Chapter 3: Project Heir

Ivana’s POV

I couldn't tear my eyes away from the photograph.

Fake. It had to be. A cheap Photoshop job, an AI render, or a heavily edited picture pulled from an archive before the safehouse fire four years ago. My brain frantically scrambled for every logical excuse to reject the paper sitting on the table. 

Then my thumb brushed over his left wrist in the picture, and my heart completely stopped.

Twisted twice around his arm was a faded, frayed length of blue paracord—the ridiculous, uneven knot I had tied for him on his tenth birthday when he refused to stop crying after breaking his collarbone. And right above it, a thin, jagged white scar cut straight through his left eyebrow from the time he fell out of the old tree in our backyard.

It was him.

Luka was alive. Somebody had pulled him out of that burning house, erased his name, and kept him locked away in the dark while I spent four years bleeding for this organization just to numb the pain of losing him.

Lucky for me, the tears failed to drop. Tears were a luxury for people who had time to waste, anyway. 

Instead, a hot, blinding wave of rage hit me. Before the Director could even blink, I lunged across the wide desk, my hand slamming into his throat, dragging him forward until his expensive suit jacket bunched up tight in my knuckles.

"Where is he?" I snarled, my voice dropping into a lethal, vibration-whisper. "Where are you keeping him?"

The Director blankly looked at my face, irritation swimming in his eyes. With a slow, infuriating movement, he reached up, wrapped his thumb and forefinger around my pressure point, and peeled my hand off his neck. He smoothed down his collar, adjusting his tie as if I had done nothing more than brush a speck of dust off his shoulder.

He didn't answer my question. He didn't answer even one.

"You have forty-eight hours to report to the Ashcroft Estate," he said smoothly, ignoring the murderous promise written across my face. "Your arrival has already been scheduled."

"No," I spat, stepping back, my hands dropping to my sides into tight, lethal fists. "I refuse. I'd rather die."

He shrugged, his expression completely blank. "That can easily be arranged."

I refused to fucking bend. I didn't care about his threats, his authority, or his power. I wasn't some desperate street orphan who caved the second someone waved a contract and a threat in my face. I was the top operative in this facility, and if he wanted me dead, he’d have to send half the building to put me down.

"You think this is about your fertility, Sokolov?" The Director leaned back, tossing a secondary medical file onto the desk between us. "You think we picked you because you have a pretty face and a functional uterus?"

I glared at him, refusing to take the bait. "Why else? You talk like there could probably be some other magical reason. I'm not dum-"

"Compatibility," he replied, tapping his finger on the thick folder. "Out of four thousand female operatives, biological matches, and bloodlines tested over the last six years... exactly one returned a viable match score. You."

I frowned, a dangerous tension pulling tight behind my eyes. "Compatible with what?"

"That is vastly above your clearance level. Try not to pry."

He didn't explain further. He just let the mystery sit there in the cold air, dense and suffocating the crap out of me.

"Alpha Alfonso has rejected thirty-two surrogate candidates over the last four years," the Director continued, sliding another file forward. "None of the introductions worked. Some candidates suffered complete rejection within hours. Some vanished. Some simply died in their sleep. No one outside his inner circle knows why."

I stared at the pages of blacked-out names and redacted autopsy reports. Questions stacked on top of questions, but I refused to give him the satisfaction of asking them.

"This is your final warning, Ivana," the Director said, his tone dropping into an icy, final cadence. "If you walk out of that door right now without signing, your brother dies tonight. We will incinerate his body, purge his medical records, and erase every single proof that Luka Sokolov ever drew breath on this earth."

The room fell into an agonizing, suffocating silence.

I looked at the Director. I looked at the contract. Then, without saying a single word, I turned on my heel and walked straight out the door.

To anyone watching, it looked like a cold, heartless surrender. It looked like I had chosen my own freedom over my brother's life.

They didn't know me at all.

The second the iron doors of the facility shut behind me, the cold night air hit my face, and my internal clock started ticking. 

I wasn't signing that paper, and I sure as hell wasn't letting them touch a hair on Luka's head. I was going to find him myself, tear through whoever was holding him, kill the Director, and then put a bullet straight through Alpha Alfonso's forehead to finish the job I was hired for.

Simple.

I knew the agency's layout better than the men who built it. If Luka was alive and under 'private care,' he wasn't in a public hospital. He was being held at Sub-Level 4 of the Sector B safehouse—the dark facility three miles off the main highway used for very valuable assets.

Twenty minutes later, I was perched on the perimeter wall of the compound.

I didn't hesitate. I dropped into the dark like a ghost, my combat knife drawn. I bypassed the main thermal grid, disabling the external camera loop in four seconds flat using a pocket jammer. Two perimeter guards stepped around the eastern corner on a routine sweep. I didn't give them a chance to draw.

I hit the first one from behind, driving my elbow into his temple before locking his neck in a sleeper hold, dropping his limp body silently into the bushes. The second guard turned, but I was already in his space—trapping his wrist, twisting his arm back until his shoulder popped with a dull crack, and slamming his helmet against the concrete wall.

I grinned slightly at how easily this came to me. 

I snatched his keycard, swiped through the steel doors, and ducked into the service corridors. I moved down the stairs, sweeping through three security checkpoints, taking down three more guards before they could even key their radios.

I was a phantom. A force of nature.

Finally, I reached the end of Sub-Level 4. A single reinforced titanium door stood at the end of the hall, marked with a bright red biohazard sign.

This is it.

My chest heaved as I swiped the stolen card. The locks hissed, disengaging one by one. I raised my suppressed pistol, kicked the door wide open with a violent thud, and swept the room with my barrel.

"Luka!"

The word died in my throat.

The room was totally empty. No hospital bed. No life support equipment. No guards.

Just a single metal chair standing in the center of the cold floor, a small wooden table beside it, and a clean white envelope resting under the dim fluorescent light.

My heart plunged straight into my stomach.

I stepped slowly into the room, my boots echoing ominously off the bare walls. I picked up the envelope, my thumb ripping it open. Inside was a single index card with one line written in black ink:

You chose exactly what we expected.

Before my brain could even process the words, a loud CLANG rang through the hallway.

The door behind me slammed shut, the locks snapping into place with deafening finality. The bright overhead lights flickered once, twice, and completely died, plunging the room into pitch blackness.

BZZZZZZT!

Emergency alarms began screaming violently, red warning lights flashing through the darkness. High-pressure hiss filled the air as sweet-smelling gray sleeping gas began pouring rapidly from the ceiling vents.

I covered my nose, firing three rounds straight into the door lock, but the bullets just ricocheted uselessly off the reinforced steel. The gas hit my lungs, my knees instantly buckling as a terrifying, paralyzing numbness raced through my veins.

As my vision blurred and the floor rushed up to meet my face, the brutal, horrifying reality slapped me in the chest.

It was a setup. The rescue mission, the safehouse, the guards... It was all a trap. They hadn't reacted to my rebellion—they had planned for it. They knew me too well.

I wasn't the hunter anymore.

For the first time in my entire life... I was the one being hunted.