The black flash drive sat where Jamil had left it—like a loaded weapon without a trigger.Kabri stared at it from across the monastery chamber, his hands stiff with the memory of blood. The snow beyond the windows was thick now, veiling the mountains in silence. The kind of silence that came before revelations. Before confessions.Before war.He approached it slowly, as if it might detonate. He knelt, picked it up, and stared at the tiny etched letters on the casing: MK-0.MK?Malik Kabri?The zero froze his breath.He wasn’t a man.He was a version.The Drive AwakensKabri slid the drive into the old laptop Evelyn had once used to draft forged embassy papers. A low mechanical whirr began. Static, then folders. Dozens of them. Labeled not by names, but by days.Day 1 — Recruitment Test (Cairo Café) Day 17 — Loyalty Trigger Simulation (Mogadishu) Day 53 — Betrayal Conditioning (Beirut Bombing) Day 142 — Evelyn Deployment Authorization Day 204 — Hollow Bridge Execution Plan Day 205

The snow outside had thickened overnight, blanketing the forest in a deafening silence. The wooden walls of the cabin groaned gently with each gust of wind, as if the earth itself sighed under the weight of too many secrets. Inside, a weak fire flickered in the hearth, casting dancing shadows across the cabin’s dim interior. Kabri sat alone in the corner, knees pulled to his chest, staring into the flames like they were the last remnants of a life he no longer recognized.His face—grizzled, bruised, blood-smeared—betrayed the storm inside. Every breath he took came jagged, forced, as though he was fighting not to scream, or maybe just not to die. His knuckles were raw from pounding the wall earlier, his voice gone from shouting at ghosts that wouldn’t answer.Amir was asleep in the other room. The boy hadn’t spoken in days. The trauma of Evelyn’s death, the fire, the escape—it had all folded into silence, like someone had unplugged the life from his small body. Kabri had tried talking

The hallway was silent, a corridor of rotting memories inside a forgotten government compound buried in the Portuguese hills. Kabri hadn’t planned to return here—he thought he’d burned this place in his mind years ago. But the encrypted coordinates Evelyn left behind, etched onto the back of a photograph, had led him here. And something in him needed to know what was inside.The rusted steel doors creaked open with a groan as he pushed into the chamber.The walls were lined with mirrored panels—some cracked, some intact, others entirely blackened by age or smoke. The air was thick with dust and abandonment, but the lights above flickered alive, one by one, like they had been expecting him. Like someone—or something—wanted him to remember.This was the Mirror Room.The place Fred had used for his psychological tests on agents. A cruel chamber of self-confrontation, where men met the worst versions of themselves and cracked under the pressure. Kabri had walked others in here. Watched th

The sky over the ruins was a deep, pulsing orange—smeared with smoke and flame as if the heavens themselves were burning in anticipation. Kabri had seen many wars. Set many fires. But nothing like this.This fire was personal.The Lisbon compound, once a hidden stronghold of secrets and sorrow, now bled fire from every corner. Explosions echoed from the west wing, sending charred timber into the air like dying birds. The fuel tanks had gone up faster than expected. Kabri’s exit was compromised.And he knew it was no accident.This was Jamil’s doing.Kabri moved through the smoke with Amir’s knife strapped to his hip and Evelyn’s recording still ringing in his ears. He carried no rifle. Only a sidearm. His instincts were raw, nerves stripped to the bone.He reached the old sparring hall—a wide octagonal chamber once used for agent training. Now it burned.And in the center of that firestorm stood Jamil.Shirtless. Ash covering his arms like war paint. A scar ran down his chest—one Kabr

The ash hadn’t settled.The flames were gone now, reduced to simmering embers in the blackened wreckage of the compound, but the heat still pulsed in the air like the memory of violence. Kabri stood alone beneath a scorched tree on the hill just above the site. The branches, stripped of all leaves, jutted into the gray sky like broken fingers.Behind him, Amir lay inside the hidden snow-covered van they’d escaped in, wrapped in every spare jacket Kabri could find. He hadn't spoken since they fled. Just silence, breath, and eyes full of things no child should have seen.Kabri stared ahead, but he wasn’t seeing the smoke anymore.He was listening.And then—footsteps.Not hurried. Not stumbling.Deliberate.Jamil.He emerged from behind a crumbling wall, limping but upright, his face covered in soot, his left eye swollen shut. A thick trail of blood ran down from his scalp. He walked with the same calm arrogance that had once made Kabri admire him.Kabri raised his pistol.“Don’t,” he sa