2025-12-30 13:34:44
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YOU TRUSTED THE WRONG MAN
The woman’s eyes hardened.“Long enough to know the difference between loyalty and murder,” she said.Then she glanced briefly toward Ethan before returning her aim to the two officers.“And long enough to decide which side deserved the warning.”Ethan’s voice cut back in before Darius could recover. “She informed me before I entered this room. She told me how you planned it. She told me the powder would stay invisible inside the glass until the wine activated it. She told me one particular cup would be prepared for me so the assassination would look natural and clean.”Darius shook his head once. “No.”Ethan ignored him. “And after she warned me, she cleaned my glass.”The room went still all over again.The female spy lifted her chin slightly. “I rinsed it myself,” she said. “Twice. Then I dried it and returned it to position.”Vale’s eyes widened. “Then the powder…”She looked toward the corpse on the floor.“I placed it in another cup,” she said.Darius stared at Rhael’s body like
THE SPY IN THE PALACE
Ethan’s words landed harder than the gun in his hand.“Before I walked through those doors,” he said, his eyes fixed on Darius, “someone warned me.”Ethan let the silence breathe after that sentence. He wanted the weight of it to settle on everyone in the room. The truth often hurt more when it arrived slowly, and right now he could see the first cracks appearing in Darius’s confidence.The room seemed to shrink around that sentence. Even the attendants against the wall seemed afraid to breathe too loudly. The quiet felt unnatural, like the moment before thunder breaks a storm. Everyone understood that the conversation had crossed the point where it could ever return to diplomacy.Darius stared at him, still half-bent from shock, while Colonel Markus Vale stood stiff under Captain Lorne’s gun. The female attendant kept both confiscated weapons in her hands, aiming them at both colonel Vale and General Darius with the confidence of someone who had stopped pretending to be harmless.
THE DEAD LOYALIST
Darius’s voice cracked in a way no one in that room had heard before.“No,” he said again, staring at the body on the floor. “No… it can’t be.”The polished negotiation room no longer looked like a place for politics. It looked like a killing ground dressed in expensive wood and state flags. Brigadier General Rhael Dane lay twisted on the floor beside the table, his face was drained of life, his hand still half-curled as if his body had died before it understood it was finished.Darius moved first.He stumbled around the fallen chair and dropped to his knees beside Rhael with none of the care or pride he had shown minutes earlier. His hands shook as he grabbed the brigadier by the shoulders and turned him slightly.“Rhael!” he shouted. “Rhael, answer me!”The dead man’s head rolled weakly to one side.Darius slapped his cheek once. Then harder.“There must be something I can do!” Darius said, with panic pushing into his voice now. “Talk to me! Rhael!”Colonel Markus Vale had gone pa
THE POISON CHOSE THE WRONG MAN
Poison rarely needed permission to announce its presence.Still nothing happened.The silence grew uncomfortable. Even the soft hum of the room’s ventilation seemed louder than before, as if the building itself was waiting for something terrible to reveal itself.Ethan went on, voice steady. “You came into this room thinking you were negotiating from a throne. You are not. What happened at Linbourgh changed that.”Darius did not react to the words. He only watched.Still nothing.Seconds stretched.Then a full minute.A full minute was far longer than most fast poisons required. The delay pressed against Darius’s confidence, slowly turning certainty into a quiet, creeping doubt.Ethan’s posture remained relaxed. His breathing remained even. His hand did not move toward his stomach. His face did not lose color.Darius felt a thread of unease slide into his chest.For the first time since the toast, the thought crossed his mind that something might have gone wrong. He pushed the idea aw
A TOAST TO PEACE... AND DEATH
Colonel Markus Vale returned with the attendants, and the room seemed to tighten around the silver tray in their hands.Five empty wine glasses rested on it, clear and polished enough to catch the light like sharpened crystal. Beside them sat a dark bottle of imported wine, the label was foreign and expensive. Nothing about it looked dangerous. That was what made it dangerous.In rooms like this, danger rarely announced itself loudly. It arrived quietly, hidden inside courtesy, inside protocol, inside the small rituals powerful men used to pretend their conflicts were civilized.Vale stopped beside the service area and gave the attendants a short nod. “Serve.”The female attendants moved with quiet precision. Their movements were almost rehearsed, years of service had trained them to become invisible during moments like this. Their task was simple—pour, serve, withdraw. They were never meant to notice the politics unfolding around them.One placed the glasses down. Another uncorked
THE MOST EXPENSIVE DEMANDS IN VERDANIS
His anger rose fast, then disappeared under control. Rhael noticed it. So did Ethan. So did Lorne.Years of command training forced the anger back down before it could fully surface. A head of state could not afford open irritation in front of an opponent. Especially not an opponent who was watching every expression with quiet patience.Darius exhaled once and forced his expression back into something composed. “Okay,” he said. “Since that is what you asked for, I will give it to you. Negotiations it is.”He leaned back slightly, as if settling into state business now instead of personal resentment.“Despite what happened at Linbourgh,” he said, “despite the fact that your company building was left untouched and your five million pounds of uranium remained in your possession after certain bad eggs inside the Herold military were exposed, I am still the leader of Verdanis.”His eyes hardened. “And I still have an interest in your uranium resources. Along with certain privileges I fin
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