The burner vibrated once, buried deep in my inner coat pocket — the kind of vibration you only felt if you’d trained yourself to wait for it. It lived inside a thin Faraday slip; I only pulled it free when I needed signal, then buried it again.

It was a heartbeat of black-market hardware that announced itself only in single, clipped pulses. I never took calls from VIREX on anything else; official channels didn't exist in my world.

Even in an empty street, I checked the windows above, the alley’s blind corners. Somewhere, someone was always listening. My watchful eyes drifted around quickly, instinctively checking mirrors and shadows—force of habit. Empty street, deserted sidewalks. Only a blackbird watching me from a stripped branch, feathers glossy as obsidian. Even here, even now, I remained wary.

I retrieved the burner out, flipping it open. "Caine."

Static, brief silence, then the familiar gravel-edged voice of Elias Monroe, Director of Operations and the last person I'd heard from the night Howard died.

"You're activated."

My fingers tightened on the phone, knuckles bleaching. Monroe skipped greetings, always—small talk was for people who didn't measure conversations in operational risk.

"Under which alias?" My voice felt rusty from not speaking.

"Kaitlyn Bishop. Ghost Protocol is live. You’re wheels up tonight. Birmingham.” He paused. “A signature consistent with Hart’s tooling resurfaced. Treat him as a lead, not a lock.”

I swallowed hard. "You're sure?"

"Packet signature overlaps, yes. Our TLS/JA3 fingerprint sits at eighty-two percent similarity. Enough to pull a trigger on, if you like wasting bullets. But the beacon jitter is wrong and the last hop is a Birmingham transit mesh, which is public and noisy. Enough to raise flags, but not enough to swear an affidavit," he rambled in his usual monotone voice.

He droned on. "Which, by the way, any half-talented ghost could fake. In fact, the way it’s been built almost feels staged as if someone gift-wrapped Hart’s style for us. If it’s him, he’s either sloppy or screaming for attention. Neither fits.”

I shifted in my seat, digesting and memorizing every bit of detail, as he continued. "He's probably running hard and loose through darknet nodes routed out of the Midland hubs. He's vulnerable, and you're close enough to exploit it. Briefing's been sent via the usual drop. Study it and burn it."

I didn't respond immediately. My gaze drifted to Howard's headstone through the windshield, now distant and blurred behind the misted glass of my car. "Did Felix Hart know him personally? Did they ever meet face-to-face?"

Monroe paused, a rare glitch of hesitation in a voice made of granite. "Negative. Hart dealt anonymously through encrypted channels. No direct contact or visual records. No reason to believe Hart has any knowledge of you personally."

I exhaled slowly, letting the relief settle beneath my ribcage. Felix Hart didn't know my face. Didn't know Melissa Caine was Howard's girlfriend. Didn't know I was about to dismantle his world brick by brick, starting with his guard down.

“You’re point for two reasons,” Monroe continued. “Plausible deniability, and because you have artifacts nobody else has. Howard’s JA3 corpus and historical telemetry. Off-book suits you. Don’t make me regret it.”

I glanced back one last time at the blurred cemetery gate. "Understood. Protocol accepted."

"Kaitlyn Bishop doesn't fail," Monroe punctuated, emphasising each word with sheer warning. "Remember your training."

Just before I thought the line went dead, he added. "And Caine, if Hart’s vulnerable, others will be moving on him too. Get there first, or don’t bother coming back."

The call disconnected abruptly with a click. I closed the burner, cracked open its plastic casing, and removed the tiny sim-chip. Crushing it beneath my boot heel, I scattered the remains in damp gravel, already untraceable.

If Hart wanted to be found, he wouldn’t use a transit mesh and a borrowed fingerprint. He was too clean for that. Either he wants me looking in Birmingham—or someone else does.

I guess only Kaitlyn Bishop could decipher that. For now, I was her. Ghost Protocol.

Roaring the engine to life, I drove without remembering the turns, the misted cemetery gate fading into sodium-lit streets. The drive back felt like  a bleed-out. Every turn, every passing streetlight, just more distance between me and the woman who walked into that cemetery. Birmingham wasn’t a destination; it was an execution ground, and I’d already agreed to show up.

The mist clung to me all the way home, as if Howard had followed me from the cemetery to watch the last pieces of Melissa come off.

By the time I hit the second bridge, Kaitlyn Bishop was already breathing down my neck, and Melissa Caine was fading like fog in a rearview mirror.

I'd spent a year honing my grief into something sharp enough to kill a ghost.

Tonight, I became that blade.

...

The sky cracked open in sleet by the time I reached my apartment. Pale silvery rain slipped like needles down the windowpanes, tapping in patterns too erratic for comfort. I slid the bolt shut behind me—twice—and dropped my coat in a heap by the radiator. The heat hadn’t kicked in properly. The place still grappled onto the stench of faintly burned coffee and mothballs.

A neighbor’s television leaked muffled laughter through the wall — a sound from a life I’d stepped out of hours ago. It made the hard case under my bed feel heavier, and more inevitable.

My apartment was the kind of still you didn’t want to sit with too long. It wasn't minimalist—just half-abandoned, like a ghost in mid-transition. Books turned spine-in. Mugs never matching. A cracked mirror leaned against the hallway wall from the last time I’d tried to punch grief and missed.

Howard’s jacket still hung from the chair.

I hadn’t moved it. Couldn’t. I let it rot in the corner like some half-formed guilt I wasn’t ready to bury. Every time I tried to throw it out, I imagined his voice. Not laughing but calibrating. Always measuring where I was weakest. That jacket wasn’t grief anymore; it was reconnaissance I’d left hanging too long.

But that part of me had to go.

Tonight, I didn’t get to be the woman mourning the ghost of a man anymore. Tonight, I was Kaitlyn Bishop—freelance systems architect, Birmingham-based, speaks five languages, no family ties, no medical records post-2015. Everything about her was curated and stripped of softness. Everything Melissa wasn't allowed to be anymore.

The documentation matched: NHS number, payroll stubs, utility email breadcrumbs, all three months stale to look honest. Bishop’s socials were a smear of selfies and half-finished quotes—forgettable on purpose.

I opened the black hard case under the bed. The contents spilled out: one Glock 43, matte-black and serial-shaved. A fresh burner phone still in packaging. Eight passports under eight aliases—one of them being Kaitlyn's. Several SIM cards. One hand-rolled silk scarf that wasn’t mine. That was Howard’s favorite thing to do—breadcrumbing. Maybe he meant it as romance. Maybe it was strategy. I stopped giving him the benefit of the doubt after the third lie I had to cross-reference in a coroner's file.

I selected the Birmingham passport and flicked it open. The woman in the photo looked nothing like me—her skin was paler, her hair a dark, burgundy red.

Standing under the bathroom’s harsh white light, I eyed myself in the mirror like I was studying a stranger with something to confess. My blonde hair looked faded now, sun-bleached and ghosted at the ends—Howard always said it softened me. That it made me "approachable." But softness was a liability, and I was done being anything that reminded me of who I’d been with him.

I unscrewed the small plastic cap from the box marked Nocturne Cherry. Kaitlyn’s shade. Not firetruck red, not fashion-wild—just the right balance of untraceable and striking. Maroon. Like dried blood in bad lighting. A color meant to slip past most faces and leave only the idea of memory.

I worked the dye into my scalp with surgical calm, the smell chemical and cloying. As the color bled through the strands, I watched the old me vanish in streaks. Blonde washed away, and something colder, deeper took its place.

With the towel wrapped tight, my feet paced the bathroom until the mirror cleared of steam. Each step left a damp footprint, fading before I could turn back to see it.

I moved next to the wardrobe. Black slacks, fitted blazers, one burgundy silk blouse—barely enough color to suggest a personality. Just enough to get Felix Hart’s attention. I didn’t need him to like me. I needed him to underestimate me.

And then, slowly, I reached for the envelope taped beneath the drawer lining where I was about to grab a hair brush. It crinkled faintly as I pulled it free. Inside was Howard’s last physical letter to me. It wasn't a cliché email or a voicenote. He didn't do things in digital, thought it was less sacred. It was a handwritten something, two pages long in neat, slanted writing.

I hadn’t opened it. Still hadn’t. Something about the seal made it feel manipulative, like the final move in a chess game I never agreed to play. He’d sent it the morning he died as if he knew. He knew everything.

My fingers hovered over the flap. If I read it now and it cracked me open, Birmingham would eat me alive. If I left it sealed, it might haunt me into mistakes I couldn’t afford. Either way, it was a live wire I didn’t want sparking mid-mission.

Because if he said the right thing… I might forgive him. And forgiveness was a lock I couldn’t pick twice.

There would be time. Or there wouldn’t.

The laptop waited in the corner, lid shut as if expecting me. I moved back to the desk and booted up the air-gapped laptop. The VIREX drop contained a three-minute debrief: digital paper trail of Felix Hart’s Birmingham movements, suspected aliases, updated face scan. I studied it all like scripture. Cross-referenced every name twice, then printed nothing. Only committed it to memory.

The file showed all the right fingerprints—too many of them. British spellings in the code comments, the same nonce-spacing Hart favored in Zurich, even his old fail-safe string buried in a log. A museum exhibit of Hart.

The last time something looked this perfect, Howard ended up in the ground. Perfection was just camouflage for a weapon aimed at the wrong person.

The only thing that didn’t fit was the timing skew—his real ops pulsed at eleven-second intervals; this beacon breathed at thirteen.

And then there was the kernel log buried deep in the metadata, signed with a hash I’d only seen once before — in an old training packet Monroe had used as a teaching example. It was too clean and too accessible. A rookie mistake Hart wouldn’t make unless he wanted the world to see it. Either he’d grown sloppy overnight, or someone was building me a breadcrumb trail with Monroe’s fingerprints in the dough.

I rummaged through every and any info I could get my hands on when I ended up finding, buried in the dump, a six-month-old credential hash I knew too well — Howard’s university email. Hart didn’t need to know me to aim close enough to bleed.

The string of characters stared back at me like a ghost wearing someone else’s skin. I could almost hear Howard’s voice in the way the hash was structured—same lazy entropy pattern, same salt length. Whether it was bait or bleed-through didn’t matter. It was personal now, coded into the hunt.

With every key I tapped, stripped Melissa away, key by key, breath by breath. That part of me—the soft girl with forgiveness stitched under her ribs—wasn’t useful anymore.

I dug through the old cigar box beside the desk and retrieved the tiny brass necklace. Kaitlyn’s. A trinket meant to anchor me to her fabricated past. I clasped it around my neck and stared into the cracked mirror, adjusting the pendant until it sat just right.

If it’s Hart, he’d circle the lure without biting. If it isn’t, the copycat will pounce.

...

Two hours later, the city was already shedding its skin. The data still burned behind my eyes as I stepped out of the flat for the last time. Dawn hadn’t arrived, but the streetlights were beginning to smudge into the morning light.

I locked the door without looking back. The apartment behind me wasn’t home anymore. Just a box filled with dead echoes and water-stained memories of a man who’d built walls out of charm and so much more—so much I couldn't decrypt. The cold breeze bit my skin as I descended the front steps, duffel slung across my shoulder, burner phone secured inside my jacket.

At the curb, the black sedan waited — my reflection visible in the over polished steel, and the windows tinted dark. It wasn’t a rental, and it sure as hell wasn’t traceable. VIREX’s ghost fleet didn’t come with plates you could Google.

I slid into the driver’s seat, and the leather groaned softly, the whole interior reeking of so. The duffel hit the passenger floor with a low thump — tools, a change of ID tags, three clean phones, syringes, scramblers, some makeup for a tinge of personality and a cherry-dyed wig in case my DNA was at risk.

I pulled the glove compartment open and rummaged through the contents: one pair of matte black gloves, a set of dark-lens driving glasses, a folded VIREX directive marked "Private Delivery: Birmingham – Tiergarten — Non-Commercial Routes Only."

No fingerprints. No stops. No questions.

The burner buzzed once:

NATHAN VOS suspected as Hart alias. 78% voiceprint match to archived cuts; spectrogram drift suggests modulation. Birmingham. AxisSec conference is drawing half the continent’s cyber mercs into the ICC.

Conference begins in 36 hours. Safehouse in Digbeth is stocked, converted textile mill, third floor, private access. Route clear. Use the M6 bypass before you hit the city’s ANPR ring. No uplinks and no check-ins.

Keep identities compartmented: Kaitlyn sleeps at the hostel; the safe flat stays cold. No ANPR bridges.

I read it twice, burned the details in my memory and then crushed the phone in my palm. The crunch of glass and plastic bit on my skin but I didn't wince. I tossed it into the incinerator capsule behind the seat.

Then I slipped on the gloves. One finger at a time, the leather grasping my skin tightly. Then the glasses — the plastic sliding across my nose, blacking out the horizon into grayscale.

The keys were already in the ignition. I turned them, and the engine purred to life.

Outside, a jogger glanced at the car, too distracted by music to notice the license plate was synthetic. I waited for him to pass, shifted into gear, and rolled out slow into the gray morning mist.

In the rearview, a dark hatchback idled two streets back — too still for this hour — but it vanished when I blinked.

Once I was out in the clear, a few meters away from the neighborhood, I kicked the gearshift into fifth, tires scratching the streets with a hunger I hadn’t felt since Vienna. The sedan roared forward, slicing through red lights. I took the curve at Fifth and Halston at seventy, tires skimming the wet asphalt in a clean, controlled drift.

The world blurred past in a smear of motion — streets, names, allegiances. In Birmingham, one wrong read could make me the bait instead of the blade. If Hart was the ghost, I was the shadow learning to move faster.

Ahead of me, Kaitlyn Bishop hunted in silence. Behind me, Melissa Caine was already marked for death — she just didn’t know when Hart would collect.

Once I crossed the next border, there’d be no safe way back — only the job, the ghost, and the kill.

And if Felix Hart wasn’t the one who did it, then maybe I’d just burn down Birmingham until someone confessed.

First contact window: twelve hours.

...

Author's Note:

I'm sorry :( I hope this isn't too difficult to read and follow. I feel like in trying to make it very paranoiac and thrilling, I added too much chaos and maybe it's a lot to digest but I'm gonna try and keep things subtle.

Let me know if U guys are able to keep track or if it gets too much of info dump.😅 One of my bad habits when writing books is that I assume the reader knows everything lol (even what's gonna happen in the plot) and I don't explain things properly.

So I'd really appreciate actual constructive feedback to make this book better. Pls and thank U, ;-; (I've spent like 13 hours just trying to research and make this chapter better lol and I'm exhausted atp but it's sooo worth it)

(Ik my bf is super concerned about my sleep but pls blame this book, not meee).

Anyways I'm off to sleep it's like 8am here goodnight y'all. And I'll probably post the 3rd chapter by next week hopefully. I have to do so much research and everything to get things right and to keep the momentum lol so yea ❤️

Thank U so much for reading ❤️❤️

See U in the next :)) byee

M❤️F