Hudson Johnson’s run ended just steps from his front door. It had begun the night before, when a panicked, bleeding Anders Baker—riddled with silver rounds—had collapsed into Hudson’s car. They raced to a back-alley clinic in Hades’s Kitchen, a specialized “patch-up” shop for the city’s lycanthrope underworld.
The night was a disaster. The vet was off-call, leaving Anders to bleed out until 6:00 a.m. By the time the lead was extracted, the damage from the silver was already systemic; he wouldn’t be walking for days. The police breached the clinic shortly after. In a desperate final stand, they tried to use the nursing staff as human shields, but a tactical team put Anders down before he could transform. Hudson managed to slip out the back, vanishing into the morning fog. He spent the day in the shadows, waiting for sunset to go home and pack his life into a suitcase, but the FIA was faster. They took him down before he even reached for his keys.
Four agents escorted him to the Division; one, Agent Clunes, led him into the cold vacuum of Interrogation Room 4. Clunes stepped out to brief the team. Five minutes later, when the senior interrogators entered, they found Hudson slumped over the table, his lungs seized by a rapid-acting toxin. Five minutes of footage—the exact gap between Clunes leaving and the team entering—were missing from the server. Agent Clunes was immediately stripped of his sidearm and placed in solitary, but the damage was done. The lead was dead.
“Internal Affairs is descending on us, Jim,” Richard Albright’s voice crackled over a secure, encrypted line. “We’re going into full lockdown. Until we find the mole, the Division is a black box. I need you to stay at the Salon. If the strike happens there, I need eyes I can trust.”
“So, I’m officially activated for this op,” Style stated, his voice dropping into a professional cadence.
“You are. I’m pushing the case files to you now,” Richard replied. “Your immediate priority is to identify the hit team. We can mop up Bran and the rest of the Sukkal cells once the primary threat is neutralized.”
“Understood. But I’m going to need assets on the ground. This isn’t a one-man job.”
“Use whatever resources you need,” Richard said firmly. “The geopolitical gears are already turning toward war, but our mandate is clear: we stop the bloodshed on Fairyland soil before it starts. Good luck, Jim.”
Minutes later, Style’s encrypted terminal chimed as the operation files arrived. The FIA’s threat assessment identified four high-value targets attending the Cheval Blanc Soirée: Roxana, the daughter of the exiled Persian Crown Prince; Princess Bertha of the Frankish Kingdom; Esma Sultan of the Ottoman Empire; and Prince Ludwig of the Kingdom of Baiern.
Most were slated to arrive in New Athens on Monday morning, hours before the gala, with the exception of Prince Ludwig, who was due Sunday. The FIA had already coordinated with the Frankish, Ottoman, and Germanic intelligence services; those agencies would handle transit security up until the moment the royals stepped onto the Dressrious Salon’s grounds. As for Roxana—given her father’s asylum status within the United Fairylands—she remained under the direct, albeit clandestine, protection of the FIA.
The targets might be the royals, but the casualties would be everyone else. Investors, actors, film executives, and reporters would all be caught in the blast radius. Style understood the threat—the assassins could easily be hiding behind the mask of a wealthy guest or the uniform of a server.
He began the grueling process of vetting every name in the FIA’s files: from the elite attendees to the Salon’s internal security, the custodial staff, kitchen staff, the waitstaff, and the temporary servers hired for the Soirée. Every face became a suspect; every background check a potential lie. He tore through the files one by one, the blue light of the monitor burning into his retinas as the night bled into morning without a single wink of sleep.
No clues. The dossiers were useless. If Trevor and Spion’s intel from the Tower of Babel held true, the assassins were likely a mercenary group that had arrived in New Athens recently. A team that high-caliber wouldn’t walk in blind; they would have spent days scouting the Salon, mapping every blind spot and service elevator.
He needed to see who had been loitering in the party hall or staying in the suites over the last few days, but he also knew the lists could be a labyrinth. The Salon was a social hub, a revolving door of high-society galas and overnight stays. The good thing was, for security, the Salon had barred all overnight stays for seventy-two hours leading up to the Soirée; Style himself was only there because of a three-month standing reservation.
If the hit team was an international cell, cross-referencing the Salon’s guest list against customs and border entry logs might provide a digital breadcrumb trail. However, if the assassins were domestic sleepers—citizens with clean records and local addresses—they would be virtually invisible. In that case, the search would shift from a data-crunch to a needle-in-a-haystack nightmare.
Luckily, he had one advantage: the Sukkal cell was bleeding out. Will Rodriguez, Hudson Johnson, and Anders Baker were all confirmed dead, leaving only two names on the board: Bran Schmidt and Karl Arneson, a PR man for JackToy.
The FIA’s sweep of their apartments had come up empty—no laptops, no encrypted drives, nothing that would point to their endgame. But they had found one glaring anomaly. In the apartment shared by Will and Bran, they discovered a smartphone belonging to the missing Hector Tin. It wasn’t hidden in a drawer or tossed in the trash; it was sitting on a nightstand, powered on and plugged into a wall charger.
It made sense that they would keep the device to prevent Hector from being flagged as a missing person, but the constant power supply was haunting. They weren’t just hiding the phone; they were maintaining it. It was as if they were waiting for a specific call—or acting as a digital beacon that couldn’t afford to go dark.
Unfortunately, the files didn’t include the phone’s internal data, and with the Division under lockdown, the physical evidence was trapped behind a wall of internal bureaucracy. Style didn’t have time for a mole hunt; he needed action now.
As the first light of dawn bled through the window, Style stood and stretched, his joints popping. He went to the mini-bar, poured a finger of whiskey, and let the burn clear the fog from his mind. He knew who he could ask for help.
He picked up his phone and sent a text to Trevor: “Call me the second you wake up. You are officially invited to the game.”