The sniper was sitting on the ground with his back against a tree and his wrists bound behind him with a plastic zip tie. He was younger than Edward expected. Mid thirties, clean shaven, the kind of face that could disappear into any crowd in any city without being remembered. Vivien's men stood in a loose circle around him, weapons lowered but ready. Edward walked through them without acknowledging anyone and crouched down in front of the man. The sniper looked up at him. His eyes were steady, trained, but something behind them was moving fast, the quiet calculation of a man measuring how much trouble he was actually in. "Who sent you," Edward said. The sniper said nothing. "I am going to ask you one more time, and then I am going to stop asking politely." Edward's voice carried no anger. It carried something worse. Patience. "Who hired you to kill me." "Nobody hired me to kill you." The sniper's voice came out dry and cracked. "If they wanted you dead, you would be dead

Edward pocketed the phone and stood still for a long moment, his face giving nothing away.Vivien's team leader stepped forward. "Sir, who was that. We can trace the number if you give us the phone.""The number will lead nowhere," Edward said. "He would not call from a traceable line.""You recognized the voice." The team leader watched him carefully. "Who is it."Edward looked at him the way a locked door looks at someone without a key. "That is not something you need to know right now." He turned to the sniper, who was still sitting against the tree with his face the color of wet cement. "Your family. Where are they.""Eastfield. Three hundred kilometers east. A residential block near the old market district." The sniper's words came out fast and stumbling, tripping over each other. "My wife's name is Sara. My daughter is Mia. Apartment 14B, Greenwood Tower. Please, if they reach them before your people do, I will never forgive myself."Edward looked at the team leader. "Send two m

The private club sat at the end of a narrow street that smelled like salt water and old concrete. Edward parked two blocks away and walked the rest, his hands in his jacket pockets, his eyes moving across every rooftop and every window without his head turning.Before leaving the car, he had sent Vivien a single message. His location, updated every sixty seconds through a tracking application she had installed on his phone that afternoon.She had not argued. She had simply looked at him with those cold steady eyes and said, "If the signal stops, I am coming in."The club's interior was dim and mostly empty. Leather chairs, dark wood paneling, the smell of cigars that had been smoked decades ago still living in the walls. A single lamp burned at a table near the back.Damien sat beneath it.He looked older than Edward remembered. The years had not been kind, but they had been precise, carving lines into his face that made him look less like a man who had aged and more like a man who ha

Edward stood in Vivien's empty office and did not move for a full thirty seconds.Her phone on the desk. Her jacket on the chair. Her coffee cup beside the keyboard, still half full, the liquid inside it not yet cold. Everything arranged exactly the way a person leaves a room when they expect to come back in five minutes.But she had not come back.His first instinct was wrong, and he knew it was wrong before it finished forming. Kidnapping left marks. Broken glass, overturned furniture, a scuff on the floor where someone was dragged. This room was clean. Untouched. Whatever had happened here, violence was not part of it.He walked to the security office two floors below. The night guard looked up from his desk and straightened immediately when he saw Edward's face."Pull the surveillance footage from the executive floor," Edward said. "Last two hours. Every camera.""Sir, I need authorization from Miss Vivien or the senior board to access executive level recordings."Edward placed bo

Edward read Vivien's message three times.She had sent it through her regular phone number. No encryption, no coded language, no attempt to hide the communication. A woman as careful as Vivien did not make that kind of mistake by accident.She wanted him to see the message. She wanted the enemy to see it too.She was telling Edward that she was not a prisoner. She was a player.He put the phone down and pulled up the contact list the Old Master had left inside the metal box at the villa. Most of the names were crossed out or dead. One was still active. Raymond Shaw, the Old Master's former financial adviser, the man who had personally managed every account in the organization's private network for over twenty years.Edward called him at six in the morning."Who is this." Raymond's voice was cautious and thin, the voice of a man who had spent years expecting a phone call exactly like this one."Edward."Silence. Long enough that Edward could hear the old man's breathing change."Edward