Page 1 of Code Name: Hunter (Club Opus Noir #2)

VIVIAN

O peration Persephone

Prague, Czech Republic

Four Years Ago

I never trust the silence. Not in Moscow safehouses, not in sand-choked Aleppo alleys, and definitely not in the hushed pulse of a Prague backstreet where damp air slicks my skin and the dark smells faintly of river rot.

The fog rolls up from the Vltava, wraithlike, curling through the alleys, reaching for me.

The glow from a distant streetlamp throws long, warped silhouettes across the cobblestones, shapes that shift even when I’m still, and every breath of wind sounds like a whisper just out of reach.

The quiet here isn’t dead. It’s watching.

I’ve spent too long mastering every silence, training my body to move when others freeze.

Control is survival. Letting go? That gets you killed.

Silence isn’t peace—it’s a prelude. I flex my fingers inside damp leather gloves, eyes on every doorway, feeling the weight in the air just before it breaks. And when it breaks, it doesn’t whisper—it detonates.

The heel of my shoe slips on the rain-slick cobblestones, and for a breathless second, I almost go down. My palm slaps against the cold brick wall, rough and wet under my hand. My heart is hammering, and my eyes are darting in all directions.

The street is dark. Too still. Each footstep rings out like a gunshot, and the fog hangs heavy, swallowing the sound.

I’m running blind—no comms, no backup, just the weight of the dossier pressed tight against my ribs under the silk of a dress that now clings, cold and damp, to my skin.

The same dress I used to bait a predator—low-cut, black, forgettable.

Pretty enough to distract, invisible enough to vanish.

I choose what they see. Always. If I let someone else decide how I’m seen—how I’m touched, how I’m taken—I become a target.

I’ve never given that power away. Not willingly. Not even to him.

The bastard is asleep now, sprawled across Egyptian cotton, mouth slack, drooling on a pillow that probably costs more than a month of my hazard pay. I drugged his champagne with steady hands and a smile that never touched my eyes.

Now I’m alone in the dark with nothing but phantoms, slick cobblestones, and the certainty that every shadow might hide an assassin.

I’ve spent nine months embedded in the belly of a beast, feeding Vallois’s network of lies wrapped in silk and slow smiles.

I play the part until the mask becomes muscle memory—until I can’t tell where the performance ends and I begin.

Day after day, I sell false comfort and let myself become what they expect: soft, compliant, and forgettable.

But I never lose track of who I am. And I never let go of the prize.

Now it’s mine—the dossier. Real, tangible, humming with danger against my ribs.

A collection of shadows in ink. Names, dates, accounts, coded trails of blood and power.

Enough dirt to salt the earth from Langley to Vauxhall Cross.

Enough to topple governments—or enough to disappear me permanently. .. but only if I make it out alive.

My exfil point is supposed to be clean. They always are.

.. on paper. In reality, they’re ticking time bombs held together by bad intel and worse luck.

The rendezvous is tucked behind a shuttered café in Old Town, near a tram line that hasn’t run in years.

It’s a haunted transit stop stranded between realities—no trams, no lights, just the trace of motion and the weight of memory.

Shadows creep through the broken windows of the café like they’re looking for someone to blame. It's too quiet, and I'm too exposed. And I know it—deep in my bones—the instant my heels strike the uneven ground, the slick surface whispering a warning beneath my soles.

I’m two steps into the clearing when the first shot splits the night—sharp, close, and meant to kill.

The sound cracks the air, followed by the whip off the stone wall.

I don’t see the shooter, but I feel the bullet slice through the space I just occupied, a hiss of displaced air grazing my awareness a split-second before instinct takes over.

My breath catches. My body reacts—I drop and roll, looking for cover.

“Down!” Wolfe’s voice barks through the rain—urgent, sharp, and almost too late. There’s something off in his tone—a ragged edge I’ve never heard in the field. Wolfe doesn’t miss a beat, doesn’t sound surprised. Not unless the plan isn’t the one we agreed on.

A second bullet tears through the air beside me, so close I feel the heat graze my scalp before it shreds a lock of hair and slams into the brick wall with a sound like bones breaking.

The crack echoes through the alley, sharp enough to cut.

My breath seizes. Muscles jerk. Instinct overrides thought, and I launch into motion, shoes slipping on the wet stone as I pivot.

The scent of gunfire hits next—sharp, bitter, and unmistakable.

Hunter emerges from the gloom like a revenant, low and fast. Glock up and sweeping.

He keeps to the edge of the wall, boots silent on slick stone, muzzle tracking each rooftop before his gaze locks on me.

He doesn’t speak at first—just scans, assesses, calculates.

Ready to kill. His presence hits me like a locked command—my breath stalls, my body remembers how to move around him before I can think to resist. He’s always had that effect.

It used to make me furious. Now, I don’t know what it makes me. Weak? A weapon? Both?

“Nocturne,” he snaps. “Cutting it close, aren’t you? Thought maybe you fancied making an entrance.”

“Miss me, Hunter?” I toss as he yanks me behind the rusted bulk of a broken-down delivery truck.

“We’ve got snipers,” Wolfe yells, crouched beside a nondescript van—probably NATO—twenty feet away, face pale and tight. “Extraction’s blown. Support team’s down.” I’ve always trusted Wolfe’s plans. But it is Logan’s voice I listen for when everything goes sideways. Even when I don’t want to.

I feel the words like a punch. “Both of them?”

Hunter nods. “Kill shots—clean, high, and precise. Whoever pulled the trigger isn’t just good—they’re professional. Military or better. Which means someone powerful wants us silenced, fast and without a trace.”

These aren’t amateurs. They're professionals—maybe hired guns. Someone knew our timing. Our route. Our mission.

“Who the hell knew about the extraction and leaked it?” I ask, scanning the rooftops. I’ve memorized the city’s patterns, but none of that matters now. The op is blown.

“This isn’t a leak. It’s a message,” Hunter growls. “Now, move!”

A chill coils in my gut. Not fear—recognition.

Whoever sent this message knows exactly where to aim, and how hard to hit.

And we’ve walked right into the crosshairs.

Hunter grabs my arm and we bolt, splitting from the delivery truck just before it erupts behind us in a deafening fireball that roars like a jet engine.

The heat hits us like a wall, searing the backs of our necks, and shards of metal and glass rain down, pinging off the cobblestones as we sprint.

The blast lights up the Prague skyline—and every inch of me screams we aren’t getting out of this alive.

The force knocks me sideways, and I slam into a parked car, ears ringing, vision tunneling.

I look over my shoulder and see Wolfe shouting something I can’t hear, waving us forward. The last image I have of him is Wolfe pivoting, ducking down a side alley.

Then suddenly... Boom. The explosion is deafening. The blast punches the air out of my lungs, a hot, concussive fist that slams into my chest and rattles my teeth.

A flash of light—white-hot and blinding—swallows the alley as a building crumbles to the ground.

Then comes the sound, a brutal, concussive whomp that shatters the air and hits like a battering ram to the chest. My ears ring, equilibrium is gone, and the world tilts sideways as the blast wave hurls me to the ground.

For a moment, I don’t know which way is up—only that everything hurts.

The impact knocks me off my feet, a pressure wave that folds the world inside itself.

Hunter is dragging me by the arm out of the debris field, smoke in our lungs, fire snapping at our heels.

I glance down at Wolfe's tracker on my wrist, but it flatlines. And just like that, he’s gone. Vaporized.

I stare at the smoking alleyway, heart pounding against my ribs, waiting for his voice to crackle back through the air. A call sign. A curse. Anything. But the silence presses in—thick, final. I climb to my feet; my body moves, driven by training, but my mind can’t catch up. Not to this.

I loved him. Against all protocol, against instinct, against everything I’ve been taught, I let him in.

He was supposed to be my constant. My anchor.

The only thing in my goddamn life that felt real, and he’s gone.

Nothing left but smoke and an ache that tunnels through my chest and makes it hard to breathe.

I stare into the space where he was, numb. No call sign. No blinking marker. Just... gone. Erased.

Grief will come later, but for now, it will only slow me down. And fear, hesitation, or lack of speed will get Hunter and me killed.

But even as grief claws at the edges of my mind, something doesn’t sit right.

My last glimpse of him—eyes fixed not on me or Hunter, but on something deeper in the alley—burns behind my eyelids.

Wolfe was always precise. He never deviated from protocol, never made a move without backup or an exit plan.

So why did he break formation? Why did he run into the alley alone?

I can’t reconcile the man I knew with the man who made that call.

He wouldn’t break protocol. Not unless he had no other choice.

Or unless… he wasn’t the man I thought he was.

I feel the betrayal before I believe it. It’s like a fissure forming in my chest, too deep to trace and too early to call truth. I want to scream his name, demand a reason—but dead men don’t answer questions.

Right now, I can’t face the questions. But later, in the stillness and isolation of exile, I’ll replay this moment again and again—feeling it circle me like a vulture.

A lie beneath the ash? No. I can’t believe that. Not about Wolfe. What we had was real. It had to be. Whatever doubts creep in, I silence them. Because if he wasn’t the man I believed in…then I’ve never been anything more than a mark, and I cannot believe that about him.

I want to scream. I want to run back and find him, but I can’t. Because dead is dead. And that blast was designed to erase. No witnesses. No body. Just absence of life.

I stare at Hunter through a veil of smoke, the flicker of firelight from the wreckage casting him in sharp relief—suit torn, jaw clenched, eyes sweeping the murk like he’s cataloging every angle a shooter could use.

But we’re alive. Barely. Breathing, but only just. Beneath the adrenaline, a hollow opens in my chest that I know will never fill.

I don’t have time to mourn Wolfe right now. I don’t have the luxury. Not when the air still stinks of gasoline and death, not when I can feel the pressure of eyes that might still be watching.

But I also can’t lie to myself. Hunter, Logan Radcliffe’s code name, is the only one left who can possibly understand what we’ve just lost. And even then—only halfway.

His presence is the only familiar thing left in this mess—and I don’t know if that makes him safer…

or more dangerous. He’s not just a man. He’s the last person who could break me and make it look like protection.

I listen to the voice that screams at me inside my head: Run.

Hunter’s voice slices through it. “We have to go. Now. If they know who you are...”

“They know.” I straighten. “My cover’s blown. Anyone they think is helping me is painting a target on their back as well.”

His gaze drops to the bulge beneath my coat. “What the hell’s in that dossier, Nocturne?”

I look away. “More than enough.”

And I can’t tell him more. Not yet. Because part of me—the part still raw from the blast and reeling from Wolfe’s disappearance—isn’t sure Hunter doesn’t already know.

There’s something in his eyes, a flicker of recognition too sharp to be chance.

Like he’s already weighed the cost of telling me the truth and decided not to.

He acts like he already suspects what the dossier contains, and maybe. .. who it condemns.

Trust is a currency neither of us can afford, and right now, I’m not sure if Hunter is my safest option.

He’s held my life in his hands before—literally, physically, with a blade at my throat and a calm I never understood.

He didn’t flinch then. He doesn’t now, but something in his eyes tonight…

it cuts deeper than protocol. Like he’s still holding something.

And maybe it’s me. Is he the one who leaked our extraction?

Or perhaps he’s the next person who’ll put a bullet in my back.

“Meet you at the backup extraction point. Two hours,” I say, spinning on my heel and sprinting away... straight to the Charles Bridge.

I trigger the explosives I planted two days before, because I'm always prepared, and dive into the Vltava’s freezing black water. When I surface half a mile downstream, gasping and clinging to a rusty ladder, I am no longer Vivian Black nor am I Nocturne... They are both dead.