The city kept its lights low that night, as if saving brightness for a future emergency. Rain tracked down the glass of the delivery van and blurred the neon into watercolor streaks. Aiden Cross rode the roof like it was still a battlefield, boots splayed for purchase, breath measured. The case in his knuckles was warm from the courier’s practice of layering insulation around fragile electronics; it was billed as a routine handoff to a private lab two blocks over. That was the kind of life a man with his history could get: small contracts, no questions, waves of cash that didn’t ask about the shape of his past.
He liked the ordinary of it. The job made no demands on promises. It didn’t ask him to answer for the name he’d been given in blue ink on a file of classified operations, didn’t look for the man he had been when missions had names and endgames. Tonight, that ordinary held like a thread through the rain, fragile but present. He jumped the gap between two low industrial roofs with the kind of economy of motion the years had carved into him, and for a moment the city was a map of sounds – the slap of his boots, distant horns, the hiss of water off metal.
When he reached the alley entry for the lab he found the first handoff done and dusted: a young tech waved him through the service door and didn’t look twice at the sealed case. The lab’s cameras logged a thirty‑second exchange and a polite nod. He should have called it a night.
The second package arrived twenty minutes later.
It wasn’t left anywhere elaborate. No dead drop tucked under an alley drain. A paper bag, folded over and tucked beneath a vending machine’s base, as if someone had forgotten a lunch and then run. Aiden’s stomach didn’t settle when he saw it. He didn’t open it at once. Men like him learned to wait; waiting let them see whether something was simply there or bait that would snap shut.
He was halfway through the alley when cold metal found his spine. Movement exploded around him: tight figures like shadows that had been waiting in the folds of the district, compact rifles that flicked into motion with synchronized efficiency. A door banged open as another team cut off the street behind him. The lab cameras could not have logged what was about to happen. This was the sort of operation meant to interrupt footage.
Aiden tensed, then moved. The training never left. He rolled to the side, using a trash bin as cover, and the first volley kicked grit into his face. He tasted iron and rain. The alley tightened; pipes and cables made the room small and honest. He fought for clean angles, for distance that let him move rather than be a target. He’d done worse on worse nights. But ambush felt different when it wasn’t foreign soldiers on black nights; this was a well‑funded, clinical hit—precisely the sort of muscle a private network could field. He killed a light with a palm strike, shoved a wheelie bin against a door and slipped through a maintenance stairwell, lungs burning, palms stinging with the memory of the last fight he’d lost. He couldn’t see their faces under the hoods, but he felt something else: the silhouette of professionalism that didn’t smell of government operations.