Sewer Safehouse, Bucharest
The maintenance room stank of rust and runoff—grime seeping from the tile, water trickling behind the walls like the place was breathing.
Ghost worked the field kit in silence, cotton and antiseptic dabbing the graze on Ethan's arm. No eye contact. No thanks needed. Just one hand steadying, the other patching like he'd done it a hundred times. Maybe he had.
Ethan barely flinched. His other hand rifled through the duffel at his boots, gear clinking—ammo, rations, something wrapped in a thermal sleeve.
He tossed the burner phone underhand.
> "Last ping came outta Berlin. Same window Lara vanished."
Ghost caught it one-handed. Cracked casing, encrypted overlay. No sim. No power.
> "Dead signal," he muttered.
> "Dead girl too," Ethan said, flat. "But she left this behind for a reason."
Ghost didn't reply. His eyes tracked Ethan—every movement economic, every word chosen like a blade. Across the room, the drain gurgled.
Ethan stepped back toward the wall, grease pen in hand. He uncapped it with his teeth and started sketching—dots, then lines—connecting stars that weren't there. Ghost watched them take shape: a hunter's arc, the crooked spine of Orion, bent just wrong.
> "She said the truth's never straight," Ethan murmured, marking the last star. "Even the sky lies when it's paid enough."
Ghost leaned against the cracked pipe behind him. Arms crossed. His voice low, but pointed.
> "She trusted you."
Ethan paused, capped the pen. Glanced over his shoulder, eyes hard as old steel.
> "She trusted the truth. I just happened to carry it."
The comm on Ghost's vest crackled—low-band, encrypted. Laswell, clipped and cold:
> "One merc made it out. He's bleeding but talking. Bring him in. Quiet."
Ghost reached for his sidearm. Ethan cracked his neck.
> "Guess bedtime's over," he said, voice like gravel under boot.
"Time to make someone bleed the truth."
---
The safehouse smelled of mildew and old politics—wood rot and stale cigarette ghosts. No power grid, no signal bleed. Just walls thick enough to forget things inside them.
Ghost worked in silence, methodical. He uncoiled the chains, checked the weight on the bolt anchors, yanked once to be sure. No cameras. No mics. Just analog silence.
The merc slumped in the chair, hands zip-tied, blood caked along his jaw like dried rust. One eye swollen shut. The other flicked toward movement, then away. Still breathing. Barely.
Behind the two-way mirror, Ethan didn't blink. Arms crossed, jaw locked. That steel-blue stare drilled through the glass like he could strip the man's past bare without touching him.
Ghost entered first. Pulled the folding chair back slow, the metal legs screaming across tile. Sat. Quiet.
> "Name."
Nothing.
> "Unit."
Still nothing.
> "Who gave the greenlight on Bucharest?"
The merc coughed. Spat blood at the floor like punctuation.
Footsteps. Slow. Ethan entered without ceremony, boots tracking dried sludge from the hallway. Hands empty, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Calm, but off. Smile wrong—crooked at the edge like he'd borrowed it from someone meaner.
> "I worked homicide," he said, casual, like this wasn't a room built for ghosts.
"Bodies talk different when you don't rush 'em."
The merc's eye twitched. Recognition? Maybe. Maybe not.
Ethan crouched, eye-level now. No gloves. No tools. Just him.
> "See, there's this thing," he said, voice low. "Nerves right under the ribs. Bunch up like cables. You twist 'em right, the brain forgets how to lie. For a few seconds."
He didn't touch him. Just leaned closer.
> "Or the tongue trick. You bite the inside just enough to swell it. Can't talk, can't scream. That's what you're afraid of, yeah? Not pain. Silence. Dying with a truth you couldn't choke out in time."
The merc flinched. Subtle. Involuntary.
Ghost didn't speak. Just watched Ethan work.
> "Tell me who sent you," Ethan murmured. "Or I'll make sure you die like the others did—thinking they mattered more than the people they buried."
The merc opened his mouth.
---
The merc's voice tore loose like something breaking in his throat.
> "VALK!"
It echoed off the tile, jagged and raw. The word hung in the air too long. Ethan didn't blink. Didn't move. But something inside him twisted—like scar tissue pulling apart under old heat.
Ghost caught it. The shift in his teammate's stance. Too still. Too quiet. One beat too long. He didn't ask. Just watched.
The merc's breathing went shallow. Teeth clenched—then a snap, sharp and final.
Foam bubbled at the corners of his mouth as he seized, eyes wide. Ethan stepped back but didn't stop it. He just stood there, fists clenched, jaw wired tight.
The merc's last breath rasped out like a threat:
> "The Gravehound hunts stars now... all of 'em."
His head lolled. Dead.
Ethan turned and drove his boot into the wall. Dry plaster cracked, spiderwebbing out from the impact.
Ghost didn't flinch.
> "You know that name."
Ethan stared at the hole in the wall, knuckles pale. Voice low. Controlled.
> "I know who built it. Valk was there. NYPD, seven years back."
He looked over his shoulder, and for once, his eyes didn't hide the burn underneath.
> "Before the badge meant rot. Before I stopped thinking justice came in a uniform."
Ghost nodded once. That was enough.
He didn't need the full story. Not yet.
But now, they both had a name. And blood behind it.
---
The safehouse smelled like mold and gun oil. A fan rattled somewhere behind the cracked drywall, pushing stale air in slow, wheezing circles. Ghost stepped in, boots muffled by dust-coated tile.
Ethan sat alone at the metal table, cigarette smoldering between two fingers. The press badge—LARA H. VALEZ, FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT—lay face-up beside an empty ashtray. He hadn't touched his rifle. That said more than words.
Ghost didn't sit. He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed.
> "You gonna tell me, or do I have to read your file?"
Ethan exhaled smoke through his nose. Didn't look up.
> "You'll need gloves. It's stained through."
He tapped ash off the cigarette like punctuation. Then reached into the duffel on the floor and tossed a small evidence bag across the table. Ghost caught it mid-air. Inside—one spent casing, 9mm, serial filed clean.
> "Found that in Callum Reyes' apartment. Night he 'ate his service pistol.' Only he didn't."
Ghost turned the casing over in the plastic. "Filed down. Military grade. Too clean for a suicide."
Ethan nodded, slow.
> "Reyes was my partner. Brooklyn Precinct, back when the badge still meant something. He'd been digging—missing witnesses, redacted case logs, disappearances linked to private contractors. All dead ends. Then he ends up face-down in his tub."
He flicked the lighter once, didn't relight. Just held the flame a second too long before letting it die.
> "IA called it a clean scene. File signed off by a Fed liaison. Codename: Volkner."
Ghost didn't speak. Just listened, eyes narrowing.
> "Day after I reported it—my badge got pulled. IA raided my apartment. Files gone. Laptop fried. They buried me fast."
He looked at the badge again. Something in his jaw flexed.
> "Lara's the only one who didn't run. She had contacts—deep ones. Spent months tracing Valk's network. Told me he wasn't cleaning up messes—he was making them."
Ghost finally stepped forward, setting the bag down like it was radioactive.
> "Why bring this to me now?"
Ethan's smile was dry, sharp.
> "Because now Valk's not just erasing ghosts. He's sending one after us. Gravehound wasn't just a threat."
He leaned back, eyes sharp under low light.
> "It was a message. Valk's still in play. And he remembers my name."
Ghost stared at him a beat longer, then nodded once. Tight. Measured. Understood.
---
The leather journal hit the table with a sound too soft for the weight it carried.
Ethan didn't say anything—just slid it across like it might bite. Smoke curled from the cigarette between his fingers, lazy and indifferent.
Ghost flipped it open. No title page, no order. Just handwriting like Lara was racing death. Scribbled codes, initials that read like tombstones, circles around names now buried under classified slabs. Some pages torn. Others redacted in thick black strokes—military redactions, not journalist scribbles.
Ghost skimmed, then stopped.
> "Volkner was never under Voss. He gave Voss the leash."
The room shifted. A current in the air. Ethan leaned back, arms crossed, watching Ghost the way a hunter watches tall grass move.
> "She knew," Ethan muttered. "Valk didn't just mop up after wars. He drew the blueprints. Built chaos from the roots up."
Ghost kept turning pages, slower now. Not reading—decoding. Names he hadn't seen in a decade. Ops scrubbed from memory. One page, marked with a shaky red circle, locked his spine.
A freight route: Odessa to Berlin. Scribbled codenames. Dots connecting like crosshairs. One name in the margin, underlined twice.
> "Dahl," Ghost said, voice flat as a rifle crack.
Ethan didn't blink. "You recognize it."
Ghost's jaw flexed.
> "Erik Dahl ran Mosul command. Pulled out six hours before the blast took half our team. Command said he was KIA. No body."
He turned the journal, showed Ethan.
> "That's not a dead man's name. That's a handler. Valk didn't lose Dahl. He promoted him."
Ethan ground out the cigarette, ember crushed beneath two fingers.
> "Then either he's a ghost… or he's the one lighting fires."
Silence crept in. Not the safehouse kind. The kind before a storm cracks open.
Ghost shut the journal. Hard.
> "Time to burn the archive."
Ethan's lips twitched—not quite a smile.
> "Hope they kept the receipts."
---
The safehouse lights buzzed overhead, soft hum undercut by the sharp crackle of Laswell's voice through Ghost's earpiece.
> "Price is back. Berlin's active. You've got seventy-two hours before the rail goes dark."
Ghost didn't respond right away—just stared out the window like he could see the tracks from here. Then a single nod. Mechanical. Calculated.
Behind him, Ethan locked the bolt on his AX-50. The click echoed in the room like punctuation.
He slung it over his shoulder, eyes fixed but distant. Whatever weight he'd carried from Lara's journal had settled into bone.
> "Berlin's where this started for Valk."
"That's where we gut it."
No dramatics. No promises. Just a line drawn in concrete.
—
BERLIN RAILWAY YARD – NIGHT
Snow drifted in spirals under sodium vapor light. Cold soaked everything in silence. Not the peaceful kind—the kind that waits before metal screams.
The Gravehound moved like vapor between crates, black kit absorbing the shadows. His breath ghosted once before vanishing. No sound but the soft scuff of boots on ice.
He paused at a stack marked with NATO tags. Pulled back a tarp. Read the manifest.
> "Constellation Archive – Lockpoint: Berlin."
The corner of his mouth twitched. Not a smile. Something uglier.
He reached into his chest rig. Pulled out a tarnished Ghost dog tag. Held it like it might still be warm.
Then dropped it.
It hit the snow with a soft clink.
> "Star burns next."
He vanished into the dark like the thought was already action.
Berlin just became the killbox.
---
[This is extra chapter]