Chapter 17
RETH
The café terrace is too bright. Too loud. Too full of normal, happy people who have no idea what it costs to sit among them.
I don't sit among them.
I stand in the shadow of the building opposite, back against stone, one foot on the wall behind me. My eyes move across every face on the terrace the way they always move—exits, angles, threats—because thirteen years of this means I can't look at a crowd without running it.
Four jobs in seven days.
All within a fifty-mile radius of where I'm standing now.
Valeria running me like a machine that doesn't need rest, doesn't need recovery time, doesn't need human mercy of distance between one thing and the next.
I can feel them—the four hits—sitting on my arms the way they always sit.
Precise. Accounted for. One line each, already decided, already carried.
Valeria gave me no name. Just coordinates and a single text: Wait for my call. The target will be obvious.
She's keeping me close to something. I don't know what yet.
But that's Valeria. She doesn't do anything without a reason, and she doesn't telegraph her reasons until she's ready for you to understand them.
Every job placed with the patience of a woman playing a board game three moves ahead.
Every instruction stripped to the minimum because she knows I'll fill in the gaps—that my training will do her work for her, that thirteen years of this has made me efficient in ways that serve her without requiring her to explain herself.
She doesn't send me anywhere without purpose.
Four jobs. Same radius. No name on this one.
She's circling something. And she wants me close enough to close the circle when she's ready.
My phone vibrates against my palm. I let it ring, let her wait, then answer without saying a word.
Her voice pours into my ear like warm oil over broken glass. “Still waiting like a good boy?” A pause—the theatrical kind, the kind she savors. “How does it feel, Nazareth? Sitting there among all those happy families, knowing exactly what you are?”
I don't respond to rage-bait.
“Head to the underground parking. South entrance.”
Without a word, I cross the street, down the ramp, into the dark. The temperature drops immediately—the cold of underground spaces, recycled air and concrete and the smell of oil on asphalt.
My eyes adjust. I move to the support column nearest the south entrance and put my back against it.
“Here.”
“Your target will arrive in forty-eight seconds.”
I go very still.
Forty-eight seconds.
Not shortly. Not soon. Forty-eight seconds—a number so precise it can only mean one thing.
She has eyes on the target right now. Live eyes, live feed, someone positioned close enough to count seconds.
Which means the target has already entered the building or they’re about to exit.
Already in the stairwell or the elevator or the ramp.
Already in motion, already unknowing, already forty-eight seconds from whatever Valeria has decided they are.
Thirty-seven.
I run it without deciding to. The calculation assembling itself the way it always does—automatic, operational.
She had eyes before I arrived. Which means she knew I'd comply before I picked up the phone. Which means this was never a question.
Twenty-nine.
“Tell me the name, Valeria,” I bite out.
“Patience, soldier. I want you to feel this one. Twenty-five seconds.”
The silence stretches. My pulse is a war drum in my ears.
Four jobs in seven days. Same radius. And now this—no name, no profile, no brief. Just coordinates and a countdown and Valeria's voice in my ear.
Fifteen.
Something’s wrong.
I know it the way I know most things, the wrongness that years of this work has made me fluent in. The wrongness of a situation that doesn't fit any operational template I recognize.
Eight.
My hand finds the karambit.
Five.
There’s no sound of footsteps on the ramp. Whoever this is, they’re coming from the elevator.
I don't move.
Two.
One.
The elevator doors open.
Light spills out—the warm, yellowish kind. Footsteps. Multiple sets. The unhurried sound of people who just ate a good meal and are walking back to wherever good meals take you.
A woman laughing at something. A man's voice low and warm in response. The shuffle of a child being carried, or held, or swung between two adults the way children get swung when they are loved and don't know yet that the world requires them to be anything other than exactly what they are.
My hand is on the karambit. My body is where it needs to be—positioned, angled, every variable calculated in the half second before the doors opened.
This is what I am. This is the terrible efficiency of everything Valeria built.
And then I see him.
The world doesn't slow down. That's a lie people tell about moments like this—that time stretches, that the mind finds mercy in its own processing. It doesn't. It lands at full speed, full weight, no cushion.
I know that face.
I know it the way you know something you were never supposed to see again. The way you know something you made a decision about in a dark moment on a dark street and have been carrying ever since. The way you know something that changed the trajectory of your life.
“Your target,” Valeria’s voice in my ear, “is Elias…Greene.”
Everything stops.
Not time. Not the family moving toward the car. Not traffic outside.
Me. I stop.
The only thing that moves is the memory.
“I have a kid. He’s only five. Please… he’s waiting for me. I won’t say anything, I swear on his life, just let me go home to him.”
“Eight one five Oak Hollow Drive.”
“No. No. No. No. Please, my son. I’m all he has. I can’t…please.”
“I’m sorry, Allison.”
My hand on the karambit is steady because my hands are always steady. Everything else is not.
Ice moves up my spine one vertebra at a time. My pulse spikes—not the controlled elevation of operational stress, the other kind, the kind I can't manage down, the kind that has nothing to do with training and everything to do with the horror of understanding what she just showed me.
My stomach turns. Worse than nausea. It’s a physical response of a body managed by a mind that realizes a line has circled back. A thread that was meant for penance that’s now a weapon in the devil’s hands.
“Valeria, what the fuck is this?” My voice comes out low. Unrecognizable.
“This is you realizing that you can't hide anything from me.” She speaks with the patience of someone who already knows she’s won.
“This is you realizing that there is no version of your life where I don’t know everything.
” A pause. “This is you knowing, without a single doubt, exactly how chained you are to me.”
The boy laughs at something the man says. A child's laugh—unguarded, complete, the laugh of someone who has no idea that the world contains people like me.
“I know about the anonymous deposit made to the adoption agency. I know about the monthly transfer to that boy’s new family,” she says softly. “I thought you knew by now, Nazareth.”
I’m already moving, stepping back into the shadow, back against the wall. “Knew what?”
“That there is no redemption for people like you.”
I press my back harder against the concrete. The cold of it through my jacket. The grounding reality of stone and shadow and the smell of oil on asphalt. I focus on it the way you focus on something physical when the thing happening inside you is too large to look at directly.
“You know I’m right.” I can hear her smile. “That’s the part that hollows you out, isn’t it? The fact that I’m always right.”
The family reaches their car. The boy is lifted into the back seat. The door closes.
They drive away.
“You've become sloppy. Too easy to read.”
“You made your point.” My jaw clenches.
“Did I?” She sounds almost pleased. “I haven't even started, darling. You've been leaving leashes all over for me to find. The boy. The girl…in Paris.”
My insides peel open, my heart and spine shatter all at once. Like a sledgehammer ripping through cinderblock.
Sophia.
The girl in Paris. Said the way you say the name of something you own. The surgical knowledge of someone who has been watching long enough to know exactly where to put the knife.
I don't speak.
I don't move.
I don't give her a single thing.
“I’m surprised you trust her with him. Oddly enough, I can’t find anything on the bodyguard. It’s like he doesn’t exist. Who is he?”
My heart is beating fast. Too fast. Rage is already fueling the adrenaline. In my mind, I’m already out of this underground parking lot. I’m already out of this fucking city, halfway to Paris. But she has eyes on me, the same eyes she had on the boy.
“You’re awfully quiet, Nazareth.”
My hand tightens on the karambit, Valeria’s blood already tainting my vision.
“It would be so easy, if you think about.” I imagine her sitting on her gold chair, champagne in hand, my fingers ripping out her stomach.
“I can already see the Paris headlines. American tourist falls from balcony in the City of Love. Boyfriend, a known associate of organized crime, found dead. Tragic, really. They’ll say she was on something.
That she jumped. Or that he pushed her before he ate his own gun. ”
“Touch her,” I say, my voice a lethal wire, “and I won’t stop until I’ve carved you out of this world. You and every blood relative you didn’t already make me kill. I’ll go through your family tree with a red motherfucking pen.”
Silence.
Then—soft, almost fond, “There he is.”
The line goes dead.