Chapter 31
Residual Heat
Lucan
My body remembers her before my mind does.
The imprint of her is still there; in the tension of my shoulders, in the faint echo of heat along my skin, in the unfamiliar absence of restraint.
I am not used to waking with another person lodged in my system.
Not like this. Not as something that lingers rather than dissipates.
I have never allowed myself the danger of proximity.
Bodies were always managed from a distance; faces turned away, mouths never meeting mine, no softness permitted, no vulnerability invited.
Desire was an act, not a connection. But with her, I crossed something I cannot redraw. We had sex. I fucked her.
I keep telling myself that this is temporary.
That obsession is a phase, a chemical surge, a misfire of attachment that will correct itself if I apply enough structure.
But every time I test that thought, it fractures, and we fuck again.
And as I leave the bunker it feels like I’m experiencing withdrawal.
I think about the word that surfaced in me so easily last night. Mine. For fucks sake, I marked her.
She is not something I use. She is something I orient around. That is the problem. The idea of her belonging to anything outside my control produces jealousy.
I am not afraid of what I am, I have never been.
But I am afraid of what I am becoming because of her.
And the most dangerous part is this:
I do not want to stop.
But wanting is never enough.
I don’t announce myself.
I never do.
Kollbein’s place sits under the old freight bridge where Reykjavík pretends the harbor ends and rot begins.
The city thins out here, sheds its manners.
The concrete sweats year-round—saltwater seeping through hairline cracks like the land itself is trying to bleed something out it can’t digest. Rust stains the bridge pillars in long vertical scars, ancient and ugly, like something tried to claw its way free and failed.
The air smells of oil, piss, cold iron, and old fish that never quite washed away.
It’s a good place to disappear people. A better place to sell secrets and call it survival.
I step through the door without knocking.
I’m here because áron found nothing, or so he says. That rarely happens, which tangles the web further.
The lock snaps apart with a dry, brittle sound, metal surrendering, that echoes louder than a gunshot in the narrow space. Somewhere above us, traffic rolls on, ignorant and indifferent.
Kollbein looks up from behind his desk too late.
He’s uglier than the last time I saw him.
Fatter, too. His neck has folded into itself, his jaw softened, eyes sinking deeper into his skull like they’re trying to hide.
Fear does that. It bloats men where they should sharpen, makes them round and slow and desperate to be overlooked.
His office is a converted shipping container welded directly into the bridge supports, claustrophobic and dim, lit by two bare bulbs hanging from exposed wires.
They sway gently with the vibration of traffic overhead, casting moving shadows that never quite settle.
Shelves line the walls from floor to ceiling: burner phones still sealed in plastic, stacks of envelopes thick with cash or photographs, false passports, SIM cards, and antique pistols no one here would ever fire.
Relics. Symbols. Information made physical so cowards can pretend it’s solid enough to protect them.
I shut the door behind me.
The mask stays on.
The room goes quiet in the way prey recognizes before the mind catches up, the way breath stutters, the way muscles tense without permission. Kollbein’s body knows exactly what’s happening long before his thoughts do.
“Vapor,” he says. His voice is already thin, already fraying. He doesn’t reach for a weapon. He knows better. “This isn’t—”
I cross the room in three steps and slam him back against the shelving.
Metal screams.
The shelves buckle under the impact, rattling violently as phones and envelopes spill onto the floor.
His breath leaves him in a wet, choking sound, and something clatters away across the concrete—keys, maybe.
Or hope. I pin him there with my forearm across his throat, not crushing, not yet.
Just enough pressure to remind his body what honesty feels like when it’s no longer optional.
“I didn’t come to negotiate,” I say through the mask, my voice filtered and flattened into something colder than human. Mechanical. Unmistakable. “You’re going to answer questions.”
His hands come up instinctively, fingers clawing at my sleeve, nails scraping uselessly against reinforced fabric. Weak. Panicked. I could break his windpipe in three seconds and be gone before the traffic overhead even changes pitch.
But dead men don’t talk.
“Luc—Vapor,” he coughs, eyes watering. “You’re burning daylight. You don’t want attention here.”
I lean in closer until he has nowhere to look but at the black glass of my mask.
“You already sold attention,” I say quietly. “Now you’re paying interest.”
I release him just long enough to grab his collar and throw him forward into the desk.
The wood cracks on impact. The cheap veneer splits like skin. The lamp topples and shatters, glass exploding across the floor in a scatter of sharp, glittering fragments. Kollbein groans, folding over himself.
I drag him back up by the hair, fingers biting into his scalp, and force his face toward mine—toward the blank, unreadable lenses of the mask.
“Inspector Halldórsson,” I say. “Is he dirty?”
Kollbein freezes.
That pause, that infinitesimal hesitation, is louder than any confession.
“I don’t know what you think you—”
I slam his head into the desk.
Once.
Twice.
On the third impact, the desk gives way entirely, collapsing inward with a hollow crack. Kollbein hits the concrete hard, the sound thick and final. He wheezes, air scraping back into his lungs, blood pouring freely from his nose and dripping onto the floor in dark, spreading stains.
I crouch over him, balanced, patient.
“Try again,” I say calmly. “And this time, understand that lying will cost you parts you still use.”
He coughs, then laughs weakly through it, a broken, desperate sound men make when they’re hoping humor might soften inevitability.
“You always did ask the wrong questions,” he mutters.
I grab his wrist and twist.
Bone protests. Tendons stretch too far. Something gives in a way it shouldn’t. He screams—high, raw, uncontrollable.
“Halldórsson,” I repeat, unmoved. “Is he involved?”
Kollbein pants violently now, sweat slicking his temples, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes. “Not… like you think.”
That’s not an answer.
I tighten my grip. Slowly. Precisely. Until the scream turns wet, choked, desperate.
“Is. He. Involved.”
“No!” Kollbein shouts, the word tearing out of him. “No—he’s not taking money. He’s not a client. He’s not owned.”
I pause.
“Then what is he?”
Kollbein swallows hard. His eyes flick—not to me, but sideways. Toward the wall. Toward something beyond this room, beyond this bridge, beyond his ability to keep pretending he’s small.
“He knows,” Kollbein says finally. “He knows where not to look.”
I straighten slowly.
That’s worse.
“He protects,” Kollbein continues, voice shaking now, unraveling. “Not people. Processes. He keeps the surface clean by letting the rot sink deeper. By pretending it’s containment. By calling it balance.”
I let go of his wrist.
Kollbein collapses onto his side, clutching his arm, sobbing quietly. I stand over him, the familiar recalibration sliding into place inside me, the part that takes new information and files it under confirmation.
Halldórsson isn’t owned.
He’s complicit.
“You don’t get to decide what sinks,” I say.
Kollbein laughs then, bitter and breathless. “Neither do you anymore.”
I turn back to him sharply.
“What did you say?”
He looks up at me, eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, defiant in the way men get when they realize they’re already ruined beyond recovery.
“You think you’re still outside the market,” he says. “You’re not. You just shop differently.”
I crouch again, slow, deliberate, letting the silence stretch until it hurts.
“Last chance,” I say. “You’re going to tell me who moved against her.”
He hesitates. Long enough to measure the cost.
Then he shakes his head.
“I can’t,” he says hoarsely. “Not directly.”
My hand moves toward his throat again.
“But,” he rushes out, “I can tell you where to look.”
I stop.
Kollbein exhales shakily, relief and terror mixing into something ugly and humbling. “The underworld market,” he says. “Not the docks. Not the old exchange. The real one.”
I straighten fully now.
“Where.”
“Below Grandi,” he says. “Under the fish auctions. Beneath the city everyone thinks they know. The tunnels, they were storage once. War-era. Cold rooms, bunkers, passageways meant for things that never came. They reopened them.”
Of course they did.
Kollbein pushes himself up onto one elbow, desperate now, words spilling.
“It’s not just Iceland. That place is the heart.
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland—everything flows through there eventually.
Weapons from the east. Money from the west. Bodies from everywhere.
If it can’t exist legally in Scandinavia, it passes through that market. ”
He looks at me like he’s confessing a religion.
“They sell identities,” he continues. “Children who don’t exist on paper.
Judges who do. Military tech that never officially crossed a border.
Human cargo. Chemical precursors. Contracts that don’t name targets, only outcomes.
You don’t browse. You don’t haggle. You survive the attention long enough to be allowed to ask. ”
“When,” I say.
“In three days,” he answers immediately. “It rotates. Always does. Only open three hours before dawn.”
“And who am I looking for?”
He hesitates again. This time it isn’t fear.
It’s respect.
“A man named Einar,” Kollbein says. “He doesn’t sell goods. He sells context. He tells you why something happened, not just who did it.”
That gets my attention.
“He talkative?” I ask.
Kollbein gives a weak, knowing smile. “Only when he wants someone else dead.”
I turn toward the door.
Behind me, Kollbein says, “Vapor.”
I pause.
“If you go down there masked like that,” he adds, voice barely above a whisper, “they’ll know you’re not shopping.”
I look back at him.
“Good,” I say. “I’m hunting.”