Notshortly.Notsoon.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.”
