Chapter 59. The Shattered Lens

The dregs of cold coffee in Rico’s cup were a bitter, forgotten aftertaste. His final, gut-punching warning—Someone else inside Rogers… permanently—hung in the air between them, a specter that had sucked all the oxygen from the room. The envelope of intel felt like a lead weight against Sabe’s chest, a key to one lock while another, more sinister one clicked shut in the dark.

He was adrift, the café’s mundane sounds—the clatter of cups, the distant traffic—fading into a dull roar in his ears. His mind, a strategist’s engine, was already whirring, trying to slot this new, terrifying piece into the puzzle. A third player. An executioner, not a competitor. Their goal wasn't wealth or power, but a silent, final oblivion for Anton. The sheer, intimate malice of it was a cold hand around his heart.

He had to move. He had to get back to the hotel, to Anton. The urge was a physical pull, stronger than duty, a primal need to place himself between that threat and the man who had become his center of gravity.

He pushed himself up from the booth, the vinyl seat sighing in relief. He gave a curt, final nod to Rico, a silent acknowledgment of a debt settled in the ugliest of currencies. Rico’s expression was unreadable, a stone mask carved with the weariness of their shared, bloody history.

Sabe turned, taking two steps toward the door, his focus already shifting to the streets outside, the route back, the next move.

The universe erupted.

It was not a sound of violence, but of pure, crystalline destruction. The café’s large front window did not crack; it disintegrated. A million shards of glass suspended in the air for a breathtaking second, a chaotic, beautiful, and deadly galaxy born from a single, precise point of impact.

Time didn't slow. It simply broke into a before and an after.

Sabe’s body was a weapon honed by trauma. He was already moving, diving sideways, his shoulder connecting hard with the checkered floor tiles as the glittering hail of glass cascaded down around him. His eyes, wide with a hyper-alertness born of a dozen near-death experiences, tracked backward to the space he had just occupied.

Rico was still standing, his body rigid. For a fraction of a second, he looked merely surprised. Then, a small, dark hole appeared in the center of his forehead. There was no dramatic spray, just a terrible, final punctuation. The life in his sharp, knowing eyes was instantly extinguished. He folded, collapsing into a chair and then onto the floor with a soft, heavy thud, his form now just another piece of the wreckage.

Sniper.

The word was a cold, clean fact in Sabe’s mind, even as the delayed thwump of the rifle shot reached the café, a dull echo of the devastation it had wrought.

Chaos erupted. A woman screamed. Chairs scraped and overturned as patrons scrambled for cover. But Sabe lay perfectly still on the cold floor, his mind racing, reassembling the seconds.

He had been a stationary target for twenty minutes. Back to the wall, a perfect silhouette against the light of the café. The sniper had a clear shot. They could have taken it at any time.

But they hadn't.

They had waited. They had waited for him to move, for Rico to be in the line of fire.

A cold dread, more paralyzing than any fear for his own life, seeped into his bones.

The shot hadn't been meant for Rico.

It had been a calculated, surgical attempt on him. The bullet that had turned the window into a weapon and ended Rico’s life had been intended for the back of Sabatine Stalker’s skull.

The nausea that rolled through him was sharp and cold. This was a new level of play. They weren't just trying to remove Anton’s protector; they were trying to decapitate his defense entirely. They knew who he was. They knew what he represented.

As the screams around him subsided into whimpers and frantic whispers, Sabe slowly pushed himself up. Glass crunched like broken teeth under his boots. His eyes scanned the carnage not with panic, but with a forensic coldness. He needed data. Confirmation.

His gaze found the wall behind the booth where he had been sitting. Lodged in the plaster, at the exact height of his head, was the bullet. It was a dull, deformed piece of metal, surrounded by a starburst of cracked paint and drywall.

And then he saw it. Next to the bullet, a single, large shard of the café window was still wedged in the frame. It was a jagged, perfect lens. Through its distorted clarity, he could see a warped reflection of the street outside, the building across the way, the world that had just tried to kill him.

The shattered lens was a metaphor that cut deeper than any glass. His view of the battlefield had just been irrevocably fractured. The enemy wasn't just Evelyn, or Marcus, or a shadowy assassin. The enemy was a thinking, patient force that understood the value of cutting the strings before toppling the king. They had seen him not as an obstacle, but as the linchpin.

Rico was dead for one reason: he had been in the way of a bullet meant for Anton’s only real chance of survival.

Sabe didn't look back at the body. There was no time for eulogies in a war of shadows. He turned and moved swiftly toward the back of the café, slipping through the kitchen—a world of steaming pots and wide-eyed, terrified staff—and out into the cool, damp air of a service alley.

The intel in his pocket was now a relic from a simpler time. The villa, the prototype—it was all secondary theater.

The real battle had just been declared. They weren't just coming for Anton anymore.

They were coming for him. And as he disappeared into the Geneva gloom, a ghost pursued by ghosts, he knew one thing with absolute certainty: he could not let them win.

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