The room shifted the moment Lukas spoke. His voice wasn’t raised, but it carried a weight that pulled everyone into motion. Elise felt it like a shock through her bloodstream. The air in the underground archive was still cold, still thick with the hum of dormant machines, but the atmosphere had changed entirely—no more searching, no more uncovering. Now it was about surviving whatever came next.Elise didn’t hesitate. She turned, pushing past the metal racks and frost-coated crates. Her shoulder brushed a hanging cable, and she barely registered the sting of cold against her skin. Aden was already at the far end of the chamber, checking oxygen levels on the emergency tanks. Elise didn’t call out; she just walked straight to him, grabbed his arm, and said quietly, “We’re moving. Now.”Aden looked up at her, saw the urgency in her face, and nodded. “Where’s Lukas?”“Coordinating extraction,” she said. “Andra’s warning wasn’t just a rumor. Berg’s coming.”Aden shut the tank valve with a

The house felt different the moment Lukas stepped outside.Not unsafe—he would never allow that—but altered. As if the threat had seeped beneath the doorframes during the night and settled there, patient and waiting. The air carried an edge now, a tightness that made every instinct in him sharpen.Caleb, Maya, and two of Lukas’s security men stood near the outer fence, studying the patch of ground where the intruder had crouched. The grass was bent, the soil disturbed, footprints faint but visible.Elise walked beside Lukas, her coat pulled tighter around her against the morning chill. She looked alert, uneasy—but not fragile. She had too much fire in her for that.“What did he leave?” Elise asked quietly.Caleb pointed to the ground. “We think it’s a signal jammer. Designed to suppress a specific set of surveillance frequencies—just long enough to slip through.”Lukas crouched and scanned the dirt himself. “Where is it now?”“In the lab,” Maya answered. “We’re breaking it down.”Elis

The helicopter cut through the low cloud cover like a blade, rotors hammering the air as Denmark’s coastline emerged beneath them—dark water, pale sand, and long stretches of nothing that felt deliberately empty. Elise watched the land come into focus through the side window, her reflection faint against the glass. The closer they drew, the quieter she became, not from fear but from concentration. Every sense sharpened when the margins for error disappeared.Lukas sat beside her, one hand braced against the frame, the other steady on his knee. He hadn’t spoken since takeoff. He didn’t need to. The stillness in him wasn’t hesitation; it was control. The kind that came from knowing exactly what he intended to do and accepting the cost of it.The pilot’s voice crackled through the headset. “Two kilometers south. Setting down in ninety seconds.”Caleb leaned forward, checking his weapon one last time. Margot adjusted her earpiece, already synced to Maya’s feed. The cabin smelled faintly o

The rain returned sometime after noon, light at first, then steady enough to blur the edges of the world beyond the facility windows. Elise stood near the glass with a cup of untouched coffee cooling between her palms, watching the trees bend under the weight of it. Everything outside looked cleansed, muted, almost peaceful. It felt like a lie.Behind her, the briefing room hummed with quiet urgency. Screens glowed with maps and data streams, Sofia’s voice threading through them all as she coordinated teams across three countries. Margot paced, stopping only to point at a projection or issue a clipped instruction. Lukas stood at the center of it, still, listening, absorbing, deciding.Elise had seen him like this before. Not reactive. Not angry. Focused in a way that sharpened the air around him.“Say it again,” Lukas said calmly.Sofia’s image flickered, then steadied. “We traced the legacy access Heinrich mentioned. It runs through a shell infrastructure Berg abandoned on paper year

The city was waking beneath a sky streaked with pink and gray, the morning light falling across Rotterdam in tentative, uneven patches. Elise stood on the balcony of the safehouse, the cool wind whipping at her hair, her gaze tracing the canals that wound through the city like veins. Despite the calm, tension hummed beneath her skin, a constant reminder that Berg’s reach was far from over.Lukas appeared beside her without a sound, handing her a steaming cup of coffee. “You haven’t slept,” he observed quietly.“I tried,” Elise said, wrapping her hands around the warmth. “But every time I close my eyes, I see those plants… altered, manipulated, glowing in ways they shouldn’t. I see what Berg can do if we falter even for a second.”He leaned against the railing, close enough that she could feel his presence without turning. “You did what you had to. And now we move forward. We can’t let her define the narrative, Elise. We define it.”Her eyes met his. There was certainty there, unwaveri