Chapter 15: Fire and Glass

The room was quiet, but not calm. Quiet the way a noose is—tight and waiting.

Ash stood in the doorway of Vale's safehouse, her shoulders rigid, eyes burning like a question no one dared ask. She wasn't dressed for war, but something in her posture said she'd burn the place down before she left unanswered.

Vale was by the desk, his back to her, methodical fingers scrolling through encrypted files like the world wasn't creaking at the edges.

"You left me out," Ash said.

No greeting. No pretense.

Vale didn't turn. "You were handling Moscow."

"I would've handled Voss better."

Silence stretched, taut as a wire. Then she stepped forward, boots hitting concrete like accusations.

"Do you not trust me?" she asked, voice low. "Or do you just not need me?"

Vale finally looked up. His face was unreadable as ever—like a statue carved from frost. But his eyes flickered. Not with regret. With calculation. As if weighing something dangerous.

"You're not a weapon, Ash," he said.

She laughed—dry, bitter. "That's rich coming from the man who forged me."

"You're too close to this."

"No," she snapped, stepping closer. "You're too far from everything."

They were inches apart now, breath threading the tension between them.

Ash's voice softened, but the edge in it remained. "You think you can shoulder all of this alone. That keeping distance is strength. But I see it, Vale. I see the way you look at people like you're already planning their exit wounds."

Her words hung like smoke in the air.

"I'm not them," she said. "You keep pushing me away like I'm just another piece on the board. But I'm not asking for permission to be in your life. I'm already in it."

Vale didn't speak.

Something unreadable passed between them. Not warmth. Not quite affection. Something sharper—shared scar tissue.

Then his phone buzzed.

He answered.

The voice on the other end was breathless, whisper-quick. "It's me. You need to listen."

Vale's eyes sharpened. "Go."

"There's movement out of Croatia. Four of them. Names redacted. But the patterns match."

"What patterns?"

"Adolf's. All of them. Surgical raids, precision kills, total vanishing acts. No media. No survivors. The scent's old-school, but the methods are evolved. Smarter. Meaner."

Vale said nothing. He felt Ash's presence tighten beside him.

The voice continued. "They're calling them the Balkan cousins. Four blood-bound bastards. Ex-military. One's a combat tactician. One's a cybernetics freak. One's into trafficking networks—global. And the fourth?" A pause. "Nobody knows. But every place they've touched ends up colder than a morgue."

Vale's grip tightened on the phone.

"They've got armies. Not just muscle. Politicians. Surgeons. Judges. And they're recruiting. Fast. Flash mobs with guns. Places where children go missing and maps stop showing roads."

"Affiliations?" Vale asked.

A silence. Then: "Whispers tie them to Adolf. Followers. Devotees. Same doctrine. Same rot. One of them signs their kills with a chess knight carved from jet."

Ash flinched slightly.

Vale's voice was quiet. "Where were they last seen?"

"Border of Hungary. Moving east."

The line clicked dead.

Ash stared at him. "This is what you didn't want me part of?"

He looked at her, finally—truly looked.

"No," he said. "This is why I needed you."

She nodded, once.

Then: "So we go."

Vale closed his laptop, grabbed the black duffel from the floor. "No rest."

Split Scene: Somewhere Else

The door was already open when Lira arrived.

Warehouse. Abandoned. Remote.

The snow outside whispered like ash, too quiet, too still.

She stepped inside and smelled blood.

And burnt hair.

And something worse—something sweet and wrong, like decay behind perfume.

The overhead light stuttered like a dying breath, revealing shadows folded into unnatural shapes. The concrete floor was slick in places. Something darker than water.

Her boots echoed. Each step heavier than the last.

Thomas followed, his jaw clenched, eyes scanning. He didn't ask if she was ready.

They both knew she wasn't.

There were six of them.

Lira's people.

No—her friends. Her family.

One hung upside down, blood long drained into a cracked basin. His dog tags were melted into his chest, the metal fused to flesh. A child's drawing was pinned to his belt with a knife—it was his daughter's.

Another had been strapped to a rusted chair, hands missing, lips sewn shut with copper wire. On the wall behind him, a message was smeared in some mixture of blood and filth:

"WE SEE THROUGH SILENCE."

A third had been posed on the floor like a dancer, but every limb was broken—shattered and twisted. Instead of a head, a broken laptop displayed a grainy loop of Lira's voice from an old case briefing.

Someone had hacked them.

The worst was in the center.

A woman.

Or what had once been one.

Stripped of skin. Not ripped—peeled, like a surgeon's practice. Her ribcage had been cracked open, and where her heart should've been, a black knight chess piece was embedded, blood-drenched and deliberate.

Lira stopped breathing.

The sound dropped out of the world. There was no air. No floor. Just a scream curling up from somewhere inside her, trapped behind her teeth.

She staggered.

Thomas moved to steady her, but she pulled away—not angry, but because even touch hurt now.

"This..." she whispered. "This is my fault."

"They went after a lead. You told them to wait," Thomas said. "They didn't."

"But I should've stopped them." Her voice was crumbling. "I should've—"

Her knees gave.

She dropped, hands hitting the concrete with a dull slap.

The smell. The copper. The heat of trauma still hanging in the air—it all crushed her.

And then—

She cried.

There was no single tear tracing her cheek like poetry.

She shook. Her face twisted. She howled, once, sharp and raw, then bit it down like an animal choking on its own voice.

She pressed her forehead to the cold ground, eyes leaking. Fury and agony braided into something primal.

Thomas stood back.

He knew not to touch her now. Not until the storm passed.

"It wasn't random," he said quietly. "This was surgical. They studied them. Killed them like they were delivering a lecture."

Lira looked up slowly. Her face was red. Her tears were still coming, but her eyes—her eyes were changing.

"I see it," she said. "The message."

She looked at the skinned woman. At the chess piece. At the sewn lips. At the broken limbs.

"This was for me."

Thomas nodded. "They're showing you what they are. And what they think you are."

Her voice came low. Flat.

"They think I'm afraid."

She stood.

The grief didn't leave. But it didn't control her anymore. It settled into her like steel poured into a mold.

Thomas didn't ask if she was sure.

She was.

"Book us east," she said. "Tonight."

He met her eyes. "It's not just trafficking. This is something deeper. Bigger."

"I don't care if it's God Himself," she said. "They die screaming."

And in the flicker of the failing light, Lira didn't look like a cop.

She didn't even look human.

She looked like a curse.

Final Image:

Vale and Ash at a private airstrip. Engines roaring behind them. The wind howling like something ancient.

Ash adjusts her gloves. Vale checks a blueprint etched into his wrist like a ritual. Neither speaks.

But something in both of them knows:

This is not a mission.

This is inheritance.

A war not started by them—but made for them.

Far away, across snow, blood, and centuries of ruin, four cousins wait. Silent kings of a hidden empire, sharpening knives in the dark.

And somewhere beneath all of it—

Adolf breathes.