Chapter 7: A Bed Too Quiet
The hospice was tucked behind an old church in Southwark, half-hidden by overgrown hedges and a crumbling stone wall. Its sign was faded but clean:
St. Margaret's Respite and Recovery.
Cara stood at the gate, hands in her pockets, jaw tight.
She hadn't spoken since they'd left the photo shop and caught the taxi here. Wren kept beside her, silent as always, but scanning constantly—windows, exits, reflections in the glass.
They stepped through the main doors, into soft lighting and antiseptic air. Everything smelled like bleach, boiled vegetables, and quiet death.
A nurse looked up from the reception desk.
"Can I help you?"
Cara nodded. "We're here to visit a patient. Graham Wellings."
The nurse frowned. "Are you family?"
"No."
"Then I'm afraid—"
Wren stepped forward, signed a few fast movements, then passed a folded note across the counter. The woman blinked, read it, hesitated…
Then slowly nodded.
"Alright. Room 14. Left corridor, second door on the right."
They moved without a word.
The corridor was quiet—too quiet.
No movement. No voices. Just the low murmur of a television from somewhere far off and the hum of fluorescent lights overhead.
Cara's boots made almost no sound on the faded linoleum as she approached Room 14.
She paused at the door.
Something in her gut whispered: Not right.
Wren moved up behind her, eyes scanning the floor, the frame, the small security camera mounted above the nurse station.
No heat signatures. No radio signals.
He nodded once.
Cara turned the knob.
The room was dim, curtains drawn, a tray of untouched food on the side table. A small flat-screen TV mounted in the corner played muted news.
And in the bed—
"Graham?" Cara said softly, stepping closer.
He was old. Frail. Skin paper-thin over bone. Oxygen tube in his nose. Arms marked with IV bruises. He stirred slightly at the sound of her voice.
Then his eyes opened.
Pale blue. Clouded but aware.
"Are you her?" he rasped. "The girl… the one they took?"
Cara leaned in.
"Yes. My name is—"
"You can't stay long," he said, a little stronger now. "They know I kept the photo. I saw them yesterday—across the street. Watching."
Cara's breath caught. "Who?"
He reached for something under his blanket. A thin envelope. He handed it to her with shaking hands.
Inside: a flash drive. Small. Unmarked.
"They buried it all. I was there that day. I saw who took you. It wasn't a stranger. It was someone from inside. The family. Maybe two."
His breathing grew ragged.
"I was supposed to destroy the photo. But I couldn't. I saw your mother die, you know. She tried to stop them. That's why they—"
Click.
A soft sound.
Not from him.
From the hallway.
Wren's head snapped around.
Cara's eyes narrowed.
She turned to the old man. "Do you have another way out?"
He nodded, weakly. "Back door. Through the linen room. Go now. Please."
They didn't hesitate.
Wren moved to the window and peered through the gap in the curtain. Two men. Suited. Standing outside the front entrance. One was on the phone.
Cara tucked the flash drive into her hoodie and turned back to Graham.
"Thank you," she whispered.
He smiled faintly. "Find them. Burn it all down."
Then his hand went still.
She didn't have time to check if he'd just fallen asleep—or passed on.
Wren was already pulling open the linen closet.
They slipped inside, through the tangle of sheets and carts, and down a narrow maintenance corridor toward a rusted staff door.
Behind them, voices echoed faintly. A door opened. A curse.
But they were already gone.
[Mission Updated: Flashpoint – The Drive]
Objective: Recover contents of Graham Welling's flash drive
Warning: Digital counter-surveillance detected. Delay upload at your own risk.
Damage Control
Room 14 was quiet again.
Too quiet.
The old man lay motionless, his chest rising and falling with shallow, raspy breaths. The tray of food remained untouched. The curtains still drawn.
The only sound now was the soft creak of the door opening.
Two men stepped inside.
Not nurses.
Not police.
Both wore charcoal-grey suits cut just slightly too clean for public service. One tall and broad-shouldered, the other leaner, angular, with a smooth bald head and eyes like black glass.
The tall one closed the door softly behind them.
The bald one approached the bed.
"Wellings," he said calmly. "You had visitors."
The old man didn't respond.
His breathing had gone slower. He was still alive—but only just.
The tall man began scanning the room with a compact handheld device—infrared, radio frequency, electrostatic. The scanner beeped three times.
"Two people," he said. "Heavy presence. No fingerprints. Wiped clean."
The bald one frowned.
"Flash drive?"
The tall man checked the side table, opened drawers, checked beneath the mattress. Nothing.
"Gone."
The bald man sighed, then leaned down next to Wellings's face.
"You should've done your job, Graham. It wasn't hard. Take the photo. Burn the copy. Die quietly."
He reached into his coat and removed a slim leather case. Inside: a capped syringe.
With gloved hands, he popped the cap off and slid the needle into the IV line.
Wellings didn't even flinch.
"Let's not make this painful."
He pushed the plunger.
Seconds later, the ECG began to slow. Then flatlined.
The bald man watched it, expression unreadable.
Then he turned to his partner. "Send the cleaner in. We'll file the death under accelerated condition due to stress. Nothing unusual."
The other man nodded, tapped a message on his phone.
Then the bald one turned and walked out without looking back.
Outside, the sun had nearly set behind the Southwark rooftops. London moved on, unaware that another thread of truth had just been cut.
"Status on the girl?" the tall man asked as they stepped into a matte-black sedan parked on the corner.
"Alive," said the other, sliding into the driver's seat. "The strike team failed. She vanished post-impact. Someone pulled her out. Unknown male, mid-twenties to thirties. No voice. Scarred."
"Reeve?"
"No. Thank God. Not his height. Burned face. No matching data."
The bald man stared ahead at the dying light.
"She's active now. Which means the system's online."
He drummed his fingers once on the armrest.
"Contact Omega. We can't afford to let another Solace heir reach Tier One. We end her before she touches a foundation."
The car pulled away into traffic.
Behind them, the hospice returned to stillness.
And in a locked cabinet, the final patient record of Graham Wellings was quietly deleted from the system.
The Man in the Smoke
He watched the CCTV feed without blinking.
The image quality was grainy, enhanced by post-processing software running on three separate drives—but it was enough.
A rooftop. A leap. A spray of blood.
Then the girl… his girl… falling into the void.
Shot.
Then darkness.
The camera lost her behind a rooftop pipe.
He stared at the frozen frame.
For years, Reeve had lived in the smoke between cities.
No permanent address. No digital footprint. No attachments.
A dozen names, three passports, and safe houses tucked into the edges of forgotten maps: old industrial buildings, shipping containers, a Scottish farmhouse with blacked-out windows and a generator buried under the barn floor.
He'd built his life around one principle: keep Cara alive.
Even if that meant she hated him for disappearing.
Even if that meant never letting her see him again.
He'd dropped out of her life when she turned seventeen, the day he put her on a military bus with a forged enlistment packet and a bank card full of untraceable funds.
"You're not ready for the world yet," he'd said, pressing her necklace into her palm. "But it's out there. And it's coming."
Then he walked away.
But he never stopped watching.
Every time she transferred bases, he knew. Every promotion. Every disciplinary mark.
Every time she was spotted near danger zones, he monitored.
She was always too brave, too visible, too like him.
And now this.
He turned away from the screen and stood slowly.
His body was older now—tightened by time, knotted by scar tissue—but the muscle memory never left. Every movement was precise. Intentional. Stillness coiled around action.
He lit a cigarette with a calloused hand and stepped onto the balcony of the safehouse—a former Ministry of Defence facility in Kent, buried beneath a private airstrip and guarded by a kill-switch that would turn the whole place into smoke and iron shards if activated.
He breathed out.
Then spoke quietly, to no one.
"You've activated the system, haven't you?"
Reeve had always known what she was. He knew her from the time she was born. By the time he had found her again after the Solace killings she was on the streets.
The necklace hadn't been some trinket—it was sealed. Ancient tech fused with legacy code so deep it didn't even register on scanners. He'd stolen it back from the children's home the night before he vanished with her. Hidden it until she was old enough to wear it again.
He'd spent the last five years chasing ghosts—pulling on every string the system had once touched.
Bloodlines. Foundations. Secret orders that masqueraded as private banks and global think tanks. The Solace Line wasn't just a name—it was a threat. A promise. And there were others who feared what it could awaken.
He had always believed she would be the one to wake it.
He just didn't know it would start with a bullet.
His encrypted phone buzzed on the table beside him.
One word message.
"She survived."
No sender ID. No traceable IP.
He exhaled slowly. Tapped the phone twice. The signal shredded itself instantly.
Cara was alive.
Which meant the hunt had begun.
He crushed the cigarette against the rail and turned back inside.
Time to move.
Time to find her.
Before they did.
Shadow Reborn
Reeve didn't sleep.
He hadn't slept properly in years.
Not since the mission in Carpathia, when two of his men were found skinned alive and he realised the world they fought for didn't exist anymore—not the one that paid them, not the one they bled for.
Not since he left Cara.
And certainly not now.
He moved through the safehouse like a ghost through an armoury.
Every surface, every drawer, every cabinet had a purpose.
He unlocked a footlocker welded into the concrete floor, keyed in the seven-digit code, and flipped the lid.
Inside: weapons. Not just common tools, but personal favourites. The M1911A1 he'd carried through Basra. The karambit from a jungle contract gone sideways in Myanmar. A collapsible crossbow of his own design—light, quiet, deadly. His original dog tags, scorched at the edges. The patch from the 16th/5th Queen's Royal Lancers—faded, sacred.
All reminders of the man the world had buried.
All coming with him.
He dressed methodically: urban camo trousers, body-weight hybrid vest, black combat boots polished to silence. A weatherproof tactical coat draped over it all, lined with modular pouches.
He slotted in a backup pistol. Blade. Throwing pins. Lockpick kit.
Last came the mask.
A half-face carbon weave mask shaped like fractured obsidian.
He looked at himself in the mirror.
Not Reeve, not anymore.
Just a solution. Shadow.
In the side room, he opened the last locker.
It contained only one thing:
A silver case, locked with fingerprint and retinal scan.
He opened it, revealing a slim black tablet.
Only one program lived inside it—a custom interface linked to a shadow network of compromised satellites and offline-data stores. Years of work. Quiet servers hidden in war-torn buildings. Dead letter drops. Contacts he hadn't used since Cara was seventeen.
He slid the tablet into his coat and pulled a burner phone from a Faraday box.
No SIM. No GPS. One purpose.
He dialled a hard-coded number.
It rang once.
Clicked.
A voice answered: distorted, and female.
"Dead Line. Confirm."
"Legacy's active," Reeve said flatly. "Solace girl was hit. Survived."
A pause.
"Level of threat?"
"Existential."
"Counterpart involved?"
"She's not alone. Someone pulled her out of the fall. Exfiltrated under pressure. Silent type. I'll find him too."
"Reinstating Directive Watchlight?"
He closed his eyes briefly.
"Effective immediately."
Click.
Silence.
Outside, a helicopter buzzed in the distance.
Reeve didn't look at it.
Instead, he walked to the heavy steel door at the back of the bunker, keyed in the shutdown sequence, and watched the lights begin to dim.
He took only what he could carry.
The rest—his past, his records, his hiding place—he left behind.
Burn it all if I don't come back.
That was the promise he'd made to himself.
And now, with the system awake and Cara hunted…
He was breaking every rule he'd made to keep her safe.
And stepping back into the fire.
Legacy Protocol: Shadow Active
Target: "The Architect"
Priority Objective: Locate and Secure Cara Solace
Secondary: Identify and Neutralise Legacy Opposition
A screen popped into his view like an old friend not seen for years. Not since he was aide to Caras' mother ...