Chapter 80. The Final Invoice

The derelict mill had served its purpose as a temporary crypt. They emerged into the pre-dawn gloom, the sky a bruised purple bleeding into grey. The stolen car was a liability they couldn’t afford, so they moved on foot, sticking to the industrial riverfront’s labyrinth of alleys and loading docks, two more shadows in a landscape of forgotten industry. The cold was a penetrating ache, a stark counterpoint to the memory of their shared warmth behind the turbine.

The plan was skeletal: get to the Freeport, use the chaos of Leora’s data blast as cover, witness the end, and then… vanish. It was less a strategy and more a direction to fall in. But first, they needed one thing from the lakeside safehouse. Not the suitcase—that was a relic of the old war. They needed the cash Sabe had hidden in a waterproof compartment beneath the floorboards. Their last reserves are disappearing.

It was a risk. The safehouse was compromised the moment they’d left it, a known node in their shattered network. But Sabe argued it with a ruthless logic that Anton had come to recognize as his last line of defense against total helplessness. “They’ve been there. They’ve torn it apart. They won’t be back. It’s the last place they’ll expect us to go. We’re ghosts. We move where the living have already looked.”

It was a gambit born of absolute desperation. Anton, his mind still echoing with the steady rhythm of Sabe’s heartbeat, simply nodded. He had no better ideas.

The approach was a study in silent, hyper-vigilant predation. They circled the block three times, watching from different angles. No static surveillance vans. No loitering figures. The quiet street was just waking up, a delivery van dropping off bread at a café further down. It felt disturbingly normal.

The door, when they reached it, was no longer locked. It stood slightly ajar, a dark, inviting mouth.

Sabe went in first, knife drawn, moving with a liquid silence that belied his injury. Anton followed, his own senses stretched thin, every nerve screaming that this was a terrible idea.

The devastation inside was not violent in a frenzied way. It was systematic. Clinical. The single room had been turned inside out. The mattress was sliced open, its innards spilling onto the floor like grey guts. The floorboards near the window had been pried up—they’d found one of Sabe’s caches. The small table was overturned, its leg snapped. The scent of expensive perfume—Evelyn’s signature scent, Nuit de Bakou—lingered in the cold air, a ghostly mockery of the lake-water smell that had been there before.

They had been thorough. They had been professional. And they had been led by someone who knew the value of psychological warfare.

Sabe moved to the spot near the bed, where a particular floorboard had a faint, almost invisible seam. He knelt and, with the tip of his knife, levered it up. The compartment beneath was empty. The money, the fake passports, the emergency burner phones—all gone.

“We should go,” Anton whispered, the violation of the space settling on him like a physical weight. “Now.”

Sabe didn’t move. His gaze was fixed on something on the floor, near the overturned chair. A single item that seemed placed, not dropped.

A folder.

It was slim, made of a rich, blood-red cardstock. It lay perfectly centered on a clear patch of dusty floorboards, as if on a presentation desk. On its cover, printed in stark, elegant black type, were two words:

TERMINATION: ROGERS

It was not a file folder. It was an invoice. A final bill.

Anton’s breath stopped. The cold in the room seeped into his marrow.

Sabe reached for it, his movements slow, deliberate. He opened it.

Inside was not a sheaf of papers. It was a single sheet of thick, cream linen paper. At the top was the Meridian Collective’s emblem—the compass, the line, the stars and crescent—embossed in gold foil. Below it, in the same elegant typeface:

Client: The Meridian Collective

Subject: Anton Alistair Rogers

Asset Designation: Legacy Liability

Termination Directive: Approved. F*e: Settled.

Method: Asset denial and reputational euthanasia. (See attached psychological profile for vulnerabilities: paternal attachment, control pathology, emergent emotional dependency.)

Executor: E. Voss. Cleaner: D. (decommissioned).

Status: PENDING FINAL SIGN-OFF.

At the bottom of the page were two lines for signatures. One was already filled with a familiar, sharp, looping script: Evelyn R. Voss. The other line, labeled For The Collective, was blank.

It was a work order. A contract for his murder, dressed in the language of corporate strategy. The attached ‘psychological profile’ was their blueprint—his love for his father, his need for control, his growing love for Sabe, all listed as exploitable weaknesses. They weren't just going to kill him. They were going to dismantle him first, using the very things that made him human.

The clinical detachment of it was more horrifying than any shouted threat. He was a problem to be solved. A liability to be terminated. His life had a line item, a f*e that had been paid.

Sabe’s hand trembled minutely where he held the paper. The calm, analytical mask he’d worn since the mill shattered. Anton saw something raw and murderous rise in his eyes, a fury so deep it seemed to vibrate the air around him.

“This,” Sabe said, his voice a low, dangerous rasp, “is how they see you. How they see us.” He looked from the paper to Anton, his gaze blazing. “A ‘dependency’. A ‘vulnerability’.”

He wasn't angry at the threat. He was incensed by the categorization. Their love, their bond, the very thing that had become their strength, was listed here as a flaw to be exploited. A point of failure.

Anton took the paper from his numb fingers. The embossed emblem felt raised, expensive under his thumb. This was the true face of the enemy. Not just greed, but a profound, philosophical contempt for the messy reality of human connection. The Meridian didn't just want his company or his prototype. They wanted to prove that a heart was the ultimate liability.

He looked at Evelyn’s signature. The final betrayer, signing her name to his death warrant with the same flourish she used on quarterly reports.

The sound of a vehicle pulling up outside, tires crunching softly on the gravel path, snapped them both back to the present.

Sabe was at the window in an instant, peering through a slit in the blind. “Black SUV. Two men. Not Zorya. Corporate.” He stuffed the red folder inside his jacket. “Back door. Now.”

They moved as one, slipping through the small kitchenette and out the rear door into the tiny, walled garden that led to an alley. They heard the front door being pushed open, the sound of polite, firm voices. “Geneva Police, we have a report of a disturbance.”

A lie, of course. But a convincing one.

They didn't run. They walked, quickly but calmly, out of the alley and onto the next street, blending into the thin stream of early morning commuters. The red folder was a brand against Sabe’s chest.

They walked for twenty minutes in silence, putting distance between themselves and the safehouse, the invoice, the violation. Finally, on a bench overlooking the lake as the sun finally broke the horizon, turning the water to molten lead, Anton spoke.

“They left it for us to find.”

“Yes,” Sabe said, staring at the water. “A final message. To tell us they know every move, every hiding place. That we’re already dead, we just haven’t stopped moving yet.”

“It’s not a message,” Anton corrected, his voice quiet but clear. The shock had burned away, leaving a cold, clear certainty. “It’s a confession. And a mistake.”

Sabe looked at him.

“They documented it,” Anton said, tapping his own chest where the folder lay against Sabe’s. “They put it on paper. With their emblem. With Evelyn’s signature. It’s evidence. Not just of my murder, but of the Meridian’s method. It’s the thread. The one thing Leora’s data blast can’t provide: a direct, physical link between the conspiracy and the act.”

He met Sabe’s gaze, the CEO’s strategic mind finally finding purchase in the nightmare. “We weren't supposed to take it. We were supposed to be terrified by it, to run. But we have it. It’s their invoice. And we’re going to make them pay for it.”

The safehouse hadn't been breached to find them. It had been staged to break them. But in their clinical arrogance, they had left behind the one piece of evidence that could convict them. A single, red folder that transformed them from hunted prey into witnesses for the prosecution.

The sun climbed higher, burning off the mist. The termination was pending. But the terms of the contract had just changed.

—-