74. Ronan
Ronan
Location: Ground Intercept Zone — Red One Perimeter
The city breathes ahead of us.
Traffic noise. Voices. A bus braking too hard. Normal life stacked on top of Malenkov’s contingency like nothing is wrong.
That’s the danger.
Jase moves at my right shoulder, silent, lethal, eyes sweeping rooftops and reflections. We don’t talk. We don’t need to.
The target’s signal pulses on my HUD—steady, confident, moving like a man who believes he’s protected by distance and civilians.
He’s wrong.
“He’s cutting left,” Jase murmurs.
“I see him.”
The operator slips through a crowd near a market entrance, jacket zipped, head down, earpiece barely visible if you know what to look for. He doesn’t hurry.
That tells me he thinks the countdown is doing the work for him.
“Lena,” I murmur, mic low. “Confirm trigger proximity.”
“Thirty meters,” she answers. “He’s the hub. Secondary nodes are waiting for his confirmation ping.”
“Time to activation?”
“Under two minutes.”
Plenty.
I angle right, letting the crowd swallow me. Civilian faces blur past—unaware, unthreatening, alive. Every step I take is measured to keep them that way.
The operator slows near a parked delivery van.
Of course he does.
Jase drifts wide, cutting off the exit vector without breaking stride.
I close the final distance and bump the operator’s shoulder hard enough to spin him half a step.
“Sorry,” I say automatically.
He nods, distracted—then freezes.
Because my hand is already on his wrist.
I twist.
The device drops into my palm—small, innocuous, lethal.
Jase is there instantly, body blocking sightlines as we pivot the man behind the van.
The operator struggles once.
Just once.
I put him down with a controlled strike to the throat. He collapses silently, breath gone, fight finished before it begins.
I don’t look at him again.
“Device secured,” I say. “Lena.”
“I’m in,” she replies immediately. “Hold—almost—”
The van’s engine ticks as it cools. Somewhere nearby, someone laughs.
Life continues.
Then Lena exhales sharply. “Black Crown Red One is dead.”
I don’t relax.
“Confirm cascade,” I say.
“Secondary nodes are stalling,” she answers. “They’re waiting for authorization that’s never coming.”
Good.
But Malenkov never builds just one fail-safe.
My HUD flickers—two new markers light up farther out, shifting patterns like something just woke up angry.
“Ronan,” Lena says, tension creeping in. “I’m seeing movement at Red Two and Red Three. He’s accelerating.”
I glance at Jase.
He’s already nodding.
“Extraction?” he asks.
“Negative,” I say. “We push.”
I key the comm. “Aaron, Miles—redirect. I need Overwatch on Red Two. Jonah stays put.”
Static, then Aaron’s voice. “Copy. We’re inbound.”
I step away from the van, crowd closing in again, oblivious to how close they came to dying.
Malenkov thought Black Crown would force me to react late.
He misjudged something fundamental.
I was already moving.
“Let’s go,” I tell Jase.
We disappear back into the flow of civilians, predators in plain sight, chasing a contingency that’s already bleeding out.
Because Malenkov made one mistake, he can’t recover from.
He showed his hand.
And now—
I’m going to break every finger he used to point at innocent people.