Berlin’s winter did not just bite; it gnawed at the bone with a clinical, indifferent hunger. Doni pulled his thin jacket tighter, though the cheap polyester offered about as much protection as a paper sheet against the Baltic wind whistling through the concrete canyons of Potsdamer Platz. He weighed barely fifty kilograms, a slight, Southeast Asian frame that felt entirely out of place amidst the hulking, monumental architecture of the German capital. He looked like a tourist who had taken a wrong turn and ended up in the middle of a spy novel.He stood before a nondescript steel door marked only with a small, brushed-metal plate: Vanguards Security Group.Inside, the atmosphere shifted from freezing to sterile. The lobby was a temple of glass and charcoal-gray stone. There were four other men sitting in the high-backed leather chairs. Doni felt his stomach do a slow, nauseating flip. These weren't just men; they were walls of muscle. Two were clearly Eastern European, with jagged sc

Cannes felt like a gold-plated furnace. If Paris was a cold, elegant blade, then the French Riviera in May was a suffocating silk pillow—expensive, humid, and smelling of salt-water-saturated vanity. The Mediterranean sun beat down on the Croisette, turning the asphalt into a shimmering mirror that reflected the blinding white of the yachts bobbing in the harbor. For the elite, it was a playground. For Doni, standing on the edge of the red carpet in a black suit that felt like a portable sauna, it was a tactical nightmare.He could feel the sweat trickling down his spine, pooling at the small of his back. At fifty kilograms, he felt like a dandelion in a hurricane of muscle. To his left, Marcus was a wall of charcoal wool and repressed violence, his eyes hidden behind dark aviators, scanning the rooftops and the cordons with the predatory focus of a hawk. To his right, two other Vanguards operatives—massive Serbians named Dragan and Viktor—stood like monoliths, their presence alone en

The descent into Milan Malpensa felt like falling through a heavy, gray curtain of damp wool. Outside the window of the private Embraer, the Italian landscape was a blur of mist and industrial sprawl, a far cry from the postcard-perfect vineyards of Tuscany or the sun-drenched glamour of Cannes. Doni sat in the last row of the cabin, his body pressed as deep into the leather seat as possible, trying to minimize the movement of his ribcage. Every slight shudder of the plane’s engines sent a white-hot needle of pain through his side, a jagged reminder of Marcus’s knee in the Berlin gym.He was pale, his breath coming in shallow, careful sips. The high-grade painkillers the medic had given him were starting to wear off, leaving a dull, rhythmic throb that felt like a heartbeat made of broken glass. Across the aisle, Viktor and Dragan were checking their sidearms with a nonchalance that bordered on the offensive. They were talking about a steakhouse in Brera, their voices a low rumble ben