Ethan Hayes Pov The trail from the auction had led Ethan through three days of careful, patient work—a courier intercepted, a ledger decoded, a name whispered by a frightened clerk who'd handled shipping manifests for a warehouse he swore didn't officially exist. Every thread pointed toward the same destination: an old tannery on the capital's eastern fringe, converted, according to the clerk, into something the man had refused to describe further before Ethan let him go.It should have felt too easy. Looking back, that was the detail Ethan would curse himself for missing.He arrived at the tannery an hour before dawn, the building squatting low and windowless behind a rotted fence, no guards visible along its perimeter, no lights burning inside. Too quiet. He circled it twice before approaching, noting the absence of the usual signs—no cart tracks, no trampled ground near the entrances, nothing suggesting the kind of regular traffic a functioning criminal operation would leave behin

Adam Swift Pov The report came from an unlikely source—one of Voss's old contacts in the capital's intelligence office, a woman who traded in secrets too dangerous for official channels and had apparently decided Adam's continued survival was worth the risk of sharing this one. She met him in a tea house near the western market, spoke in a voice pitched barely above a whisper, and left before he'd finished processing what she'd told him."Carter's activated something called Project Zero," Voss said, relaying the rest of it later that evening in the war room, a single sheet of paper spread between them that held frustratingly little beyond a name and a warning. "Our sources don't have much. What they do have isn't comforting.""Tell me anyway."Voss exhaled slowly. "Fifteen years ago, before Carter built his current empire, he funded a private research program—officially a medical initiative, unofficially something considerably darker. Human trials. Enhancement, augmentation, whatever

Adam Swift Pov He healed as fast as his body allowed, which was not fast enough. Three days after the rooftop, Adam still moved with the careful stiffness of a man whose ribs hadn't finished deciding whether they were broken or merely furious, his shoulder bound tight beneath his coat where the joint Zero had nearly shattered continued to ache with every sudden movement. He hid the worst of it from Voss, and suspected he wasn't hiding it as well as he hoped.The summons from the King came on the morning of the fourth day, delivered with none of the ceremony that had marked his commission weeks earlier. This time the war room held every senior officer in the garrison, maps spread across every available surface, the air thick with the particular tension of men who understood something had shifted beyond the point of careful, measured response."Carter has called every syndicate leader in the capital to a second summit," the King said without preamble, once the room had settled. "Our in

Adam Swift Pov"Detonator!" Adam screamed. "Take him down!"A soldier beside him raised a crossbow and fired in one motion. The bolt caught the man in the shoulder a half-second before his thumb found the trigger, spinning him sideways, the detonator flying from his grip and skittering across the stone. Not dead. Not disarmed. Just delayed."Move! Move! Get them off the bridge!" Adam plunged into the crowd, shoving civilians toward the near bank, grabbing an old woman by the arm and hauling her out of the crush before she could be trampled. "This way! Keep moving, don't stop!"Gunfire erupted from the bridge's far end. Carter's guards, realizing the charges hadn't gone off, opened fire into the packed crowd itself—not aiming, just spraying panic into a mass of people too tightly packed to run properly. Screams tore through the morning air. A man fell three feet from Adam, blood blooming across his shirt."Shields forward!" Adam bellowed. "Cover the civilians, push them back!"His sold

Adam Swift Pov The runner hadn't finished speaking before the horns sounded—three long blasts from the eastern watchtower, the signal for an enemy force too large to name in a single shout.Adam was moving before he'd fully processed it. "What's the count?""Sir, the watch says hundreds—armored, disciplined, moving in formation. Nothing like the street fighters we've faced all morning." The runner swallowed hard. "They're calling themselves the Black Battalion. They've hit the southern checkpoint already. It's gone.""Gone how?""Overrun in under four minutes, Commander."Adam's stomach turned cold. Four minutes against a full garrison checkpoint wasn't street fighting. That was a professional force."Sound general muster," Adam ordered. "Every company still standing, to the southern approach. Now."He reached the checkpoint's remains at a dead run, Dax and forty soldiers behind him, and found devastation waiting that made the runner's report look conservative. Crown soldiers lay sca