She found it near the back corner, half hidden behind a rack of files: a narrow steel hatch, stenciled with a faded arrow and the word USCITA.

Her father had built himself a way out. Of course he had.

The hatch groaned as she wrenched it open, revealing a maintenance tunnel barely wide enough for her shoulders, dark except for a single dying emergency light somewhere far down its length.

Boots hit the vault floor behind her.

She didn't look back, not fully, but the edge of her vision caught movement at the main door, a shape in black, a rifle raised, and stitched onto the shoulder of his jacket, half lit by the red alarm strobe, a wolf's head in silver thread, teeth bared.

The same wolf from the envelope.

She had no time to wonder what it meant, only to know, with sudden, cold certainty, that whoever led this was not hired muscle acting on someone else's orders.

He moved like a man who owned the room he was destroying.

She dropped into the tunnel and pulled the hatch shut behind her, plunging herself into near total darkness, her own ragged breathing suddenly the loudest thing in the world.

She ran anyway.

Hands out in front of her, palms scraping concrete, knees catching on pipework she couldn't see until it had already caught her.

Somewhere behind the sealed hatch, muffled and distant, she heard more gunfire, then something heavier, mechanical, being set into place.

Charges.

They weren't here to steal her father's archive.

They were here to erase it.

She didn't slow down. Couldn't. The tunnel bent twice, sloped upward once, and every meter of it felt like it might be her last before the air ran out or the ceiling came down or one of those silent, modulated voices found the hatch and followed her through it.

Her lungs burned.

Somewhere in the dark she lost a shoe and didn't stop long enough to care.

Twice she pressed a hand flat against the wall just to be sure it was still there, that the tunnel hadn't narrowed into nothing, that she hadn't run herself into a dead end a hundred meters underground.

"Andiamo," she whispered to herself, half command, half prayer, the word slipping out in the only language that still felt like hers right now.

"Andiamo, andiamo."

A rung ladder appeared out of the dark, leading up toward a thin seam of grey light.

She climbed with her hands shaking, shoved a grate free above her head, and hauled herself out into a service alley behind headquarters, the night air hitting her lungs like something physical.

She had maybe three seconds to feel it before the ground threw her sideways.

The explosion came up through the pavement first, a deep, bone-deep shudder, and then the sound arrived a half beat later, a roar that swallowed every other noise in the street.

Glass rained from windows two floors above her. A wall of heat rolled out of the alley mouth she'd just crawled from, and somewhere beneath her feet, twenty years of her father's secrets were burning to nothing.

She lay against the cold pavement, ears ringing, and understood with total clarity that she was no longer investigating her father's murder.

She had become the next name on someone's list.

For a moment she simply breathed, chest heaving, the taste of smoke and dust thick at the back of her throat.

Somewhere above her, a second explosion, smaller than the first, rattled loose a shower of debris that clattered against the alley's far wall.

She flinched but didn't move, too spent to do anything but lie there and let the building she'd been born walking through burn behind her.

Her hand found the drive still shoved inside her jacket, and she pulled it free with fingers that wouldn't stop trembling.

A single blue light blinked once on its casing, then steadied.

She had no idea how, no idea if it was even meant to work outside whatever machine her father had built for it, but the small screen embedded in its edge flickered to life anyway, lines of code scrolling too fast to read.

Then, for less than a second, one line held still.

PRIMARY CONTACT: LUCIEN VARGA

The screen went black before she could reach for it.

A soft click sounded from somewhere inside the casing, final and complete, the sound of something locking itself away from her forever.

Valentina stared at the drive in her hand, at the blank screen that had just shown her a name she hadn't heard spoken aloud in seven years, and felt the ground tilt beneath her in a way that had nothing to do with the explosion.

Her chest went tight, a pressure that had nothing to do with the smoke still hanging in the air.

For one disorienting second she wasn't in the alley at all, she was somewhere else entirely, some room, some night she'd spent seven years trying not to remember, and then she was back, kneeling on broken pavement with sirens closing in and a name she couldn't explain lodged somewhere behind her ribs.

Sirens rose in the distance, growing louder, converging on the burning building behind her. Somewhere far above, smoke curled black against a sky just beginning to lighten.

She should have moved. She should have found somewhere safer than an open alley two hundred meters from a bomb site.

She sat where she was instead, the drive clutched in one fist, that name still ringing through her louder than anything the explosion had done to her ears.

Her phone vibrated against her hip.

She almost didn't answer it.

Her hands were shaking too badly to trust them with anything, and every number that had called her in the last two days had brought nothing but ruin.

But something made her lift it to her ear anyway, some instinct she didn't have the strength left to argue with.

"Yes," she said, her voice barely holding together.

Silence on the line, for just a moment.

Then a voice, deep, calm, carrying an accent she couldn't place at first and then could, Eastern European, unhurried in a way that made the words land harder than shouting would have.

"Run, Valentina. They're already coming for you."

The line went dead.

She sat frozen against the alley wall, sirens closing in, smoke thickening overhead, the phone still pressed to her ear long after the call had ended.

She would know that voice anywhere.

Lucien Varga was alive.