The rain hadn’t stopped for days in Inveraray.It was the kind of persistent downpour that turned cobblestone streets into glistening veins of grey, where shadows slithered into alleyways and the skies held their breath in anticipation of blood. Kabri stood beneath the eaves of a weathered pub near the edge of town, watching the world blur through the glass.He hadn’t slept in two days.Fred’s Scottish network was small but meticulous—every transaction filtered through a man named Marcus Ballantine, a former City banker turned ghost accountant. A man whose clean suits and whiskey-drenched charm masked rot deeper than any alley Kabri had ever walked.Tonight, Marcus would die.And Kabri would be the rain.In his hand, Kabri held a burner phone displaying the final coordinates.They led to a Georgian manor tucked behind the treeline near Dùn na Cuaiche, a stone-walled estate with two exits, a greenhouse, and three bodyguards on rotation—according to Yusuf’s informant. But Kabri no longe

The call came in just after midnight.Evelyn, wrapped in a wool sweater, sat alone in the living room of the moorland cottage. Kabri hadn’t returned. His coat was still gone from the hook by the door. The fire was dying low, a whisper of crackling ash. Outside, the wind combed through the tall grass with fingers of ice.She hesitated when the unknown number buzzed her phone.The digits were foreign—but the prefix was British.Against her better judgment, she answered.“Hello?”The voice on the other end was male, accented, firm.“You’re Evelyn, yes?”“…Who’s this?”“I’m calling on behalf of Yusuf. You are currently interfering with something beyond your understanding.”The blood drained from Evelyn’s face.“Excuse me?”“You’ve been marked as a liability. You’ve compromised the target.”Evelyn stood up slowly, every nerve in her body pulling tight. “What target? What are you talking about?”The voice ignored the question. “You were warned once, indirectly. This is your last one. If Kab

Kabri stared into the cracked mirror of a derelict roadside hotel near the Tunisian coast, a flickering bulb buzzing above him like a dying insect. The sink beneath him was stained with rust and dried blood—some his, some not.The man in the mirror didn’t look like Kabri anymore.And that was the point.Three passports lay open on the bed behind him. None bore the name "Kabri." Not anymore.One was Egyptian. One Libyan. The last—Algerian.He chose the Algerian.Name: Saeed Al-Rai. Occupation: Agricultural Consultant. Birthplace: Biskra. Age: 33.The forger in Algiers had been clear: burn your old life or it will burn you first.Kabri already felt the flames licking at his heels.The eyes of Interpol were on him. Fred had placed a million-pound bounty on his head. Yusuf was watching him closely now, too—smiling in meetings, but tracking his every move like a lion in heat.Kabri—no, Saeed—had to vanish before they buried him.The first thing he did was cut his hair.He used a dull ho

The air in the Naples clinic reeked of antiseptic and hidden truths. In the underground operating room of Dr. Vinko Marelli—a ghost surgeon who didn’t exist in any legal database—Kabri lay still under the cold lights, his eyes covered with surgical gauze, heart steady.The room hummed with quiet steel. Vinko, a former army medic turned identity sculptor for the underworld’s elite, didn’t speak unless necessary. He had worked on arms dealers, cartel defectors, and even a fallen prince from Oman.Now he was working on a ghost who used to be Kabri.Two weeks had passed since the staged explosion in Split. Every news outlet covering the Balkans had run some version of the same story: Interpol confirms identity of Algerian mercenary killed in coastal explosion. Photos. Forensics. Obituaries. Anonymous quotes from a neighbor.Fred’s people bought it. So did Yusuf’s. Even Evelyn—he assumed—had mourned him briefly, then folded back into the shadows of her own family mystery.But Kabri wasn’t

The wind tore through the courtyard of Evelyn's ancestral home, thrashing against the stone like a scorned ghost. She stood at the window, arms crossed, eyes lost to the faraway gray that blanketed the hills.She’d heard it from Yusuf’s men.Kabri—dead in an explosion outside Dundee. Nothing left but flame, twisted metal, and silence.They said he was chasing a lead on Fred’s supply routes when the building collapsed.They said it was quick.They said he was gone.She didn’t believe a word of it.Evelyn Fredrickson hadn’t survived a life raised under the shadow of a man like her father without learning to smell lies. And everything about Kabri’s “death” reeked of the same stench that had clung to Fred her whole life—suspicion hidden beneath a shroud of theatrics.Kabri was smart. He was quiet. Too calculated to die in an unannounced blast.No body. No prints. No CCTV.Just silence—and a burned patch of land.Evelyn had read this play before. It was a ghost’s story. Kabri was no ghost.