"We are not done here. You are one to talk," she said, as he turned back to face her fully now. Her eyes glittered with a challenge. "Were you not sleeping with another man's wife yourself, Lyu? Did you not get her pregnant? And what did you do about it? You allowed another man to raise your own daughter, gave her away like she was nothing, so that she could inherit wealth that was never truly hers to begin with."Lyu's hands curled into fists at his sides, but he said nothing. He allowed Lyana to grow up in the Rodriguez mansion because he thought it was the best thing for her. She did not need to be kidnapped as a child from a father whom she had no knowledge of his existence. Federico Rodriguez was the father Yvonne ever showed to her. He thought it was right to leave it that way for the time being. Nobody had the right to judge him for doing so."Have you come back now to claim her?" Melissa's laugh was brittle, cruel, as if mocking the very thought of that. "News flash, old frien

Twelve hours. Seven locations. Nothing.Adrian Blood stood in the mouth of a broken doorway, staring into the seventh warehouse of the night, the dust in the air catching what little moonlight slipped through the shattered skylights above. His golden suit had long since been abandoned for something less conspicuous, and the soot and blood staining his shirt told the story of everything that had come before this moment."Virus, give me something. Anything." Adrian Blood demanded, he could not waste another hour searching an empty warehouse. It was better if the system could tell him if the place was truly holding the prime minister or it was just another blind end, another waste of valuable time."Scanning." A pause, longer than usual. "I am detecting an unusually dense security network within this structure. Cameras, motion sensors, and something else I cannot immediately identify. My attempts to penetrate it are being actively resisted.""Resisted how?""As though something on the ot

For one suspended heartbeat, nobody watching could tell what had happened.The masked leader's body folded sideways, the revolver slipping from his fingers as his knees buckled beneath him, a dark stain already spreading fast across his chest. In living rooms and pubs and hospital corridors across the country, a ragged cheer broke out, sudden and disbelieving, the sound of a nation exhaling all at once."He got him! He actually got him!""It's over. It's actually over!"In the university dormitory, students who had been sitting in stunned silence now leapt to their feet, embracing each other, someone laughing with joy shown on their face. The nurse in the hospital waiting room sank into a chair, pressing both hands over her mouth, murmuring thank you, thank you, thank you to no one in particular.But the celebration curdled fast.Because the Prime Minister had not moved. He remained kneeling exactly where he had been, blindfold still in place, and it took a moment too long for the cam

The bar sat in a part of the city that did not officially exist on any map, tucked between two buildings so nondescript that most people walked past the alley entrance a hundred times without ever noticing the door was there at all. Inside, the lighting was dim by design, amber bulbs casting long shadows across empty tables and untouched chairs, the whole place in a creepy form of silence.Only the bartender stood at his post, represented by the shape of a stranger man in the far corner of the room, polishing glasses and whatnot. This he had been doing for the past hour.The man who entered carried a briefcase, black leather, unremarkable. It was the kind that could have belonged to any traveling salesman or mid level bureaucrat. He moved through the room without hesitation, slowly with calculated steps and each one an act of theatre. He settled into the chair across from the only occupied table.James Halton sat waiting, his suit pressed to a sharpness that seemed out of place in the

The two days given by James Halton's client did not reach before he made his move many years ago. Infact, it was the very next day after his meeting with the woman. The address led James Halton to the far end of the city, past neighborhoods that grew progressively poorer with every passing block until he reached a stretch of slums that the rest of Ravendale seemed determined to forget existed at all. Children ran barefoot through streets lined with rusted metal and sagging wooden structures, their laughter strange and stubborn against the backdrop of such visible poverty. Maybe joy had simply refused to notice how little it had to work with. Or maybe there was something else which he had failed to notice.He found the orphanage exactly where the folder said it would be, a low building with a freshly painted sign despite the crumbling walls around it, and he approached in the plain gray uniform of a cleaning contractor, a disguise chosen specifically because nobody ever looked twice at