Chapter 39
The Long Game
Lucan
I replay the image of her in my mind, over and over again.
Her on the table, with her sweet pussy. Her gorgeous eyes, and princess curls.
She met me like I’ve no one met me.
I have built my life on containment. On distance. On knowing exactly where every impulse belongs and where it does not. I kill because it is clean. Because it is controlled. Because it never asks me to stay afterward.
Elara does.
She is a destabilizing agent.
I feel it in my body the way I feel chemical imbalance; subtle at first, then unmistakable. The tremor in my left hand is quiet when she is near. My mind sharpens instead of fractures. My breathing steadies in a way it never does when I am alone.
She is a drug, and I have indulged.
I tell myself that what I want from her is not possession, but proximity. That I don’t need to label her mine, that I can exist with her without rewriting the architecture of myself around her.
This is a lie.
The truth is uglier and far more dangerous.
I want the world to understand that she belongs to me in the way something irreplaceable belongs to the person who would burn cities rather than lose it. I don’t want her protected by walls or systems or distance. I want her protected by the simple, brutal fact of me.
Possession is not foreign to me. Everything in my life exists in categories of control. Tools. Targets. Variables. But she does not fit inside any of them. She is an obsession with a pulse.
I ask myself a question I have never needed to ask before: Is it normal to imagine killing anyone who comes too close to what you want?
I picture other men. How easily I could remove them. How little evidence I would leave behind. How clean it would be.
That is not love.
That is territorial instinct at its most lethal.
I’m on the move again. The city above is asleep in the way Reykjavík always pretends to be asleep—streetlights washing snow into pale gold, apartment windows dark but never truly empty, the harbor breathing under ice like a lung that refuses to stop.
I move through it like I belong to the infrastructure.
Like I’m another utility line buried under the sidewalks.
Kollbein’s voice follows me anyway.
Below Grandi.
Under the fish auctions.
Beneath the city everyone thinks they know.
Of course they did.
Of course someone took war-era tunnels—cold rooms and bunkers and passageways meant for catastrophes that never arrived—and decided they were perfect for commerce.
The kind that needs no daylight. The kind that thrives on the fact that most people cannot imagine a world existing directly under their shoes.
The bike is too loud for what I want tonight, so I leave it.
I take the long way on foot, hood up, hands deep in my coat pockets, letting the cold bite my knuckles until my tremor calms into a disciplined, ugly quiet.
The mask stays in my bag for now, a weight I can feel with every step.
Kollbein said if I go down there masked like that, they’ll know I’m not shopping.
Good.
Like I said; I’m hunting.
Grandi sits where it always sits, the fish market building hunched against the bay, smelling like salt and old blood and the metal tang of industry.
Even at this hour there are lights on in the far rooms—night workers, machines, refrigeration units that never sleep.
The ground around it is slick with frozen brine. The air has teeth.
There’s a door at the side that looks like a maintenance entrance.
It doesn’t have a sign. It doesn’t need one.
It has a camera above it that is too new for the rest of the building, and a keypad that is disguised as a rusted electrical box.
Two men stand near the wall smoking, their posture casual in the way only armed men can afford.
One watches the street. The other watches the door. Neither watches each other.
I do not slow down. Slowing down is a request.
When I get close, one of them shifts, cigarette ember flaring. His gaze slides over me, cataloging height, shoulders, the way my weight settles on my feet. He doesn’t ask for a name. Names are for the surface.
He asks, “You lost?”
My eyes flick briefly to the camera, then back to him. “No.”
He waits for more. Down here, language is currency, and men like this want you to pay extra.
I let a beat pass. Then I say, “Three hours before dawn.”
Something changes in his face. Not recognition exactly—an adjustment. A door in his brain opening the correct way.
He nods once, reaches behind him, and knocks a sequence on the metal panel beside the door. Not the keypad. A rhythm. A code older than numbers.
The door unlocks with a sound like a throat clearing.
Inside is a narrow corridor that smells like bleach and fish and damp stone. The fluorescent lighting is brutal, humming like dying insects. The walls sweat. My boots leave wet prints.
The door shuts behind me, and with it, the world above becomes a rumor.
So do I; I take my mask, and fasten the straps behind my head.
The corridor slopes down in a slow spiral that should not exist beneath a fish auction building.
Halfway down, the air changes—colder, denser, carrying the faint chemical sting of old refrigeration units repurposed for something else.
I hear voices ahead, a low mass of them—too many to be a private gathering, too controlled to be a crowd.
Then the tunnel opens, and I step into the mouth of the underworld.
Below Grandi is not one room. It is a system.
A network of old storage chambers carved into the rock, connected by corridors that were once used to move supplies and bodies during wartime, now repainted in neutral grays and lit with strip lights that make everyone’s skin look sick.
Doors stand open into cold rooms lined with steel racks.
Some racks hold crates. Some hold glass cases.
Some hold nothing at all, but the men standing beside them hold their hands as if they’re touching ghosts.
The market rotates, Kollbein said. I believe him. The layout looks modular—temporary partitions, rolling barriers, curtains that can be pulled across in seconds. Nothing is permanent here except intent.
The soundscape is wrong. Not loud—controlled.
The hum of ventilation fans. The distant drip of water.
The murmur of negotiations. The occasional metallic clink of something heavy being set down.
Every so often, laughter breaks through, sharp and humorless, and then dies again like it was embarrassed to exist.
It’s not a bazaar. It’s a courtroom without laws.
Men and women move through the tunnels like predators in different skins.
Some wear practical winter gear. Some dress like they’re going to a dinner party.
One woman in a long black coat walks past me in heels that click softly against damp concrete, her hair braided down her back like a rope.
Two young men trail her carrying a case that looks like a violin. It is not a violin.
I pass a table where a man with surgeon hands lays out vials of clear liquid on black cloth. The vials have tiny silver glints that move when the light hits. He speaks quietly to a buyer with too-expensive gloves.
A corridor to my left opens into a wider chamber where the ceiling arches high, old bunker architecture designed for occupancy.
It’s crowded. People stand in clusters, shoulders close, voices lower.
There are watchers everywhere—men pressed against walls, women sitting on crates with their arms folded, eyes sweeping. Security. Or prey waiting for a lapse.
I move with purpose, because aimless movement invites curiosity, and curiosity invites correction.
Kollbein said Einar sells context. Not goods. That means he will not stand behind a table. He will not display anything. He will be somewhere that allows observation—somewhere that grants him the advantage of seeing everyone before they see him.
I find him in a place that used to be a cold room.
The temperature drops the moment I step through the threshold, and my breath fogs.
The room is larger than the others, its walls lined with insulated panels, its floor coated in rubber that dampens footsteps.
A refrigeration unit sits in the corner, no longer active, but it leaves behind the smell of old frost. The lighting is dimmer here, softer, designed to hide faces more than reveal them.
And in the center of that cold room, leaning against a steel rack like the room belongs to him, is a man dressed like a knock-off from the movie The Godfather.
He turns his head slightly as I enter, like he felt the temperature change before he heard me.
“Vapor,” he says, and his voice is human, unfiltered by fear. Middle-aged, but not weak. The kind of voice that has been listened to for decades and expects that to continue.
He turns around fully, facing me.
He is late fifties, maybe early sixties.
His face is lined not by laughter but by calculation—fine creases around the eyes from constant focus, deeper grooves at the mouth from keeping too many words in.
His hair is iron gray, cut short, combed back with a care that suggests vanity survived longer than kindness.
His eyes are pale, a washed-out blue that almost reads as colorless in this light.
The left eyebrow has an old scar, thin and precise, as if someone once tried to teach him a lesson and failed.
His nose has been broken and set properly. Someone invested in fixing his face. That alone tells me he matters.
He wears a ring on his right hand—simple metal, no stone.
The kind of ring men wear when they want to appear anchored.
Married, or pretending. His hands are clean, but not soft.
There’s faint staining under the nails, like he handles paper, chemicals, money—things that leave residue even when you wash.
He smiles like we’ve met at a civilized event.
“You came,” he says.
“Einar,” I answer.