2025-08-11 00:51:24The next morning, Ayla woke to a pounding in her skull and a blinking cursor on her screen.
1 new message
Subject: Phase One – Roarke
Her finger hesitated above the mouse. A whisper of doubt curled in her chest. She was in uncharted territory, pulled into a shadow game where the rules were made by a man everyone feared.
She clicked.
The screen went black, then pulsed back to life with a new dossier. Not on Senator Roarke this time, but on a man Ayla had never heard of.
Name: Benjamin Grae
Status: Active
Location: London
Affiliation: Unknown – suspected handler for high-net assassinations
Threat Level: Classified – Level Omega
Then a blinking prompt appeared at the bottom.
Confirm readiness. Target access window: 18 hours.
She exhaled slowly. “You’re serious about this…”
10:44 a.m. Inside a top-floor conference room, Director Langford slammed his palm on the table. “You want me to greenlight an unauthorized operation on foreign soil based on intel from a dead man?”
Ayla stood her ground. “Cassian’s first tip brought down a senator. He gave us everything, account numbers, logs, even the kill order Roarke signed. That wasn't luck.”
Langford’s jaw tightened. “If he’s right about Grae, we’re not chasing shadows anymore. We’re attacking ghosts with teeth.”
“Then we bite first.”
The director paced. “And you think you’re qualified for this?”
“No,” Ayla said. “But I’m not the point. Cassian is. He’ll only work through me. We ignore this, we lose the trail and him.”
Langford stared at her. “I don't like you being in the middle of this. He’s using you.”
“I know,” she said, voice flat. “But maybe I can use him back.”
London. 22:19. The warehouse Cassian pointed her to was quiet, too quiet.
Ayla crouched behind a stack of crates, heart hammering, eyes flicking between shadows and the signal on her tablet. Cassian had rerouted her into a backdoor channel, unlocking Grae’s encrypted comms through a signal sniffer he'd built in the 2000s, and updated just last week.
The man was either a time traveler or a demon with Wi-Fi. She spotted Grae, Sharp suit. Thin, hawkish face. Calm like a surgeon with a scalpel. He walked with a limp and never looked over his shoulder. That told her everything: he didn’t need to.
Suddenly, Ayla’s earpiece crackled. Cassian’s voice, smooth, cold. “He knows you're watching.”
Ayla froze. “What?”
“Grae’s better than you think. This is a show. He's baiting you.”
Sure enough, Grae stopped mid-step and turned, eyes locking on her location. “Run.”
She didn’t need telling twice, She sprinted, bullets slicing past her head as masked men emerged from the shadows, no uniforms, no insignia, just precision and silence. Her heart thundered. She leapt a rail, hit concrete hard, and bolted through a side exit.
She made it back to the safe house, adrenaline still pumping, Cassian was already waiting on the screen. He looked amused. “I see you survived.”
She glared at him. “You sent me into a trap.”
“I warned you.”
“You set me up.”
He leaned forward. “I vetted you. You want to play in the shadows, Agent Trent? This is what it costs.”
Ayla’s voice shook. “You could’ve helped.”
“I did,” he said coldly. “You're not dead.”
She wanted to scream. But under the rage, she knew the truth: Grae had walked into that warehouse knowing someone was watching. Which meant he was tipped off.
Which meant someone inside the agency had leaked the mission, A mole, Back in the U.S., Ayla sat in the dark, eyes glued to her screen. The cursor blinked again. Well played. Round two soon. — R
She stared at it, jaw tight, Cassian was playing a long game. Every name, every move, was another step on a chessboard she couldn't see the end of.
But the mole changed everything, If there was someone inside feeding intel to the enemy, She was already surrounded. And Cassian knew it.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter Fifty-Four — Ghost in the Smoke
The world pressed in. The crimson strobe lights pulsed against the thick fog of gas and gunpowder, painting corpses in grotesque stop-motion snapshots. Ayla Trent’s ears still rang with the echo of gunfire, her throat raw from the acrid smoke.She pressed her back against the cold concrete wall, weapon raised in trembling hands, though there was nothing left to shoot. Except her own doubt.Raymond was gone, She’d freed him. Her hands had unclasped his shackles. Her decision, her mistake and now the host was loose in the labyrinth of this detention facility. Her pulse roared. Every second wasted meant another move in his game. And she was locked in a room full of bodies.Ayla forced herself to move, stepping over the sprawled forms of masked operators. The knife Raymond had left in one of their throats still quivered slightly, as if mocking her hesitation.She crouched by the steel door, fingers brushing the lock. Reinforced, Keycard only. The keypad blinked red, demanding credentials
Chapter Fifty-Three: The Eruption
The silence before the collapse felt wrong. Ayla Trent had trained herself to recognize patterns in code, in people, in the smallest fractures of behavior. And right now, the hum of the underground detention facility was too steady.The fluorescent lights didn’t flicker. The ventilation fans didn’t shift pitch. Even the guards’ movements outside Raymond’s steel-barred holding room had grown mechanical, rehearsed, stripped of the little imperfections of real life.Her instincts screamed: something was about to break. Raymond sat across from her at the bolted steel table, wrists cuffed, posture deceptively loose. He wasn’t tense the way she was. If anything, he looked amused.“You hear it too, don’t you?” he said softly, as if continuing a conversation they hadn’t started. His voice was silk over a razor. Ayla’s eyes narrowed. “Hear what?”Raymond tilted his head. “The absence. True silence isn’t natural here. Every system has noise. Every person leaves ripples. But this” he gestured la
Chapter Fifty-Two
The fall never ended. Ayla’s scream ripped from her throat, stolen almost instantly by the roaring wind. The world was a blur of firelight, crumbling stone, and twisting shadows.Her body whipped in the torrent, tumbling head over heels. She clawed at the air for something anything but there was nothing to hold, nothing to stop her descent. And then she saw him.Raymond, Falling just ahead, his limbs thrashing, his furnace-eye glowing faintly in the abyss. A beacon, a reminder that she wasn’t alone. “Ayla!” he shouted, his voice breaking through the maelstrom.She reached for him. The distance was impossible, their bodies spinning in different trajectories. But she stretched anyway, fingers straining, skin tearing against the rushing air. The abyss laughed, the sound reverberated through the endless shaft, cold and cruel.“YOU FALL TOGETHER. YOU BREAK TOGETHER.”The void thickened below them, a swirling pit of black flame and molten stone. Ayla’s chest tightened If they hit that, ther
Chapter Fifty-One
The words did not belong to Raymond. The sound that poured from his throat was deeper, more cavernous, like something echoing across the walls of a cathedral carved from bone.Ayla froze, her hands still on his face, as the abyssal voice rattled through her veins. “THE HEIR IS BROKEN, THE TITAN WALKS NOW.”She recoiled. “No,” she whispered. “That’s not you.”Raymond sat up with mechanical slowness, his limbs jerking like a marionette’s strings were being pulled by unseen hands. His head turned toward her, both eyes yawning pits of void, bottomless, hungry.For an instant she thought she saw fragments of his face creases of exhaustion, the faint scar at his jaw but then the abyss swallowed it whole, devouring the last traces of him.Ayla scrambled backward across the stone floor. Her palms slipped on the damp moss, Her chest heaved. She’d pulled him back, She’d fought the prison, She had saved him. And yet, he wasn’t Raymond anymore. He rose to his feet with a grace too alien to be hum
Chapter Fifty
The moment Raymond vanished into the titan’s maw, the world collapsed around Ayla. The horde shrieked louder than anything she’d ever heard, a sound so raw it made her vision blur.The ground buckled, veins rupturing, spurting black ichor that sprayed across her face and arms. The air itself thickened, choking her throat with every breath But none of that mattered. Raymond was gone.Her hands trembled as she stared at the space where he had been. Her palms still tingled, burned with the furnace-heat of his skin. She could still feel his weight pulling against her. And then nothing.Her knees hit the quaking ground. She screamed his name again, but the titan’s laughter swallowed it whole. It echoed inside her skull, low and booming, every syllable vibrating through her bones. “HE WAS ALWAYS MINE.”Ayla spat blood and bile, forcing herself to her feet. “You don’t own him!” she shouted, voice ragged. “He’s not yours!”The abyssal eyes tilted toward her, and she felt them pierce straight
Chapter Forty-Nine
The world had no shape. Ayla’s scream tore itself from her throat, but the sound was shredded into silence before it left her lips. She was falling not through air, not through water, but through something heavier, something viscous, something that clung to her skin and pulled at her bones.Her chest burned. She tried to inhale, but her lungs found nothing. No oxygen, no air at all Only void. Her vision fractured. For one blink she saw Raymond’s face above her, furnace-eye burning, hand locked around her wrist like an anchor.For the next blink, there was only blackness, pierced with streaks of red lightning. She clung harder, Her nails dug into his hand Don’t let go. The void tore sideways. She crashed against a surface that was not solid yet did not yield.It bent beneath her like taut fabric, then slingshotted her back into the endless fall. Her body twisted, convulsed. Somewhere inside the madness, her heart still hammered, refusing to stop. Raymond’s grip never loosened.The red
You may also like
The Celestial Heist
Lummi Gold2.6K viewsCRIME BOOK 101
Sweet_SourKiwi7.8K viewsShadow On The Eyes
Natashia_Lou4.4K viewsThe Serial Killer: A headache for the police
Jejewiyyah2.6K viewsShayne
Blessing Natasha120 viewsDreaming a Music Mystery
Yasmine Jameson2.4K viewsKilling Justice
Kei3.8K viewsShadows of the Law
B.L. Sinclair90 views