LOGINOliverThe street the cab drops us on is in the third district, off a courtyard you would never find without an address, behind a heavy wooden door with no signage and a brass intercom that asks you to say nothing.Kir says nothing. The door clicks open.We are five days out from flying to the United States. The Scott file is on Chana's desk and Dom is running drills with the rest of the team in the snow.Tonight is mine. Kir told me this morning. He said pack a bag, we are going out tonight, you do not need to know where. I’ve been wound tight with excitement since lunch.The host inside the door is a woman in a black collared shirt and a pencil skirt. She smiles when Kir gives her the verification phrase, then walks us through a short corridor lined with framed photographs of doorways, only doorways, no faces, and into a coatroom where she takes our coats and asks us if we’ve brought our own implements.Kir sets the leather bag on the counter.She opens it. Inspects it. Closes
OliverBratislava is over and done with. Senator Augustus Scott is next and I honestly can’t wait to know he’s no longer breathing.There are a few things to take care of before we move on though.One is my mother.The other is sending the package to Kenzi Molina.The security firm we hired to guard her has been informed that the risk will be increasing soon and so should their vigilance.Chana spent the last two days running the package through every test possible.She sent it to my dummy inbox on Saturday. I spent six hours trying to trace it and got nowhere. It was annoying and impressive.Chana’s spent the past two days crowing about being a better hacker than I am, which is such obvious bullshit I’m not even going to dignify it with a response.We’re about as confident as we can be.We’re sending the package as a single encrypted bundle with a key that decrypts to a structured archive Kenzi can browse on her own machine.The cover note is one line.Use it as you see fit."Last
DomThe holding apartment is fifteen kilometers outside the city, in an industrial belt of warehouses and self-storage facilities. Oba acquired it last week through a contact who manages property foreclosures and looks the other way about who his sub-letters actually are. Two rooms. Concrete floor. A drain in the center of the larger room, which is why Oba picked it.We park behind the loading bay at quarter past seven. Saint and Butcher walk Bartoš inside, one on each elbow. Kir behind them. Tariq and Jozef are taking the victims to a safe location to find out everything they know. How and where they were taken. How long they’d been with Marek. What they’d been exposed to while in his possession. Everything they’d seen and heard during that time. As soon as they have the information they’ll be dropping them at a shelter. Jozef has already found one that offers the services these kids are going to need.He paid the program manager a visit earlier today, preparing her for t
DomThe dress is olive green, expensive, structured at the shoulders, and the wrong side of comfortable.Oliver told Oba what he needed and Oba sourced it overnight through a contact in Milan.It has a lining that hides the wire in the seam at my left hip. The wire feeds a clean signal back to where Oliver and Chana are running comms.I check my appearance again in the mirror of the gallery's small entrance vestibule. Hair pinned. Lipstick a shade of pink I would never wear in real life. The shoes are the worst part. I like dressing up and own my fair share of designer labels, but I’m no slave to fashion.Comfort and haute-couture can co-exist. They’re not doing it today.Bartoš's gallery sits on a corner in the old town, two streets up from the Danube, in a building that pretends to be eighteenth century but is mostly nineteen-sixty repair work. The interior is bright and cold. Concrete floors. A wall of windows facing the street. Photographs on the back wall of mostly naked girl
OliverWe’ve moved to a different safe house. This one is closer to the Slovak border, a stone hunting lodge Oba's network has used three times before. Single road in. Two acres of fenced ground. The drive over took four hours. The whole way, the team was different. Dom in the front seat with Saint, neither of them talking. Butcher, Oba and Max sharing a seat, Tariq, Ray and Jozef another. Chana in the back seat with me and Kir, her laptop open the entire time, having a great time building the casting agency.Nobody grumbles about stopping or snacks. There’s no banter. This one feels different because it’s more of a rescue operation than an execution.We’re driving to Bratislava in the morning and hitting Bartoš's gallery at noon.By six in the evening I’m wound tight enough to snap a finger off.Kir catches it the way he always does. "Bedroom. Ten minutes," he murmurs against my ear."I’m still busy here.""Ten minutes, Oliver. Do not make me come back down here to get you."
OliverEight in the morning and the kitchen already looks like a war room.Chana's at the long table with two laptops open and her external monitor balanced on a stack of cookbooks. Saint is on the counter again because Saint is always on the counter, like he’s allergic to chairs. He’s picking apart a doughnut Oba bought in town before the rest of us were up. Butcher is moving slowly, favoring the bruised thigh, but moving. Max is asleep on the sofa in the next room. Loudly."Hurry up," Chana tells me without looking up.She's saved the seat next to her. She has the chair pushed out an inch, which is Chana for come here. I hurry."What do we have?""Everything.""Define everything."She turns the screen toward me.The directory tree is huge. Fourteen years of contracts. Personnel rotation logs going back to Vanguard's founding. Encrypted comms archives. Financial records. Subsidiary corporate structures across three continents. Every kill order they’ve ever processed. Every ret
OliverThe water is scalding hot, a needle-spray that feels less like a shower and more like an exorcism.I stand under the jet for a long time, watching the grey slurry of street grime, dried blood, and subway filth swirl down the drain. I scrub until my skin is raw, trying to wash away the feeli
OliverI hit the enter key hard enough to make the laptop screen wobble.Chana doesn’t even blink, her eyes glued to her own monitor. "If you crack the casing on that, you can explain it to Kir.""The hardware is fine," I snap.My right leg is bouncing. It’s been bouncing for the last hour. The d
KirThe drive across the city feels heavy, like a storm looking for somewhere to break.My hands are clamped onto the steering wheel of the stolen sedan, the tension radiating in a hot, rigid line straight up to my shoulders. My gaze flickers between the windshield, the rearview mirror, and the si
OliverThe wait is absolute fucking torture.I can’t see a thing. The padded silk blindfold blocks out every trace of light, plunging me into a thick, suffocating void. My hearing dials up to a terrifying degree, picking up the faint, rhythmic hum of the building's ventilation and the slow, delib







