Marked By the Merciless Mercenary

The building had no name on the buzzer, no doorman, just a keypad and a camera that tracked them from half a block out."This is where you keep people you're deciding whether to kill?""This is where I keep people I've already decided not to." Three locks, unhurried, before the door opened on a space that looked more like an airport hotel than anywhere a person actually lived. Nothing on the walls. "The difference is the whole point right now."She went in because the alternative was the stairwell, the coat, and a version of tonight she had no interest in surviving to remember. The door locked behind her with a sound that felt more permanent than she wanted to sit with."You knew my father." She turned on him, camera bag still clutched like a shield she knew wouldn't work. "Say it. Actually say the words."He set his jacket over a chair, slow, buying time. "I knew of him. I was a junior on a containment team eleven years back. I didn't make the call on what happened to him. I ran the

She played it twice before her hands were steady enough to hand him the phone. The second listen was worse than the first; somehow, the way bad news always sounds more real the second time you let yourself hear it.Ivy, I don't know what's happening; there are men outside the house. Please, if you get this—Cut off there. Eleven seconds. No location beyond the one Ivy already had memorised without ever meaning to, the two-bedroom outside Milwaukee, where she'd grown up learning not to ask what her father did at work, where the kitchen still smelt faintly of the same coffee her mother had bought for thirty years out of habit rather than preference."They have her." Barely a whisper. Her own voice sounded far away to her, like it belonged to someone standing a room over. "They actually have her.""We don't know that." He was already moving, pulling keys from a drawer she hadn't noticed, checking a second phone with a quick, practiced glance before pocketing it. "A recording made under p

They were on the road again before the sky had finished turning from black to the flat grey that passed for dawn in this part of Wisconsin. Diane's note was folded into the inside pocket of Gideon's jacket like something that might burn a hole through the fabric if he left it anywhere else. He'd wiped the kitchen table down before they left, cleared the counter of the two coffee mugs Diane must have used the morning before she was taken, and Ivy had watched him do it without understanding why until she realised he wasn't cleaning. He was making sure nothing in that house could be used against either of them if someone came looking a second time.Ivy hadn't spoken since the lab address registered on his face back at her mother's kitchen table. She sat with her knees drawn up against the passenger door, watching farmland blur past in shades of frost and stubble, and every few miles she caught herself reaching for her phone to check for another message that never came. The silence in the

The text sat on Gideon's screen for a full ten seconds before he made himself pull over onto the shoulder, gravel crunching under the tyres, hazards clicking on out of a habit that had nothing to do with actual danger and everything to do with needing his hands occupied while his mind caught up.Nice try, Gideon.Three words. No signature. He didn't need one. He'd have known Marek's rhythm blind, the particular economy of a man who'd spent a decade learning that unnecessary words were unnecessary risk, and something about seeing it now, out of context, sent a cold thread down his spine that had nothing to do with the message's content and everything to do with what it implied about how closely he was being watched.He called the cabin before he'd even fully processed why.Ivy picked up on the first ring, voice tight. "What's wrong?""Nothing's wrong yet. I need you to check something for me." He kept his own voice level, the way he'd been trained to, though his pulse hadn't slowed sin