The desert was merciless at night.It didn’t chill. It stung. The wind came dry and quick, hissing over rusted fences and broken walls like it remembered the battles once fought on this land—and demanded more blood to water it.Saeed Al-Rai—once Kabri—knelt beside a cracked mud barrier, scanning the horizon through a pair of military-grade thermals. The convoy was late.Too late.Behind him, Yusuf crouched, tapping commands into a rugged satellite pad, the screen dimmed to avoid attention. Around them, six other fighters—lean men from Yusuf’s elite squad, all draped in sand-washed keffiyehs—lay silent in the dust, rifles aimed toward the narrow dirt road that split the wasteland in two.“It’s him,” Saeed whispered.Three heat signatures had just turned the corner, barely visible on the feed. Two box trucks, armored underneath. And a Land Rover—Fred’s signature for high-value ops.Fred wasn’t in it. Of course not. He never touched dirt.But his money was.And his future.Yusuf turned,

Evelyn held the envelope like it was dipped in acid.No return address.No stamp.Just her name — handwritten in that familiar, slanted script she hadn’t seen since the night the manor burned.The day Kabri died.She stared at it, unmoving, as if it might vanish if she blinked.A knock sounded on the door of her small Edinburgh flat.She didn’t answer.The knock came again — louder this time.She reached for the letter opener instead.The paper inside smelled of smoke and something older… incense? Dust?She unfolded the single sheet.The first sentence punched the breath from her lungs."If you’re reading this, it means I chose silence over shadow — not death."Her knees buckled.Evelyn sat hard on the arm of the couch, hand trembling as she read the rest aloud in a whisper only she could hear."I watched from afar the night you looked into the flames and cried. I wanted to reach out, to stop you from mourning a man who wasn’t gone — just changed. I had to become Saeed Al-Rai to finis

The wind off the Mediterranean carried the scent of salt and rust. In the port city of Oran, Algeria, the sun scorched the rooftops, but Kabri felt only ice in his veins.He had waited years for this moment.The café was small, tucked between a broken appliance shop and a dried-up pharmacy. From the outside, it was just another smoke-filled hole where old men argued over football and politics. But inside, in a corner with his back to the wall, sat the last thread in a tangle that Kabri had tried to rip apart for far too long.His name was Haroun Lahlou.He used to be one of Fred’s men—a mid-tier bodyguard with enough military training to earn respect and just enough cowardice to survive.He was at Hollow Bridge.And unlike Jamil, he lived.Kabri took his seat without ordering anything. He didn’t need coffee. He needed blood answers.Haroun looked up. Time had not been kind to him. A jagged scar curved across his cheekbone, and his left eye was now milky white. His once thick arms had

Yusuf’s villa in Tangier was silent, the kind of silence Kabri had grown to fear. The moonlight filtered through slanted shutters as he stepped inside unannounced. No guards, no servants. Just that suffocating quiet — the kind that followed the scent of betrayal.He moved like a shadow, his boots making no sound against the mosaic tiles. One hand gripped the suppressed pistol at his hip. The other held the encrypted flash drive he’d retrieved from the Aurès Mountains. It was already copied, distributed, ready to blow Fred’s entire empire sky high.But that wasn’t why he was here.He was here because something stank in the heart of Yusuf’s circle. Someone had leaked Kabri’s location three days earlier — only hours after he decrypted Jamil’s final drive. That couldn’t have been coincidence.He turned the corner into the main drawing room.Yusuf sat alone, legs crossed, a tumbler of honeyed whiskey untouched in his hand. His phone lay on the table. The room was dim, lit only by a flicker

The smell of antiseptic stung Kabri’s nose as he stepped into the dim-lit backroom of a forgotten tattoo parlor on the eastern edge of Vienna. The shop had no signage. No website. No records. That’s why he chose it.A single bulb buzzed overhead, casting long shadows over the stained black chair that waited for him like a silent judge.The artist, an old Roma man with cataract eyes and a shaky cigarette in hand, didn’t ask for a name. He just nodded once and pointed to the seat.Kabri sat and slid his shirt off slowly, revealing the scar across his chest—deep, puckered, the mark he’d carved himself in Algeria after Yusuf’s blood pact, to remember Jamil. It had once bled with purpose. Now it throbbed with ghosted regret.“You sure?” the man asked in broken German.Kabri answered in Arabic. “Cover it. Bury the name.”The tattooist’s eyes flicked down at the scar. Then he nodded again and began heating the needle.It wasn’t vanity.It wasn’t reinvention.It was erasure.The name "Kabri"