Stolen Legacy (The Legacy #2)

PROLOGUE

Jameson

Minsk, Belarus

Eight Years Ago

The operation was already wrong.

Nothing visible had changed. Traffic moved at the expected pace. Pedestrians followed the same routes they had followed during surveillance. The café windows reflected a flat gray sky and the row of buildings across the street.

Every individual element looked normal. Something about the whole scene didn’t.

Harrison and Rook walked half a block ahead of me, close enough to sell the cover and far enough that I could monitor the street without appearing connected to them.

Their breath clouded briefly in the cold.

Rook slipped her hand through Harrison’s arm and leaned closer as they approached the café. He looked down at her with the easy familiarity the cover required.

They were supposed to look like a couple.

They did. Convincingly enough that I should’ve relaxed.

I didn’t.

I was accustomed to working with Rook. She followed structure. She understood instructions existed because someone had already calculated the ways an operation could fail.

Harrison treated plans as suggestions made by people with less confidence than him.

He glanced back once as they reached the corner.

I resisted the urge to signal him to slow down.

The café occupied the ground floor of a narrow stone building at the end of the block. It had two public exits, one service door opening onto the alley, and large windows facing the street.

The window table had twenty-three percent more exposure than the tables along the interior wall.

I’d told them not to use it.

Harrison opened the door for Rook.

Three minutes later, they sat beside the window.

I watched him remove his gloves and place them on the table.

The target was scheduled to arrive at 10:17.

He had never arrived at a meeting at the expected time. That was part of the problem.

Eight years of intelligence gathering had produced financial records, intermediaries, dead couriers, shell companies, and twelve different names.

No verified photograph or confirmed voice recording. No pattern strong enough to predict where he would appear next.

We knew the organization.

We knew what it moved and what happened to people who interfered with it.

We didn’t know the face of the man directing it.

We were attempting to identify a ghost by watching the people who feared him.

At 10:11, the communications channel cracked sharply in my ear, then went silent.

I tapped the receiver once.

Nothing.

Again.

Still nothing.

The failure could’ve been technical.

The signal had held through every rehearsal and the previous four hours of field surveillance.

Technical failures didn’t usually begin six minutes before a target was expected.

I looked toward the café.

Rook hadn’t reacted. Harrison was saying something to her, one hand curved around his coffee cup.

They didn’t know the channel was gone.

A delivery truck turned onto the block.

I had seen it twice during surveillance.

Tuesday mornings at 10:26. Produce delivery to the restaurant behind the café.

Today was Thursday.

The truck shouldn’t have been there at all.

Its rear doors weren’t secured.

The driver braked too late at the corner, corrected, then looked toward the café.

Not toward the road or the loading entrance.

The café.

His right shoulder dropped as his hand moved below the window line.

I stepped off the curb.

The target hadn’t arrived. The communications were dead. The truck was wrong.

Three failures in six minutes.

I started running. “Abort.”

The word disappeared into the dead channel.

Inside the café, Rook looked toward Harrison and smiled at something he said.

The truck accelerated.

That was confirmation enough.

I tried again. “Abort the meeting. Move.”

Neither of them reacted.

They couldn’t hear me.

Fuck.

I reached the center of the street when the truck detonated, the sound disappearing inside the pressure wave.

Heat slammed into me hard enough to steal my breath. The force lifted me off my feet and threw me backward onto the pavement. Glass erupted from the café windows. Metal folded inward. The entire truck vanished inside white fire and black smoke.

For half a second, there was only heat, pressure, and the high ringing in my ears.

Then I was up and moving again.

I jumped through what remained of the window.

Smoke filled the room, thick enough that I could barely see past the nearest tables.

The ceiling had collapsed near the front tables.

Chairs were scattered across the floor. The sprinkler system had activated, turning dust and ash into gray streaks along the tile.

The air tasted like burned metal and concrete.

I couldn’t hear properly.

It didn’t matter.

I found them both immediately.

Rook was half-buried beneath a section of the interior wall. Blood covered one side of her face, and her hand moved weakly against the floor.

Alive.

Harrison lay several feet away near what remained of the window.

He wasn’t moving.

Debris covered his legs and one side of his torso. One arm extended across the tile, palm upward. His face was turned toward the floor.

A shard of glass protruded from his chest, high and left, too close to his heart.

I dropped beside him. “Harrison.”

No response.

Blood soaked through his shirt around the glass, spreading across the fabric and dripping onto the tile beneath him.

I reached for his neck.

My fingers kept slipping against the blood and dust.

I tried again, but my hands were shaking too badly to find anything.

It didn’t look like his chest was moving.

I put one hand against the side of his face and turned him toward me. “Harrison.”

Blood ran from his hairline. His eyes remained closed. His mouth was slightly open, but I couldn’t feel breath against my hand.

“I don’t think he’s breathing,” I said.

Boots struck broken glass behind me.

A medic dropped beside Harrison and opened a trauma kit while another cut through his shirt. Someone fitted a mask over his mouth as another set of hands began clearing debris from around his legs.

“He’s not breathing,” I repeated.

“Give us room,” the medic said as he worked.

I stayed where I was.

“Mercer, move back,” someone said, bracing one hand against my shoulder.

“We need to get him out,” the medic said.

Hands closed around my arms and pulled me backward.

I fought them, not tactically and not with any awareness of who they were.

I only knew they were moving me away from him.

“Harrison,” I called.

The medics lifted him onto a board. One of them kept pressure around the glass while another worked over his airway.

His hand dragged across the floor.

For one second, I thought he’d moved it.

Then the board shifted beneath him.

They carried him through the smoke.

I followed until one of the security officers blocked the opening and forced me back.

“Harrison,” I called again.

He didn’t respond.

Then he was gone.

All that remained was blood, shattered glass, and the outline his body had left in the ash.

The room continued moving around me. Medical personnel crossed through the smoke. Someone called for another stretcher. Water fell from the broken sprinkler system and ran through the dust in thin gray streams.

None of it fit together anymore.

We had spent eight years chasing a man no one could identify.

If we’d known his face, or the faces of the people working for him, we might’ve tracked them long before they reached the café.

Instead, there was only blood on the floor where my brother had been.