Page 103 of Fractured Loyalties

“We make them think I took the bait. But we flip the table before they finish the game.”

She doesn’t push. Just says, “You want eyes back on Vale’s network?”

“Yes. Deep scrape. Every alias. Every ledger. If he’s resurfaced, he’ll be trying to build a shadow trail. We burn it before it forms.”

“Understood.”

“And Lydia?”

“Yeah?”

“Keep her off the grid. If anything touches her data—her phone, her email, her location—I want to know before she even has a chance to notice. Nothing gets near her, understood?”

“Already done. We moved her comms two layers deeper yesterday. Didn’t tell you because I knew you’d want plausible deniability.”

A beat.

Then I say it, soft but sharp: “Thank you.”

“Go be a monster now,” she says, and cuts the line.

I toss the comm onto the passenger seat and run a hand through my hair. My skull aches. Not from fatigue. From restraint. From the pressure of staying human long enough to keep Mara in the clear.

But this part? This hunt?

This is mine.

The burner slate is still in the glovebox. I pop it open and start cycling through the city feeds Rafiq patched. Surveillance. License plates. Facial scrape grids. It’s not perfect, but it’senough to triangulate a pattern. He wasn’t wrong. Whoever walked into that nest wanted me to see him.

What he didn’t expect was that I’d build a cage around it before he even knew he’d stepped inside.

Three hits.

Same jacket. Same stride. Different faces, same silhouette.

A runner. Or a proxy.

I flag them all and cross-reference with old syndicate codex markers. One name pops.

Toma Virelli.

Used to run with Vale under the Radas contract umbrella. Pulled clean after the Prague fallout. Last I heard, he was moonlighting for arms distributors through Malta. Never expected to see him dirty his hands again.

So why now?

Why for Vale?

The answer punches me in the ribs.

Because Vale made it personal.

And Toma? He always did love betting on the losing side.

I reach for my blade and slide it into my boot.

The first domino just hit the floor.

The moment I pull out from the side street and ease back onto the main road, everything shifts.