2025-08-06 09:59:07Manchester’s rain wasn’t like London’s. It came down faster, harder, and without apology. Each drop sounded like a tap on the windowpane of fate, and for Kabri, fate had always knocked before it kicked in the door.
The van rolled to a stop outside a derelict paint factory in the outskirts of Manchester’s Redbank district. Once a center of trade and machinery, now a wasteland of rusted iron and wet concrete. The kind of place the world had forgotten, and criminals remembered fondly.
Kabri turned off the ignition and looked over at Jamil in the passenger seat. The sling was gone now, but the bandages remained under his jacket. His eyes were sharper again. The adrenaline that had been dulled by pain in London had returned.
“You remember the route?” Kabri asked, voice steady.
Jamil pulled out a sketch of the factory layout, traced the route from memory. “Left gate entrance, down through the first hallway. Delivery’s in Bay 3. We make the handoff, confirm the crates, and bounce.”
“No mistakes.”
“Never.”
Behind them, two more vans pulled up. The convoy was lean—three vehicles, six men total. But this wasn’t a war zone. This was what Fred had promised: a quiet job, a clean transaction, and a golden handshake.
They’d be delivering a shipment of Eastern European rifles—Bulgarian-made, polymer-based, unregistered—to a shell buyer linked to Interpol insiders. The real buyer, no doubt, was someone higher up the crime food chain who needed to make sure his name didn’t surface in the fallout. But none of that mattered to Kabri.
All that mattered was that Fred had made the call himself. And if this went clean, it meant two things: one, Fred was still feeding them real jobs; two, they were back in the inner circle.
Kabri opened the back doors of the van. Inside, nestled in crates lined with foam and blankets, lay thirty-seven rifles. AK-200s, some new, others freshly reassembled. Each one was marked in Cyrillic, registered under a false arms license out of Zagreb.
“Looks tidy,” Jamil said, nodding.
Kabri clicked the safety on one of the weapons. “Tidy is how we walk out alive.”
As they moved into the warehouse, boots echoing against the damp concrete, Kabri’s mind did not rest. Something about this felt too simple. The job had been approved too quickly. No resistance, no tail, no encrypted calls—just a courier message dropped at their safehouse, signed with Fred’s real initials.
In their world, the simpler a job looked, the more teeth it had hidden beneath.
Inside the factory, the overhead lights flickered like they hadn't been used in a decade. Water dripped from steel beams, falling onto crates and old forklifts. A stench of oil and mildew hung in the air.
The meeting point was an old loading bay—Bay 3—still intact with rusted rails for trolleys and an office window shattered from the inside.
Two men were already there.
One wore a long black coat and dark gloves, his face angular and expressionless. The other was shorter, stockier, dressed in a Manchester United hoodie and black boots. They stood like men who didn’t need introductions.
“Right on time,” the tall man said in a posh but hollow British accent. “That’s rare these days.”
“Better to be early and live,” Kabri replied.
The shorter man stepped forward and held out a scanner. Kabri motioned toward the van, and two of their crew began unloading crates.
As the scanner blinked green across each metal box, Kabri watched the tall man’s every movement. There was something unsettling about how calm he was. Not cautious. Not curious. Just… calm.
“Thirty-seven pieces,” the short man confirmed. “Clean tags. Looks good.”
“Payment?” Jamil asked.
The tall man gestured toward a briefcase resting on a trolley nearby. “Digital wire. Vault wallet. You’ll get access code once we leave the area.”
Kabri stepped closer, hand extended.
“No offense,” he said, “but digital keys can be corrupted. Let’s confirm the unlock first.”
The tall man smiled faintly. “A cautious professional. Fred was right about you.”
That stopped Kabri.
He didn’t respond. Not outwardly. But something tightened in his gut.
“You speak to Fred recently?” Kabri asked, voice low.
“Just last night,” the man said, eyes cold. “Said you two were his best. Like sons, he said.”
Jamil glanced at Kabri. The exact words Fred had used just days earlier.
Kabri moved to the briefcase, flipped it open, and activated the encrypted keypad. A small screen blinked red, then green.
Balance: €1,000,000 – Available Now.
Clean.
Kabri shut the case and nodded. “Looks solid. You can take the gear.”
The men wasted no time. In under five minutes, the rifles were loaded into a black SUV that had been idling around the corner. No logos. No plates. The two strangers didn’t linger.
As they left, the tall man gave Kabri one last look.
“You know,” he said, “Fred may be paranoid, but he’s rarely wrong about people.”
Then they vanished.
Outside, under the cloak of nightfall, Kabri and Jamil lit cigarettes and stood near the first van.
“That guy,” Jamil said, “he was Interpol.”
Kabri nodded slowly. “Or someone who wants us to think he is.”
“He didn’t blink once the whole time. That’s trained behavior. Not street. Agency maybe.”
“Doesn’t matter. The payment was clean. That’s what we came for.”
Jamil looked over the horizon, where the dim glow of Manchester bled into the sky.
“You still thinking about London?”
“Always.”
“Still think Fred played us?”
Kabri didn’t answer right away. He watched the drops fall from the broken eaves above them. Each one echoed like a second ticking down to something worse.
“I don’t think,” Kabri said finally. “I know.”
The debrief happened back in London, three days later.
Fred sat at a red mahogany desk in a Chelsea townhouse safehouse he rarely used. Clean walls. No pictures. The air smelled like whisky and ink.
Kabri and Jamil stood across from him.
“You pulled it off,” Fred said, his voice warm. “The buyers were impressed. Said you handled it like old-school smugglers.”
“They were quiet,” Kabri replied. “Professional.”
Fred looked pleased. “That’s because they’re not buyers. They’re shadows. The type that walks between governments and cartels. I’ve been courting them for five years. This was your audition.”
“Why now?” Jamil asked.
Fred shrugged. “Because things are moving. Europe’s changing. Borders aren’t just maps anymore. They’re business lines. And we need players I can trust.”
He stood, walked around the desk, and clapped both men on the back.
“You two? You’re not just muscle anymore. You’re part of the core.”
Kabri remained still.
Fred didn’t notice.
Or he pretended not to.
That night, Kabri sat alone in the apartment above their safehouse, reading the encrypted file Jamil had copied from the SUV’s transmission antenna during the Manchester handoff. A risky move—one Kabri hadn’t approved but secretly appreciated.
The file was a log. An ops record. And in it was a single name that made Kabri’s blood run cold.
Jamil – flagged. Red Zone. Watch for divergence. High-value, low-trust.
Below it: Kabri – possible flight risk. Dispose if compromised.
Kabri’s fingers hovered over the keyboard.
His mind moved through everything they had done—the heists, the bloodshed, the loyalty. All of it carefully documented… and none of it protected them.
Fred’s “sons in crime” were nothing more than tools.
And Jamil?
Marked for disposal.
The rain hit the window harder now. Manchester had been a test. Not for trust. For compliance.
And Kabri was already failing.
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Chapter 241
The grave was modest.No ornate stone, no flowers, no names.Just two mounds of earth beneath an acacia tree, a flat rock marking the space between them. And beside it, a small wooden box — weathered by sand, protected by silence.Amir brought his daughter here for the first time on her twelfth birthday.She had never met them — the men buried here. She knew of them only as shadows from her father’s stories. But even at twelve, she felt the weight in the air. The silence. The ache.She knelt between the graves and whispered a greeting, as if sensing they were listening.Amir stood a few paces back, arms crossed, heart heavy. He wasn’t sure he could explain everything — not all at once. Not the betrayals. Not the lies. Not the love. But something told him it was time.Not to forget.But to pass it on.“Tell me,” she said quietly, looking at the mound on the right. “Was he the one who hurt people?”Amir nodded slowly.“Yes. But he also tried to save someone.”She turned to the other gra
Chapter 240
The desert swallowed sound.No sirens. No engines. No voices. Only the wind, scraping against forgotten stones like a memory refusing to be buried.Kabri was gone. Jamil too. The last gunshot had echoed across the cliffs like thunder splitting the sky — and then... silence.Weeks passed.Then months.And in time, all the great fires died. The burned-out mansion crumbled under vines in the hills of Portugal. The hideouts turned to dust. The names “Kabri” and “Jamil” passed through intelligence circles as rumors, then as ghost stories, then not at all.What remained?Sand.Wind.And one man standing alone — Amir.Amir had returned to the desert not for closure but because he had nowhere else to go.The grave of two brothers lay under a crooked tree near the ruins of their childhood camp. Unmarked, save for a flat stone and a weathered necklace buried beneath the sand. One bullet had ended a war. The second, a legacy.But the story hadn’t really ended.Amir knew that now.He stood at the
Chapter 239
The memory returned uninvited.A patch of afternoon sun spilled through the tall reeds beside the Wadi River, golden and warm, catching the faces of two boys too young to know what blood meant.Kabri was twelve. Jamil, nine.And for the first time in months, their laughter wasn’t stolen — it was real.No shadows yet.No oaths.No guns.Just two brothers in cut-off shorts, muddy knees, and palms sticky with date syrup, daring each other to jump across a deep ditch carved by the rain.“Last one across is a chicken!” Jamil yelled, already sprinting.Kabri snorted. “You say that every time.”“Because you’re always the chicken!”Kabri launched forward.The air split around them as they leapt.Jamil landed first, barely sticking it, wobbling with arms flailing. Kabri came after — feet thudding hard — then fell flat on his back, breath gone.Jamil doubled over laughing. “You landed like a pregnant goat!”Kabri groaned. “I hope the goat kicks you.”They rolled into the grass, wrestling half-h
Chapter 238
The box sat on the shelf, wrapped in a torn military scarf, untouched for years. Amir had not opened it since the last night he had needed to be a weapon.Inside: a Glock 17, two extra magazines, a suppressor wrapped in cloth, and a folded note in Kabri’s handwriting:“This is not for you. This is for the man you swore never to become.”Amir stared at it now, not as a warrior or a fugitive, but as a man inching toward the edge of something more sacred — peace. A peace he had not earned. But one he might finally allow himself to keep.The years since Kabri and Jamil’s deaths had been spent in cautious rebuilding. No wars. No shadows. Just Noor’s laughter and the scent of bread rising in a sunlit kitchen. A wife who loved without questions. A home without locked rooms.Still, the ghosts remained. Not with knives or voices — but as temptations.Every week he passed a locked drawer.Every month he checked security footage of the perimeter, “just in case.”But today, something in him shift
Chapter 237
The wind whispered through the olive trees behind their home in southern Spain. Amir had built the cottage with his own hands — not as a fortress, not as a hideout, but as a place where nothing needed to be watched. A place where knives weren’t hidden in books, and smiles didn’t have layers.The girl was just five, a shadow of her mother’s jawline and Amir’s wide eyes. She played alone in the sunlit garden, a mess of curls falling over her forehead, fingers stained with juice and dirt and youth. Her name was Noor.And she was humming.The melody was faint, broken, innocent.But Amir froze the moment he heard it.The air left his lungs.It wasn’t a song Noor had ever been taught.It was Evelyn’s lullaby.He stepped outside quietly, watching his daughter draw circles in the dirt with a twig. Her hums rose and fell like a breeze through reeds, her head tilting as if listening to music only she could hear.It was impossible.Amir hadn’t heard the tune since that night in the cabin. Since
Chapter 236
It was the third night after the wedding when Amir finally dreamed again.Not a nightmare. Not the kind with fire, blood, or the endless sound of gunfire. This dream was colder. Quieter. Too still.And the table was long.A grand oak table, polished to a shine, set in the middle of a candlelit hall he didn't recognize—something between a monastery and a memory. Shadows danced on stone walls. Frost crept at the edges of the stained-glass windows. And thirteen chairs lined each side, untouched.Until they came.The first to appear was Kabri.He took the seat at the far end of the table, dressed in black like he always was in Amir’s memories—but not the militant version. Not the fighter. Just a man. A man with tired eyes and fingers still stained with ash. He didn’t speak. Just looked at Amir with a gentle sorrow, and that ever-present weight behind his gaze.Then Evelyn entered.Wearing red.The real Evelyn, or the illusion? He didn’t know anymore. Her face was as he remembered it the
