Page 6 of Heresy
Vera Ivanov waits in her steel coffin, unaware her story ends tonight.
I swingmy leg off the bike, heavy leather settling across shoulders like the familiar weight of authority. My boots make almost no sound on worn asphalt—years of operational discipline transforming movement into silent approach.
Fuse and Zero stand like stone gargoyles guarding entrance to tomb, bodies radiating stillness that suggests violence held in suspension. They see my approach and silent understanding passes between us—communication refined through shared purpose, brotherhood of men who have crossed lines that can never be uncrossed.
Professional courtesy between monsters.
And then I see her. The loose thread. Vera.
She's pressed against corrugated steel like a cornered animal in a cage of our making, slight frame dwarfed by industrial architecture. Dark hair creates a wild halo around a face drained pale with terror, features sharpened by adrenaline into something approaching ethereal. She clutches the camera to chest like a shield, like a talisman.
Nothing remarkable. Another piece of civilian debris.
My mind shifts into operational mode—calculating logistics of erasure, mechanical steps required to make a person vanish. Should be simple. Should be clean.
I take a step into the alley. That's when I look into her eyes.
I expect tears. Pleading. Hysterical begging I've witnessed hundred times before. I see none of it.
Terror swims in wide, dark pools of her irises—primal fear that speaks to evolutionary understanding of predator-prey dynamics. But underneath, buried like ember in ash, something else flickers.
Not hope. Defiance.
Sharp glint of shattered glass, dangerous and unexpected. She isn't looking at me like lamb for slaughter. She's looking at me like she's calculating whether she has strength to rip my throat out before I land a killing blow.
The realization hits like cold water on hot metal.
This isn't simple erasure. The methodical plan encounters unexpected resistance—not external obstacles, but internal disruption. Something unwelcome and intensely irritating sparks in my gut, spreading warmth through regions that have learned to operate on ice.
Interest. Curiosity. Weakness.
I hate the feeling instantly, recognizing it as an operational liability that could compromise judgment. Leaders can't afford attachment to problems requiring permanent solutions.
But there it is anyway, burning like a small betrayal in my chest.
I walk slowly toward her, closing distance with deliberate precision, letting silence stretch until it becomes physical weight. Psychological warfare through proximity—demonstration that space belongs to me.
Watch throat work as she swallows. Note tremor in hands. Catalog every tell.
She is afraid—physiological responses impossible to fake. But she is not broken. Not surrendered. Not reduced to psychological submission that makes necessary work easier.
Not yet.
I stop just outside striking distance, shadow falling over her like a dark promise. This close, I can smell her fear—metallic tang of adrenaline, salt of sweat, something floral underneath that speaks to life lived outside violence.
This changes things.
Simple erasure feels insufficient, like trying to solve complex equations with elementary mathematics. The anomaly requires investigation before elimination.
I need to understand what makes this one different.
My voice emerges as a low, controlled rumble—sound designed to penetrate bone, settle into consciousness like a tuning fork struck against frequency of existential dread.
"You saw something that doesn't exist. Now I have to decide if you do, either."
Let her process that. Let her understand how narrow her world has become.
The words hang in charged air between us—statement and threat and philosophical question combined. This is where negotiations begin, with absolute clarity about who holds power and who merely hopes to survive its application.
