Chapter One
Niko surfaced slowly, dragged up from a heavy, drugged dark he’d already fought his way through once before.
This wasn’t the first time he’d woken restrained.
The first thing he registered now was weight.
Not pain—pain had already announced itself earlier—but pressure.
Restraints across his chest and thighs, cinched tight enough to limit movement without cutting off circulation.
His wrists were bound at his sides, metal biting just enough to be a reminder.
His body felt distant, heavy, as though it belonged to someone else entirely.
The second thing was familiarity.
The steady thrum beneath everything. Engines. Not close. Not new. The same vibration he’d registered before consciousness slipped away again.
A jet.
He didn’t open his eyes right away this time. There was no need. He already knew the shape of the space he was in—the controlled quiet, the absence of cargo rattle, the expensive hush of a private cabin. Purpose-built. Clean. Designed for discretion.
He was still airborne.
That hadn’t changed.
He didn’t test the restraints. Not yet. The drugs were still in his system—he could feel them, a dulling fog wrapped around his muscles, a deliberate chemical hush meant to keep him compliant without knocking him unconscious.
Whoever had calibrated the dose knew what they were doing. Sedation without cognitive loss.
That told him more than the restraints ever could.
They wanted his mind intact.
Voices drifted from the front of the cabin, low and controlled. English, clipped and precise, accented just enough to suggest travel rather than origin. They weren’t talking to him. They were talking around him, the way professionals did when they believed the outcome was already decided.
“...handoff confirmed,” one said quietly.
“Jakarta’s green,” another replied. “Fuel only. No manifest. Ground crew is ours.”
Jakarta.
Niko kept his breathing even, his expression slack, eyes half-lidded in a way that suggested the drugs were doing more work than they actually were. Inside, his mind sharpened.
Jakarta wasn’t a destination.
It was a private refueling corridor. A place where aircraft didn’t ask questions and people changed hands without paperwork. You didn’t take prisoners there.
You passed them on.
The realization settled with a cold, familiar clarity.
This wasn’t containment.
This was delivery.
Memory filtered back in fragments—the jolt in the command van, the sharp, white-hot pain in his shoulder, the taste of blood as he’d gone down hard.
He remembered reaching for Luca’s telemetry panel, fingers brushing the seam in his sleeve, then the weight of bodies, the snap of restraints, the needle sliding home.
He remembered thinking, almost absently, that if they were this careful ... then perhaps they thought he was someone else.
Niko let that thought finish itself now.
They believed he was Luca.
The implications stacked fast. Value. Leverage. Time.
And an expiration date.
The men in the cabin moved with practiced efficiency. No raised voices. No unnecessary contact. Every check was deliberate, almost deferential. When one of them approached to adjust the restraints at his wrist, the touch was careful, impersonal. Not the way you handled a disposable asset.
Not the way you handled someone you planned to hurt.
“Vitals are stable,” the man said quietly.
“Good,” came the reply. “We don’t need him stressed. Not yet.”
Not yet.
Niko catalogued the voice. Older. Calm. Authority without bravado.
He didn’t react.
Inside, the clock ticked louder.
The drugs dulled his muscles, but not his awareness. He tracked the subtle shifts in pitch as the aircraft adjusted altitude, the faint vibration change that told him they were cruising now, locked into a long leg.
Moving slowly, he reached for his watch.
He triggered the sequence with a thought and a tap, not sending a signal so much as creating an absence.
It was something Luca had developed for him, and thank God he had.
Somewhere above and around them, systems would begin to disagree with themselves—noise rising, returns smearing, certainty dissolving into weather and terrain and bad data.
To anyone watching, it would look like nothing at all.
But if someone was out there—if they were listening the way Niko hoped they were—they’d recognize the quiet for what it was. An open stretch of sky that wasn’t empty by accident.
He counted minutes between messages sent throughout the cabin over comms. He listened for names, further locations, anything that would give him a shape to hang this operation on.
There wasn’t much. And he knew that was intentional. Whoever had taken him operated on a need-to-know basis, even among their own people. Compartmentalized. Efficient.
Dangerous.
The jet was quiet. Too quiet for a prisoner meant to be interrogated.
Niko registered it immediately—the absence of tension, the lack of urgency. His captors were careful. Controlled. They moved with the confidence of men transporting something irreplaceable rather than someone disposable. Every choice they made reinforced the same assumption.
They believed he was valuable, and as long as that belief held, restraint mattered more than cruelty. He didn’t think about Black Tide directly. Not yet. Thinking about them would invite hope, and hope was a liability in a situation like this.
Instead, he focused on what he could control. They thought he was Luca, and he was determined to continue to feed that lie. And as long as they believed that, he lived.
The moment they didn’t—
Niko closed his eyes briefly, not in fear, but in acknowledgment. Execution would be immediate. Clean. Efficient. No theatrics. That wasn’t speculation. It was certainty.
The aircraft banked slightly. He felt it through the restraints, through the seat, through the bones that still remembered what it meant to fly free. Somewhere ahead of them, Jakarta waited—runway lights, fuel lines, a quiet exchange in the dark.
He wondered, briefly, who would take custody next.
And then—unbidden, unwanted—another thought surfaced.
Ethan.
The pain the thought drove through his heart surprised him, the way it still did sometimes. Years had passed since that last mission together, since the sudden departure and silence that followed. No explanation. No closure. Just absence, like a door slammed shut mid-sentence.
Niko had learned not to chase ghosts.
Still.
He did know one thing.
If anyone could read the air the way Niko had learned to ... if anyone could follow a trail that wasn’t meant to be seen...
It would be Ethan Rhodes. He had thought previously, hoping that someone would be out there watching, listening. Now he knew he hoped it was Ethan.
The thought was dangerous.
Hope always was.
Niko let it go, forcing his mind back into discipline. There would be no reaching out. No signals. No desperate moves.
He had already done what he could.
Now, he waited.
Jakarta loomed closer with every mile, and with it, the narrowing edge between value and death. Niko remained still, breathing slow and even, his face calm beneath the lights.
Whatever came next, he would meet it the same way he always did.
Silent. Watching. And ready.
****
Flying dark was muscle memory.
Ethan held the aircraft just below where anyone would expect him to be, riding the thin, empty spaces between recognized corridors and logged altitude bands.
The jet responded the way it always did—smooth, eager, unapologetically fast. He flew the way he always had when he didn’t want to be seen, letting the sky believe it was emptier than it was.
The instruments glowed softly, muted and stripped back, showing only what he needed and nothing that might chatter into places it didn’t belong.
The sky out here felt different—quieter, thinner. A place between notice and neglect.
Behind him, the cabin was alive with quiet motion.
Black Tide didn’t fill space with noise. They filled it with intent.
Drew was strapped into the forward workstation, boots braced, shoulders loose, but his eyes sharp as they flicked between telemetry feeds and the passive external data Ethan allowed through.
He didn’t speak unless he had something worth saying, and the fact that he hadn’t filled the last ten minutes with commentary said more than any reassurance could.
Victor stood just behind him, broad shoulders relaxed in a way that meant they weren’t—not really.
His presence was a wall at Ethan’s back, solid and immovable.
Tane hovered close by, one hand resting on the bulkhead, gaze fixed on the altitude readout as if proximity alone could influence the numbers.
He shifted minutely with every adjustment Ethan made, tracking speed and pitch with a predator’s focus.
Further back, Dominic and Luca occupied opposite sides of the cabin.
Luca was hunched over a tablet, jaw set, fingers moving fast as he pulled fragmented intel from channels that shouldn’t exist. His focus was absolute, the rest of the cabin fading away as patterns formed and dissolved under his hands.
Dominic sat opposite him, arms folded, expression unreadable—but his attention was sharp, watching the others as much as the data, reading posture and silence the way some men read maps.
Kael Makani took the seat directly behind Ethan’s right shoulder.
He hadn’t said much since wheels-up. He didn’t need to. Kael’s leadership didn’t announce itself. It settled into a room like the calm that came after a storm. When he leaned forward, the cabin seemed to recalibrate around him.
“The trail’s still clean,” Drew said quietly, finally breaking the silence. “No active emissions. No signal chatter. Whoever took him knows how to disappear.”
Ethan nodded once. “They’re not hiding from everyone. Just from the people who’d know how to follow.”
Victor shifted his weight, boots whispering against the deck. “Which tells us this wasn’t opportunistic.”
“No,” Ethan agreed. “This was planned.”
Tane leaned in slightly. “But not rushed.”
Ethan adjusted their heading by a fraction, fingers precise on the controls. The jet answered instantly. “If it was rushed, they’d be flying harder. Burning margin. They’re steady. Controlled.”
“Careful,” Dominic muttered without looking up. “Whoever’s running this doesn’t want him damaged.”
That earned a look from Luca.
“Damaged how?” Luca asked, voice level.
Dominic’s mouth flattened. “Physically. Mentally. Doesn’t matter. They’re preserving the asset.”
Kael finally leaned forward. “You’re sure he’s alive.”
It wasn’t a question.
Ethan glanced at the display—at the absences most pilots would miss. The numbers that lined up too cleanly. “Yeah,” he said. “He is definitely alive. Sedated enough to keep him compliant, probably, but not enough to knock him out.”
The cabin went still.
Victor’s jaw tightened. Tane’s posture shifted, coiled and ready, as if violence might be called for by will alone.
“That narrows things,” Kael said.
“It does,” Ethan replied. “They’re moving him like cargo, not a hostage.”
Tane’s gaze sharpened. “Explain.”
“Hostages get broken early,” Ethan said. “Cargo gets protected until delivery. Handled by people who don’t improvise.”
Luca exhaled slowly. “So, this is a transfer.”
“Looks that way,” Dominic said. “Which means Jakarta makes more sense.”
Kael’s eyes flicked to Ethan. “You agree.”
Ethan nodded. “Fuel-only stop. No manifests. Private ground crew. Jakarta’s clean. They won’t interrogate him there.”
“They’ll pass him on,” Victor said.
“Yes,” Ethan replied. “If that exchange happens, the trail goes cold. Harder to follow—but not impossible—to pick up again.”
Silence settled, heavier now. Not fear. Calculation.
Drew broke it. “Why him?”
No one answered right away.
“Could be leverage,” Dominic said finally. “Could be bait. Could be they think he knows something we don’t realize he knows.”
Luca’s gaze stayed distant. “Or they’re making a move without understanding the board they’re playing on.”
Kael straightened, decision settling in his spine. “We don’t need to know why yet. We stop the handoff.”
Tane nodded. “Eyes on the ground crew. No contact unless forced.”
“And if we miss the window?” Drew asked.
Kael’s expression hardened. “Then we follow him into whatever hole they pass him into.”
Ethan adjusted course again, shaving another margin as the engines hummed, pushing them deeper into controlled airspace. He felt it then—the weight of being seen, of re-entering a world he’d spent years skirting.
Someone would notice.
Including his father.
He shut the thought down. Not now.
Jakarta’s lights bloomed beneath them, the city a sprawl of fire and shadow. Somewhere in that maze, a jet was lining up to land with Niko Keahi restrained inside, alive for reasons none of them yet understood.
Ethan kept them invisible, steady, closing the distance one quiet mile at a time.
“Hold on,” he said softly—not into the comms, not to the men behind him.
Just to the air.
And to the man who trusted it as much as he did.