Flames tore through the old headquarters as Adrian crashed through a collapsing hallway, smoke burning his lungs. The explosion hit like a giant fist, blowing him off his feet and slamming him into a concrete wall. The world spun. Alarms howled. Metal groaned overhead.For a moment, everything was muffled.Heat. Ash. Silence.Then sound returned in a harsh wave, gunfire, boots, falling rubble.Adrian forced himself up, blood running down his brow. His ears rang, but he could still hear the soldiers moving in. They weren’t searching anymore. They were hunting.And Marcus had given the order.Adrian… you should have stayed dead.He felt that sentence like a knife twisting inside him. The betrayal burned deeper than the fire around him. Marcus Hale, the man who carried him through a bullet storm in Kandahar, the man who shared rations with him when they were trapped behind enemy lines, was now aiming to kill him.Adrian pushed the pain down, sealed it inside the cold part of his mind. He

Night dropped over the city like a curtain pulled too fast.Adrian moved through the old industrial district with a limp in his left leg and blood drying across his jaw. His ribs throbbed from the explosion, but pain only sharpened him. Pain reminded him he was still alive.He reached an abandoned railway yard, the meeting point Elias Ward forced into his pocket before dying.A message written in the Commander’s handwriting:“If you survived… come here. Midnight.”Adrian didn’t trust it.He didn’t trust anything anymore.But Ward was the only person who might still hold a piece of the truth.A piece Cipher hadn’t managed to burn.The air smelled like rust and rain.Wind rattled chains hanging from cranes long out of use.Adrian scanned every rooftop, every shadow, every broken rail car.Nothing moved.Which meant danger was waiting.He stepped between two rusted containers, boots silent on gravel. His hand brushed the pistol at his hip. Every sense stretched thin.ThenA faint click.

Night settled over the outskirts of the city like a thick, suffocating fog. The industrial district lay quiet, abandoned warehouses, rusted cranes, broken windows that stared out like dead eyes. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.Except him.Adrian Kaine stood in the shadows beneath an old loading gantry, the cold wind biting into his skin through the torn sleeves of his shirt. His ribs still ached from the explosion hours ago, and the dried blood across his knuckles felt like a second skin, tight and cracking. But pain was a luxury he no longer allowed himself.Pain meant he was still alive.Anger meant he still had purpose.He checked the magazine in his rifle, then raised his head slightly. A convoy approached in the distance, four armored SUVs, engines rumbling low like beasts in the dark.They were coming exactly where he wanted them.Inside the last SUV was the man he needed: Colonel Mason Kade, the government officer who signed the orders that sent Shadow Unit to their death. The

The safehouse sat on the edge of a dead industrial district, hidden behind rusted shipping containers and a row of abandoned vehicles burned down to their metal bones. Adrian Kaine moved through the shadows, boots silent against the cracked ground. The place smelled of rot, old oil, and secrets.A perfect hiding spot.Or a perfect grave.The coordinates had come from a scrambled message intercepted during the night, an encrypted note marked with a codename Adrian hadn’t heard in almost two years.“Specter.”A name that should not exist.A man who should not breathe.A soldier who died with the rest of the Shadow Unit.Adrian stopped at the safehouse door, listening.No movement.No heartbeat within range.Only the cold bite of silence.He pushed the door open.The darkness inside swallowed everything. Dust floated in the air like dead memories. Exposed wires hung from the ceiling. A cracked table sat in the center, littered with old surveillance photos—photos of him.Adrian stepped cl