Page 25 of Fractured Loyalties (Tainted Souls #2)

The scent of her still lingers in my hoodie. It clings to my skin like a warning I can’t ignore. Warmth threaded with sleep and skin and trust I didn’t earn. Not fully. Not yet.

The sky outside the car is clear and pale, the full light of morning spilling across the cobblestones in cool sheets. It’s early, but not quiet—Marseille hums with that particular tension cities wear before they’ve had their first cup of noise.

The buildings here are sun-bleached and crooked, crouching close like they’ve overheard too much. This place doesn’t wake up. It watches, listens, and measures your tread before it decides if you belong.

I’ve been here before. Years ago. When my name meant something else. When I was sharper, meaner, and didn’t give a fuck who bled.

I park two blocks out, kill the engine, and step into the street long enough to run a quick perimeter sweep.

No eyes. No heat. When I’m sure the street’s clean, I walk a block further and slip into the driver’s seat of a low-profile sedan Lydia arranged—off-books, burner plates, scrubbed from registry, no digital trails.

I ease the car into idle just outside the drop point—an old port district where the buildings lean into one another like drunks after a fight. The wheel is still warm from my grip. My contact is late.

I check the side mirror. No tail. No reflection of anything but the ripple of ocean through the alley gap.

I adjust the comms loop in my ear. Static. Lydia hasn’t pinged me again. I told her to keep eyes on the house. I trust her to obey that more than I trust most people to breathe.

But my pulse still kicks. Not from fear. Not even from the mission.

From the echo of Mara whispering against my chest, palm pressed over my heart like she was trying to memorize the rhythm of it.

Come back with this still beating.

It will.

Even if I have to coat my hands in old blood to make it happen.

A soft rap at the window breaks my focus.

I don’t startle.

It’s Rafiq, my contact.

Ex-intel runner. Worked the Balkan pipeline until it dried up. We crossed paths on a failed extraction in Bucharest—he got shot, I got promoted. I trust him with data, not lives.

He’s thinner than I remember. Older. Same eyes though—the kind that catalogue exits before they register faces. I kill the engine and slide out of the car.

We don’t speak until we’ve walked two blocks south and turned into a graffiti-smeared tunnel lit by nothing but a flickering street lamp and a busted neon sign for a brothel that hasn’t operated in years.

"You look less dead than I expected," Rafiq mutters.

"You’re losing your touch."

He snorts once. No smile.

"Vale," I say. Not a question.

Rafiq glances at the archway behind us, then back at me. "He’s been using one of your old nests. Lyon tag. Marseille footprint. There is something wrong about the whole setup."

"Define wrong."

"Wrong like it wants to be seen. Every other ghost I’ve tracked in the last year? They erase themselves. This one—he leaves breadcrumbs."

My jaw tightens. "Then he wants me to follow."

"Maybe. Or maybe he wants someone else to think that."

That’s worse. More layers. More chances to slip.

"You still have access to the east subgrid?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"Because if he’s pulling shadows through my old tech, I need to see how deep he’s buried."

Rafiq’s fingers twitch like he’s fighting the urge to ask what the hell I’ve walked into. He doesn’t. Smart. That’s why I picked him.

He passes me a chip. "Last forty-eight hours of entry logs on the target nest. I scrubbed faces. Only tags and timestamps. One anomaly last night. Two hours after your name flagged the Berlin node."

"Show me."

He plugs it into a burner slate and turns it toward me. One entry. Mid-height male. Wide gait. Deliberate movements. Timestamp puts him at the location thirty minutes after the Marseille ping Lydia traced.

"He’s testing the buffer radius," I mutter.

"So what’s your plan?"

I look past Rafiq, through the jagged tunnel into the mouth of the alley.

"Find the weak side of his game. And tear through it."

We leave the tunnel behind, the air turning from damp to metallic.

The city grows louder the closer we get to the perimeter of the old nest—a warehouse district on the edge of the port, fenced off like it still belongs to someone who gives a damn.

Most of the buildings are gutted. A few hum with illegal wiring and the occasional burn barrel. This one? Looks dead. Feels worse.

Rafiq lingers by a rusted-out mailbox while I cross the narrow alley, boots crunching over broken glass and ash. The exterior of the warehouse is tagged with old syndicate symbols—faded and repainted until the meaning is just noise. But I know the bones of this place. I helped design them.

The entry sequence hasn’t changed. Three paces from the storm drain, press the hinge plate on the left, slide in a chipped keycard, then pull back. The outer lock gives with a shudder.

Inside, it’s darker than it should be. Cold too. I shut the door behind me and wait. My eyes adjust slowly.

Nothing has been updated. No heat sensors. No new cameras. No movement.

Except one thing: the terminal. Still warm. Recently used.

I cross over to it slowly. The dust is broken around the base, like someone leaned in with urgency. The screen pings to life before I even touch it—whoever was here last didn’t scrub their exit.

Rookie mistake. Or bait.

My fingers hover. I don’t touch the keyboard. Instead, I reach under the frame and feel for the override bolt I installed years ago. Still there. Still intact.

I tap the inner panel. The screen glitches, then displays the last five user entries. Four are standard check-ins. One isn’t.

Encrypted packet.

Red label. Internal string.

Marked: EIDOLON.

My old tag. Not public. Not even syndicate-registered. This was never meant to be tracked.

My stomach tightens.

I open the packet.

It’s not data.

It’s a message.

No sender. No origin string. Just words:

"We trained in shadows, but some ghosts don’t stay buried. The next one you lose won’t be nameless."

My breath catches.

It’s a threat.

No—it’s a prophecy.

And whoever sent it knows about Mara.

Rafiq steps in from the doorway, reading the expression on my face before he sees the screen.

"Problem?"

I kill the monitor and stand. "He knows I’m watching. And now he wants me to bleed for it."

"So what now?"

I lock the door again. Reinforce the old traps. "Now we bait him back. But on my ground."

Rafiq frowns. "Are you going home?"

"No. I'm taking the war to him."

He doesn’t ask more, he just nods once.

We leave through the back, stepping out into the hard morning light. And every part of me is vibrating with two truths:

Vale wants to take something from me.

And I’ll tear out his fucking throat before I let him.

The sun has risen fully now, slanting through the alley in narrow beams that catch the dust in the air like smoke.

The ground steams from where night moisture still clings to the stone, and I taste rust on my tongue.

Not from the air. From the memory of blood.

My blood. Theirs. The kind that never dries right.

Rafiq peels off after we round the corner. No goodbye. No plan. Just vanishes like good ghosts do. He knows better than to stay close once a fuse has been lit.

I slide back into the car and shut the door with a calm that feels borrowed. Everything inside me is moving too fast. Not panic. Velocity. Precision under pressure.

I call Lydia.

She answers before the first ring finishes. “Tell me.”

“EIDOLON was flagged.”

Silence.

Then: “Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

She exhales hard. I hear keys clicking in the background. “Where?”

“Marseille node. The nest. Someone wanted me to find it.”

“And they know about her?”

“They didn’t say her name. But they don’t need to.”

Lydia goes quiet again. When she speaks, her voice has hardened. “What’s the next move?”

“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’s enough 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.