LOGINPOV: Felix The second day, Dante's team at the first address reported movement, a figure, male, matching Martin's general description, entering the building at mid-morning and departing forty minutes later carrying a bag that suggested he was managing supplies, moving things between locations, the maintenance behavior of a man who was settled somewhere but not static. The figure moved on foot, which was either confidence or the practical choice of someone who understood that vehicles created records, and turned into a commercial district two blocks from the address before the team lost visual.Forty minutes in the building. The address was a possibility, not a certainty. Martin operated in the grey space between certainties, had always lived there, had built his entire method around the principle that certainty was the thing you denied your enemy while cultivating it for yourself. But a possibility was more than we had yesterday and the direction of travel was the right one. I told
POV: FelixMarco and his team recovered the new compound accelerant that just ordered. We kept Strack close so he could keep communicating with Martin and get all the necessary information on where and how to deliver the new shipment. We would use that information to track down Martin and save Selina and her friend Amaya. The laboratory was not what I expected. I had imagined something clinical, the sterile, deliberate workspace of a man who approached chemistry with the same detachment he brought to everything else. What we found instead was organized chaos, the accumulated evidence of a mind that worked in layers, with equipment stacked on equipment and notes covering surfaces in a handwriting so small it required close reading to parse. It was the workspace of someone genuinely in love with the work, which was perhaps the most disturbing thing about Emil Strack, that he brought real passion to the applications he had chosen for his intelligence.The compound was on the thir
POV: FelixStrack was found at the first location, not the second. Dante had weighted the second more heavily based on recent activity in the area, and I had split the team evenly between both sites rather than committing disproportionately to either, which was the correct decision and also the decision that meant I was not present when Strack was located, which meant I received the confirmation via Marco's voice on the phone rather than in person.I took the call in the car and said bring him to the safe house on the north side and don't damage him beyond what the situation requires and make sure he understands that cooperation is the only version of tonight that ends with him still breathing.Marco said understood and ended the call. I sat in the back of the car with the city moving past the windows and thought about Emil Strack, about the kind of man who takes a research background built on legitimate science and applies it to the specific problem of ending lives in ways that l
POV: FelixDr. Voss agreed to meet me at seven in the morning. Not at his home, I hadn't asked for that and he hadn't offered it, understanding without discussion that what we were about to talk about required a location that belonged to neither of us, a neutral space with no history attached to it. We met at a coffee shop on the western side of the city, the kind of place that opened early for the people who needed somewhere to be before the world caught up with them. He was already there when I arrived, sitting at a corner table with a cup of something untouched in front of him.He has that look on his face, the look of a man who had rehearsed this conversation many times over six years and was now discovering that rehearsal had not adequately prepared him for the reality of it. He was in his late sixties, slight, with the precise hands of someone who had spent a career doing careful things with them. He looked at me when I sat down with an expression that contained equal parts re
POV: Felix I finally reopened the case file of Elsa, living through the pain again just to uncover the secret behind her sudden death that seems to be the beginning of my troubling record of deaths and missing persons. I have never counted her as a victim before, I don’t even speak about her because it hurts to think about it, it opens up old wounds, bringing back memories that I’ve long overcome. I have to force myself to face that pain and uncover the truth.I had not opened this file in six years. Not because it didn’t exist, I had kept it the same way I kept everything, like a man obsessed with keeping records. I have always believed information was the only honest currency, but some files are not about information. Some files are about the specific weight of a loss that you have decided, with the quiet determination of survival, not to revisit until you can afford to.It’s funny because I could not afford to now, either. But I opened it anyway. I’m doing this for Lina, and fo
POV: Felix The warehouse address Ryan had given me was forty minutes away. I made it in twenty-five. I stood inside with a flashlight and looked at what Martin had left behind, and I understood that Ryan had told me the truth.There were things in that warehouse that should not have existed. Things that connected too many places, too many times, too many losses. I walked through slowly, touching nothing, reading everything, and the picture that assembled itself in my mind was one I had never considered, not once in all the years I had spent searching for enemies outside my own family.So close…So fucking close…The enemy had been so close, the enemy had stood at my wife’s funeral, he had a face I knew, had also known my entire life, and had used that familiarity as the finest cover in the world, because no one looks closely at what has always been there. I stood in the center of that warehouse for a long time, alone, the flashlight cutting a single pale circle in the dark, and
POV: Selina “H… H… How did you know I fell in the bathroom, I never said that to anyone, Martin. How did you know?” I asked in shock, my hands shaking in fear as I realized that he was also wearing a blue jean and boots like my attacker. I looked around me and almost all the guys around me had the s
POV: FelixI sighted Martin Moore amongst her friends and it pissed me off to see her chatting so freely with him. Simon Wilson was there as well, but he wasn’t in her circle, he didn’t even go near her. I’m guessing that he is posted at her for hanging out with me. I don’t care if he wants to hate h
POV: FelixIt had taken everything in me to stop me from forcing myself on her when our bodies collided. She was at her most vulnerable and wished to take control over her when she was too weak to put up a fight. I held her, comforting her, trying to make her see the thrill of getting so scared all f
POV: Selina“Stay back!Stay back! Don’t come any closer!Stay the fu*k away from me, stay away!” I yelled at him, my heart beating in fear as I realized that the cops were no longer here. I’m alone with him and there is no telling what he would do to me. He looked surprised by my reaction, I could tel







