POV Cyrus
Interpol doesn’t call; it intrudes.
The encrypted line chirps at 4:03 a.m., the hour when even cities hesitate. I’m already awake, the fire burned down to orange bones, the ledger ash settled like a quiet verdict in the grate. Varga’s voice crackles through with the same metronome calm that irritates bureaucrats and comforts soldiers.
“Your man is not a ghost,” he says. “Montenegro. Kotor Bay. Local shell: B.E. Industries. Looks like he likes acronyms.”
“B.E.,” I repeat, tasting the insult. “Beck Eternal.”
“Or Beck Enough,” Varga says dryly. “We have sightings: marina, hillside clinic, private airstrip. We’re cross-referencing customs anomalies. I’ll forward the dossier.”
“Do it,” I say.
“You’ll tell your people?” he asks.
“I’m telling you,” I answer, and end the call.
The dossier arrives like a small storm—faces, ports, payments. His digital signature rides the edges of the transactions like a smirk. My pulse slows the way it does before a necessary violence. I save the file to an air-gapped drive and lock it in the safe before my better self can argue.
By morning, the house smells of coffee and the cinnamon Tess insists prevents despair. Mara comes down barefoot, hair braided like a concession to order, wearing one of my shirts because we keep trying tenderness. She finds my eyes instantly, which is the trouble with love: it’s a homing device.
“Sleep?” she asks.
“Enough,” I lie.
She nods toward the dead fire. “You burned more paper.”
“Old ghosts,” I say.
“You still believe they’re flammable,” she murmurs, then kisses my cheek, soft and distracted, and pours coffee.
I watch her cross the room. The urge to tell her the whole truth rises like a wave and breaks against something older than bravery. Safety, I tell myself. Strategy. She calls those lies we dress in good tailoring. I call them winter.
At the office, Rafe is already prowling the perimeter of our network, jaw set. He doesn’t ask why I’m tighter than usual; he treats my moods like weather—annoying, unavoidable, not personal.
Lucian blows into my suite without knocking, sling gone, a tie knotted like it owes him money. He flips the dossier onto my desk with a little flourish. “Interpol’s bedtime story,” he says. “Our favorite hydra has a new head and the same smirk.”
“You read my safe,” I say.
“I read your face,” he counters, then jabs the page where B.E. Industries pays a consultancy on a hillside above Kotor. “You know what you’re doing?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Which is?”
“Finishing it.”
He laughs once, no humor. “Obsession.”
“Closure,” I correct.
“That’s just revenge in a suit,” he says, leaning against the window and staring down at the city like it’s a board we can arrange with fingers. “You conceal this from Mara and you corrode the only truce we’ve earned.”
“She deserves quiet,” I say.
“She deserves truth,” he fires back. “Remember that clinic we opened? The creed you invented? ‘Truth in daylight.’ Catchy. Hypocritical.”
I restrain the impulse to rearrange him. “If she knows he’s breathing, she will hunt him. She will die for it if the angles align wrong. I will not write that script.”
Lucian studies me for a long moment. “You don’t trust her strength.”
“I’m terrified of it,” I say.
He leaves with a shake of his head that used to shame me when we were ten, and now only irritates. The door clicks. The room exhales.
I make my calls the old way—landlines, burners, a web that predated the internet’s arrogance. Underworld informants require currency more nuanced than cash. With one, it’s passage papers for a nephew. With another, it’s a contract renegotiated in a port authority I supposedly don’t influence. With a third, it’s a promise: he lives if he tells me first.
I meet the first in the back of a shuttered florist in Vauxhall. The air smells of damp stems and forgotten weddings. He is small, expensively nervous, fingers stained the color of nicotine and secrets.
“Kotor,” he says, rolling the r like a prayer. “B.E. leases a bunker under a clinic. It isn’t for patients. It is for erasures.”
“Security?” I ask.
“Eastern European ex-militia. Cheap, loyal until they are not. And the boss?” He drags a finger across his shoulder where a bullet would leave a memory. “Hurt. Meaner. Likes the sound of a woman’s name in his mouth.”
I imagine that mouth forming “Mara” and the room tilts. “Location specifics,” I say.
He names coordinates like a man confessing. I slide a photo across the table—his nephew at a London bus stop, grinning with a new ID tucked into his sock. “He boards the ferry tomorrow,” I say. “He never knows my name.”
“Nor mine,” he replies, and vanishes into flowers that can’t quite remember they were once alive.
The second meeting is in a boxing gym that survived gentrification by refusing to be beautiful. Sweat, leather, the thud of fists confessing what words can’t. The woman I talk to has a scar that makes people look at her left ear when she speaks. She doesn’t waste syllables.
“Your man bought a boat,” she says, pinning a youth to the ropes with an elbow that teaches respect. “Fast. Silent. Registered to a dummy in Malta.”
“Name?” I ask.
“Blue Eventide,” she says, and smirks. “Cute.”
By dusk, I have a stack of intel and a plan that tastes like copper. I drive home through a city pretending at calm. In the lift, I tell my reflection the same lie I told Varga: I am not dragging inheritance behind me; I’m carving a future.
Mara is in the library, barefoot again, surrounded by ledgers she refuses to let burn. She doesn’t look up when I enter. “Rafe pulled firmware that looks like a handshake with a dead server,” she says. “The ghost writes in your name. We need to show regulators before it grows teeth.”
“I’ll handle it quietly,” I say.
Her laugh is a cut. “Of course you will.”
“Don’t,” I warn.
“Don’t what?” She lifts her face; grief and fury have mapped themselves into a beauty that makes me want to apologize for the world. “Don’t notice that every time you go silent, a man with a scar writes my obituary?”
She knows too much without knowing this. I scrub a hand over my face. “I need time.”
“We don’t have it,” she says. “Peace is a loan with a variable interest rate. Pay it now or lose the house.”
Later, after we do the work couples do to pretend the bridge isn’t swaying, she sleeps with her hand in my shirt and I stare at the ceiling like it owes me a star chart. The dossier in the safe hums in my head. At 2 a.m., I slide out of bed like guilt, pull on a sweater, and open the fireplace grate.
The paper ledgers are from the era before me and, if I do this right, after me. I feed them to flame the way priests feed gods they don’t admit they worship. It isn’t erasure; it’s a delaying action. Some monsters follow paper. Some follow blood.
“This ends with one of us buried,” I mutter.
“Lovely mantra.”
Helena’s voice shouldn’t have the ability to startle me; it does anyway. She stands in the doorway in silk and steel, hair loose, eyes awake in the way women’s eyes learn to be when they’ve raised sons to be weapons. She looks at the fireplace, then at me.
“Which one?” she asks softly. “You or him?”
“Does it matter?” I answer.
“It does to the living,” she says, stepping in, folding her arms against a chill that may not be in the room. “Revenge is inheritance, not victory.”
“I’m not interested in victory parades,” I say.
“No,” she says. “You’re interested in relief. It’s a poor substitute for forgiveness.” She tilts her head. “Tell her.”
“Not yet.”
“Will you at least tell your brother?”
“He already knows enough to annoy me,” I say.
Her mouth curves. “Then be careful with the rest. Secrets spoil fast in this family.”
When she’s gone, I stand at the window and watch the city pretend to sleep. My phone vibrates against my palm—a burner number lighting with a single word: Soon. I pocket it and wait for morning to grant the illusion of legitimacy.
At the office, we run drills until the staff hate the sight of my face and the sound of Rafe’s. Lucian schedules a board session and fills it with jokes until he isn’t joking. Mara chair-throws her way through three network trees and finds infections where code swears there are none. We move as if motion can ward off prophecy.
At noon, I meet a man in a pub where the floor still remembers beer as penance. He’s the kind of smuggler respectable men hire when they are tired of respect. He drinks water and waits for me to talk first.
“B.E. Industries,” I say.
“Front,” he grunts. “Money in, silence out.”
“Where?”
He smiles and shows me three photographs of the same door from three angles. “Under the clinic,” he says. “There’s a hall you only see if you know which light to break.”
“What do you want?” I ask.
“Nothing from you,” he says. “Everything from him.”
“Get in line,” I say, and slip him an envelope that will keep his daughter in school for a decade.
By dusk, I have a flight plan none of my people will approve and a sickness I refuse to call fear. I stand at the glass railing outside my office and watch the river bruise itself on the pilings. Mara texts a photo of a sandwich untouched and the word eat. I reply with a thumbs-up and a lie.
Then the building shivers.
Rafe’s voice hits the intercom. “All hands. Now.”
I sprint. The command floor is a sudden choir of alarms. Screens field static, then scroll with characters that don’t belong in any sane alphabet. Our safeguard lights toggle from calming green to insulted red. Mara barrels in from the analyst pit, Tess on her heels, Lucian swearing with flair.
“What is it?” I demand.
“Not a worm,” Rafe says, fingers flying. “A banner.”
The central monitor hisses, resolves. The logo blooms there like a scar reopened: clean lines, circle and bar, the brand carved into the soft tissue behind my ribs. The message unspools beneath it in that fucking serif font he favors when he wants to sound civilized.
Beck sends an encrypted message to every Blackwell server: Round Two.