CHAPTER EIGHT: Ashes and Silence

She returned to the suite barefoot.

Her braid was undone. The wine on her breath had turned bitter. Her fingers shook as she opened the door, but her expression didn't.

He was already there.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, still dressed, boots unlaced, eyes fixed on the floor as though he'd been rehearsing how not to ask the question burning behind his ribs.

Their eyes met.

But no words passed between them.

He took in her disheveled state — the red smear under her jaw, the silk clinging too tightly to her waist.

She noticed the way he didn't move, didn't accuse, didn't breathe too loud.

It was worse than shouting.

He turned away.

She walked past him, each step echoing like a confession.

Her earrings landed on the dresser with a dull clink.

He said nothing.

She said even less.

And when she lay down, she faced the wall — as if sleeping beside someone didn't require warmth, only silence.

That night, neither slept.

Lucas sat in the dark, watching the city's amber lights flicker against the glass. Mia lay motionless, curled around the ache that wouldn't leave her ribs.

Both of them haunted by the same name.

Both pretending they weren't.

The next morning, Mia woke to emptiness.

The other side of the bed was cold.

A week passed.

A week of choking silence and gloved interactions.

Of scheduled meetings, fake smiles, and emotional landmines.

They didn't fight. They didn't talk. They just existed — like two statues frozen in the aftermath of something neither could name.

Mia buried herself in war briefings.

Lucas trained harder, later, longer — punishing himself with exhaustion.

Every time they crossed paths, there was a moment — a sharp breath, a flicker of something behind the eyes — but it never lasted long enough to soften the distance between them.

Mia sat up slowly in her office, her body aching in the way only grief — or guilt — could manage. She stared at her encrypted tablet for a long time before touching it.

Her fingers hovered over the comm log.

She tapped into her southern informant: Rye.

"Status report. Anything from the Sonhane border tunnels?"

A pause. Then static.

"There was a breach. Underground."

"Gas explosion, that's the official story. But Rica flagged an unauthorized foreign operative in the vicinity—profile matches Ghost-92."

"One body found. Burned. Unidentifiable."

She didn't ask the name.

She didn't need to.

Her throat closed around air like it had turned to smoke.

Across the city, Lucas received his own message.

The encrypted line buzzed once.

"Ghost-92. Lost during tunnel fire. No remains. No retrieval ordered. Operation closed. Status: Terminated."

He read it twice.

No name. Just a code.

But it was always Mino.

His Mino.

The silence in the room pressed against his spine.

That evening, Mia sat at her desk with her wedding bangles still around her wrist, faded with wear.

She opened her message draft.

Typed slowly:

You said nothing.

So I will say nothing too.

But you could've at least told me goodbye.

She stared at the words like they were bleeding.

Then deleted them.

Lucas never mentioned the message he got.

He returned late to the suite, quietly. She was already in bed.

He was preoccupied in his own thoughts.

He had lied. Not just to Mia. Not just to command. But to himself.

He had known Mino wasn't just working on Dahlia. That mission — the one briefed in boardrooms and whispered through comms — was a façade. A decoy dressed in clean lines and vague objectives. Beneath it, buried under codes and layers of disinformation, was something far messier. A black operation. Unnamed, unclaimed — the kind of mission you didn't come back from with medals, only ghosts.

And Mino had walked straight into it.

The signs had been there for weeks, maybe months. Irina had been the first to notice the shift. She was cold-eyed, clinical, impossible to read — but that day, her voice had carried something close to fear.

"If you care about him, get him out. Before they bury him."

That was all she said. No context. No elaboration. But it haunted Lucas more than any report ever could.

And then came the silence.

Lando Russ — Lucas's oldest comrade, closest friend, and the one man he trusted with everything he couldn't say out loud — vanished from the grid. A ghost to follow his ghost.

That was what truly broke him.

Because Lando never disappeared.

They had fought side by side during the Northern Uprisings. Lando had taken a bullet to the ribs shielding Lucas from a rooftop sniper in Kerhyn. He was a ghost spy with unmatched instincts, the man you sent in when the mission was already bleeding out — and he always resurfaced. Always.

But now, nothing.

No pings. No tracker movements. No casual encrypted jokes. Not even their personal fail-safe signal, the one Lando swore he'd never ignore.

That's when Lucas knew.

This wasn't a mission anymore. It was a grave.

And Lucas — out of pride, out of fear, out of jealousy — had done nothing.

Maybe part of him had wanted Mino to feel that distance, that sharp edge of abandonment. Their last conversation had ended coldly, both of them too stubborn to say what they really meant. Lucas had accused him of crossing lines, of getting too deep with someone he wasn't supposed to care about. He didn't say Mia's name, but they both knew.

Mino had said nothing.

Then he disappeared.

Now Lucas sat in the dark, his lungs filled with smoke and regret, wishing he could rewind time.

He hadn't just lost Mino.

He might've helped send him to his death.

A tear left his eye and then he remembered that he is also responsible for the person beside her.

He looked at her in the dark.

Saw the stiffness of her posture.

The hollowness of her breath.

They were both grieving someone they could never name aloud.

He climbed into bed.

No one touched anyone.

No one spoke.

No one cried.

And somewhere between the silence they shared and the truths they buried,

the ghost of Mino began to settle between their bodies —

warm like a memory,

cold like a warning.