All Chapters of Shadows of Silk & Steel: A Billionaire's Secret, A Bodyguar: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

The micro-SD card was an illegal sun, burning a hole through Sabe's palm. Rico's arrival had changed all this. He was no longer a passive captive waiting for his fate; he was a fighter in a cell, and the boundary of the enemy had just been marked. Section Seven. The title was an ice in his blood, reminding him walls were not just concrete, but living, breathing entities that could warp reality as they pleased. He was waiting for Anton's lawyers for a trial. By then he'd be buried under a mountain of pristine evidence, and Anton would be… whatever Marcus and his ghostly benefactors intended.He had to leave. Now.The strategy wasn't formulated in an epiphanic moment, but in the hard, calculating awakening of a part of himself he'd tried to entomb: the operative. The ghost. He spent the infinite, empty hours watching. The shift change of the guard at 22:00 was a time for the rush of hellos and utilitarian tedium. The delivery of the plain dinner at 18:00 was by a different, heavier guar

London was a ghost, and Sabe its haunt. He floated through the city's substructures—the storm sewers, the access tunnels, the secret spaces between the glinting spires—a specter of hurt and purpose. The rain had soaked his stolen coat, the water soaking into the bandages beneath, burning on his back with a numb, inescapable pain. Every siren, every shout, every inattentive glance seemed like a beam slicing through the darkness searching for him.He needed a hole in which he could withdraw. Not a hotel, not a flop-house. A place that wasn't there.He remembered a place. An old MI5 safe house from his brief, early liaison days working between departments. A place so old and low-grade it had likely been removed from the live registers, a computer ghost in the machine. It was on a brutal council estate near Vauxhall, a concrete monolith over the Thames, its aesthetic badness its best camouflage.The Chubb seven-lever lock on the reinforced door to the utility room in the basement was impe

AEGIS_ZERO burned itself into Sabe's mind, a bitter scar of fear. It was the plan of their downfall, a plan for his death and Anton's imprisonment. The blunt, bureaucratic callousness of it took his wind. They were not only criminals; they were social surgeons, excising disease with clinical, legal precision.He had to leave there. The body in the stairs was a ticking time bomb. But more than papers were on the flash drive. In the highest directory, besides the dossiers, was a single video file, recorded from last week before the theft. It had only a title by a sequence of numbers. His cursor hovered on it. This was the meat of it. The proof.He clicked play.The film was grainy, shot with a hidden camera at a severe, downward angle, perhaps concealed in a light fixture or a smoke detector. The environment was upscale, all dark wood and plush leather—a private clubroom or a high-end hotel suite. And there they were, caught on film in intimate, incriminating detail.Evelyn Voss recline

The world did not come to an end with a bang, but with a whisper. A thousand whispers, sighing through the corridors of power like a dry, venomous breeze. In Geneva, Anton's universe was disintegrating molecule by molecule. He was in the center of his penthouse, a space that had always symbolized his omnipotence, and was enduring walls breathing inwards, suffocating him. The quietness was not peaceful; it was the stagnant air prior to the storm blowing through. His phone, which had always been a conduit of international powers, was serving as a paperweight.His attorneys had gone quiet, a telltale sign that they were penning their resignation letters.His head of security had suggested tactfully that he "cooperate fully" with the new regime.The questioning was no longer an internal corporate matter. The Swiss Federal Police, based on the international nature and potential for economic terrorism, had taken the lead. They had frozen the principal corporate accounts of Rogers Industries

The buzzing of the dying wasp was the vibration of the phone, the warning that came just before the swarm descended. The fragile peace beneath the bridge was shattered, invaded by the familiar, comforting adrenaline. But it was not the same this time. The fear was still there, cold and sharp, but it no longer tasted so bitter, so lonely.Anton's eyes met Sabe's in the shadows. There were no words of warning, no hopeless questions. The understanding was swift, cellular. Sabe jerked his head toward the south bank, toward a maze of narrow, dim service tunnels that opened into Southwark streets. Anton nodded.They went.Sabe led, a specter gliding through the shadows, his former rigidity counterbalanced by the silky motion of a predator. Anton followed, his own city-boy shoes slithering on the wet stones, his breathing in jerky gasps. He was not a runaway, a tactician and a financier. Yet he kept pace, driven by a now communal fear that was odd.They didn't utter a sound until they were t