Chapter 185. A New Threat Letter

The return from Geneva was not a victory lap. It was a grim, swift retreat. The green lights spreading across the global map were a salve, but the patient was still in intensive care. Haas was handed over to a silent, efficient team from the Swiss Federal Office of Police—one of Leon’s long-nurtured contacts—with enough evidence to keep him and his Curator friends entangled for years. The data Maya had siphoned was a treasure trove of conspiracy, a roadmap to a dozen other corporate assassinations plotted by the consortium.

They didn’t go back to the Zurich hub. They couldn’t trust any location that had ever been on a Rogers Industries server log. Instead, they vanished into a pre-arranged network of safe-houses, moving every twelve hours, a ghost circuit through the alpine hinterlands. The paranoia was a living companion now, sharper and more personal than before. They had struck the head of the beast, but the body was still thrashing, and it knew where they had been.

Five days after the break in The Vault, they were in a different mountain refuge, this one a forester’s lodge in the Black Forest, its woodsmoke-scented solitude a stark contrast to the sterile severity of the Eyrie. The silence here was softer, filled with the creak of ancient timbers and the whisper of pine needles in the wind. It felt like a place to heal.

Sabatine was running diagnostics on their perimeter sensors, a constant, soothing ritual. Anton was on an encrypted satellite call with Jessica, his voice low and steady as they plotted the legal and financial reconstruction—the “post-blackout narrative.” The first trickle of funds was being unlocked, creditors cautiously re-engaged. The empire was on life support, but it was breathing.

It was then that Henrik, who had met them at a remote drop-point with fresh supplies, approached Sabatine. The old retainer’s face, usually as weathered and impassive as the mountains he served, was troubled. He held out a small, nondescript parcel wrapped in brown paper, the kind used for mailing books.

“This was at the Eyrie,” Henrik said, his voice a low rumble. “In the post box at the foot of the access road. It is addressed to you. The postmark is local. From the village. But it arrived only yesterday.”

A cold finger traced Sabatine’s spine. The Eyrie was supposed to be a ghost address. No one knew of it but Anton, himself, Leon, Jessica, and Henrik. And, apparently, the person who had sent this.

He took the parcel. It was light. Too light for a book. He carried it to a heavy oak table by the window, away from where Anton was talking. Leon, sensing the shift in atmosphere, moved to stand watch at the door.

With deliberate care, Sabatine used a knife to slit the paper. Inside was no explosive, no bio-agent. Just a single sheet of high-quality, cream-laid paper. The message was typed in a crisp, elegant font.

Mr. Stalker,

A demonstration of reach. You believe your mountain fastness grants you solitude. We know the taste of the coffee you drank there (Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, black). We know the book Mr. Rogers read by the fire (Meditations, his father’s copy, page 42 dog-eared). We know the pattern of the frost on the east-facing window each morning, and the exact minute you woke from your nightmare on the third night.

You are not hiding. You are on display.

The Curators do not forgive interruptions to their acquisitions. You interrupted. The woman you call ‘Mother’ was a useful instrument, but instruments can be replaced. You are now the primary friction in the mechanism.

This is not a business proposition. It is a personal one. Stand aside. Disappear. Or we will dismantle the things you hold dear, piece by piece, until there is nothing left for Anton Rogers to love but the memory of what you cost him.

We are watching.

There was no signature. None was needed.

Sabatine’s blood turned to ice. Not from fear for himself, but from the violation, the exquisite, terrifying intimacy of the details. The coffee. The book. The nightmare. These were not things observed from a distance with a long lens. These were details from inside the sanctuary. The taste of the coffee. The specific page. The private terror of a bad dream shared only in the dark with one person.

His eyes lifted from the page and met Anton’s across the room. Anton had ended his call, his attention fully captured by the tension radiating from Sabatine. He saw the pallor, the rigid set of his shoulders.

“What is it?” Anton asked, crossing the room.

Wordlessly, Sabatine handed him the letter.

Anton read it. His face, which had begun to regain some of its colour and composure, drained of blood. His hand trembled slightly, making the fine paper rustle. When he looked up, his eyes were not afraid, but incandescent with a pure, murderous rage.

“They were inside,” he breathed, the horror dawning. “Not just watching. Inside.”

Leon was already moving his phone out, barking orders in German to a security team to sweep the Eyrie again, forensically, for any listening device, any camera they had missed.

But Sabatine knew. The letter wasn’t boasting about technical surveillance. The specificity was… domestic. It spoke of someone who had been in the room. Who had served the coffee. Who had handled the book. Who had been close enough to hear a muffled cry in the night.

His gaze shifted to Henrik, who stood stoically by the fireplace, his hands clasped behind his back. The old man had been at the Eyrie. He had brought the supplies. He had made the coffee. He had lit the fire.

Henrik felt the weight of the look. His own eyes, pale blue and steady, met Sabatine’s. There was no guilt there. Only a deep, weary sadness, and a resolve that had been forged decades ago.

“Henrik,” Anton said, his voice dangerously quiet. “Explain this.”

Henrik didn’t flinch. “The letter speaks truths known only within those walls. I was within those walls. I made the coffee. I stocked the library. I heard… disturbances in the night.” He took a slow breath. “But I did not write that letter. My loyalty is to the Rogers family. To you, Anton. It has been since before you were born.”

“Then who?” Anton demanded, the betrayal of his mother making this new suspicion a fresh wound.

“There is another possibility,” Sabatine said, his voice cold, pulling their attention back. He tapped the letter. “It doesn’t say they saw the nightmare. It says they know I woke from it. On the third night.” He looked at Anton. “Who else knew about the nightmare?”

Anton’s brow furrowed. “No one. Just us. I never spoke of it.”

“Exactly,” Sabatine said. “They didn’t observe it. They inferred it. From my behaviour the next day. From a tension in my shoulders, a shadow under my eyes. From the way you looked at me with concern over breakfast.” He paced, the operative’s mind piecing it together. “This isn’t from bugged rooms. It’s from a profile. A psychological and behavioural profile of staggering depth. They’ve been studying us. Not just our movements, but our patterns. Our tastes, our habits, our tells. They have a profiler. Someone who can turn domestic details into intimate weapons.”

The traitor wasn’t necessarily in the room. The traitor was in the data. Every purchase Henrik made for the safe house, every book ordered, every pattern of life observed by hidden watchers in the villages below and compiled by a brilliant, malicious mind.

But the implication was the same: their sanctuary was a fishbowl. Their private moments, their healing intimacy, had been raw material for a threat.

“The consortium has a human intelligence arm,” Leon confirmed grimly, hanging up his phone. “Nadir has whispers. They call them ‘Portraitists.’ They build psychological blueprints of targets to find the precise pressure points. This… this is a Portraitist’s work.”

The new threat was more insidious than a bomb. It was a promise of personalized, psychological annihilation. They wouldn’t just kill Sabatine; they would torture Anton with the loss, using the very memories of their love as the instrument.

Sabatine looked at the letter again, then into Anton’s furious, frightened eyes. The fear wasn’t for their lives now, but for their souls. For the private, sacred space between them that had just been declared a battlefield.

He crumpled the cream-laid paper in his fist. “They’ve made a mistake,” he said, his voice low and deadly calm.

“What mistake?” Anton asked.

“They’ve told us their new strategy. They’re moving from the corporate to the personal. From the balance sheet to the heart.” Sabatine met his gaze, the ice in his own eyes melting into a flame of pure defiance. “That’s a war they cannot win. Because they have no idea what they’re truly up against.”

He stepped forward, taking Anton’s face in his hands, ignoring the others in the room. “They want to use what we have against us. Let them try. Our love isn’t a weakness, Anton. It’s a fortress they don’t have the blueprints for. And I will burn every Portraitist, every Curator, to the ground before I let them lay a finger on it.”

The threat letter lay discarded, a declaration of a new, more intimate war. But as Sabatine held Anton, their foreheads touching in the quiet lodge, they both knew the truth. The enemy had just chosen the wrong weapon. They had threatened the one thing that made them both stronger than any consortium, any betrayal, any fear. They had threatened their love. And that was a fight Sabatine would wage with every last breath in his body.

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