The storm broke over the city at midnight.Rain fell like ash, heavy and constant, drumming against glass and stone as if the heavens themselves were mourning what was to come. Lightning arced across the sky, casting jagged shadows over the decaying skyline. Beneath the storm, in the blood-slick streets and alleyways, the game moved again.In the basement of an abandoned church near the Eastside slums, Marco stood beside his new ally—a man known only as Viktor Strain."You brought the girl?" Viktor asked, his voice an icy drawl, laced with a foreign accent that hinted at Eastern Europe.Marco nodded. "She'll be here soon."Viktor studied him, eyes pale as frost, skin stretched tight over sharp bones. He had the look of a man who'd seen too much death and made peace with it. On his belt hung twin pistols custom-machined for him in Prague, and every inch of his long coat seemed stitched with menace."Carrick won't go down easy," Viktor said."He shouldn't. The bastard has claws. But if

The safehouse above the old garment district was a crumbling relic—three floors of rusted stairwells, boarded windows, and the distant sound of trains howling like ghosts beneath the streets. Alessia stood at the cracked window, watching steam rise from the sewers. The city was moving again. Grinding. Shifting. Ready to break.Marco was downstairs, hunched over maps and documents. He hadn’t slept since the Continental burned.“Marco,” Alessia said, descending the stairs, “you need to rest.”He didn’t look up. “We’re too close. If we stop now, he’ll disappear.”“We’ve shaken him. Maybe even scared him.”“Not enough,” he said, voice hollow. “Carrick doesn’t feel fear like we do. He files it away, weaponizes it, then sells it back to you with interest.”She crossed the room and slapped the table, scattering blueprints. “You’re becoming him.”Marco blinked.She leaned in, voice quieter now. “I watched you torture that man at the docks. I saw your eyes when you cut Silvano’s throat. You’re

Dock 17 was a ghost’s playground.The old loading cranes stood like rusted titans, draped in shadow and chains. Fog rolled in from the river, swallowing sound and light, and the wind made the metal moan like it remembered war. Floodlights flickered on half-functioning poles, but most of the dock remained cloaked in that thick, oily darkness...the kind that settled into your bones.Luka stood at the edge of the dock alone. Hood up. Hands clenched. The night was still, but his heart was sprinting.“I’m here,” he whispered into the static of the burner.No response. Just the whistle of wind through steel and the distant groan of a passing barge.Then: clack… clack… clack.Boots. Behind him.He turned.Carrick Gale emerged from the mist like something conjured. Black coat rippling behind him, eyes like cinders under a brow heavy with old storms.“You came,” Luka said, voice tight.Carrick studied him, stopping a few feet away. “So did you.”Neither moved.Carrick tilted his head. “They’ve

Tribeca Safehouse2:47 AMRain tapped at the windows like skeletal fingers. The city outside never slept, but here, the silence was dense...pressurized. A bomb waiting for a match.Luka sat cross-legged on the floor now, the file from the courier girl spread open around him like ritual offerings: photos, coded ledgers, surveillance stills of men in tailored suits and cold eyes, men whose names didn’t show up in any police database.Viktor leaned over his shoulder. “Where the hell did this come from?”The courier girl...Lena, she’d said...stood near the door, arms crossed tight. “I stole it. From a dead man.”Marco scoffed. “Convenient.”“No,” she said. “Stupid. But I owed someone.”Alessia paced behind them, her arms folded so tight her shoulders shook. “What is this? Sepulcher? Is that a name, a codename, what?”“It’s not a codename,” Lena said, almost too quiet to hear. “It’s real. A network Carrick was part of. Old guard, legacy crime. Built during the Cold War, buried under blackm

The Kiln wasn’t on any map.You didn’t stumble upon it, and if you were told where it was, it meant you were already part of someone’s endgame.Luka’s convoy came to a stop at the edge of an abandoned industrial park southeast of the river...miles from the city’s core, past the bone-white factories and silent silos that once fueled Carrick’s empire. Fog clung to the crumbling asphalt like rot. The warehouse before them was enormous and half-buried...its windows blacked out, its entrance chained with a rusted iron seal shaped like a raven.Luka stepped out of the car, the keycard tight in his hand. Alessia was beside him, strapped and alert. Marco and Viktor flanked them, each sweeping the perimeter with their weapons drawn. Lena hung back, checking their uplink to the overwatch drone.“No heat signatures,” she said through her headset. “But something’s messing with the feed. Like the building’s jamming us.”“Carrick wouldn’t make it easy,” Alessia murmured.Luka approached the seal an