Page 158 of Fractured Loyalties
My throat tightens.
“He had this on him?” Mara whispers.
I nod. “This doesn’t make sense.”
Kinley leans in. “It does if Jori wanted it to. That’s not a message for me.”
He looks straight at me.
“It’s for you.”
The lights overhead flicker once. Then stabilize.
We’re no longer alone.
Movement.
A shift in pressure, barely perceptible—but real. Somewhere beyond the far wall, something activates. Not the slam of boots or the whine of machinery. Softer. Intentional.
“Hold,” I say. Not loud. Not urgent. Just the word. And they freeze.
Kinley draws. Mara doesn’t, but her spine aligns like a bowstring pulled taut.
A hiss opens in the far right seam of the chamber. Then a slice of light—a vertical line that expands until it becomes a doorway without a frame. It’s not architectural. It’s surgical. A precision aperture formed by heat, glassy at the edges where the metal’s been scored.
Someone walks through it.
Not fast. Not slow.
Measured.
He’s unarmed. At least visibly. Dressed in fitted black. Combat boots, matte gloves. His face isn’t familiar. But the energy in the room bends toward him like gravity. Not power. Intent. The kind that comes with authority no one dares question aloud.
Mara shifts closer. Barely. I don’t acknowledge it, but I feel it.
The man stops just inside the new opening. He looks first at me, then at Kinley, then finally settles on Mara.
“Elias Voss,” he says. “Still dragging ghosts into unfinished corridors.”
His voice is polished—refined, but not soft. Not rehearsed either. It sounds like someone who never has to raise it to command a room.
“I don’t know you,” I reply.
“No,” he says, stepping forward. “But I know you. I know what you did in Marseille. In Rostov. I know the name they call you in dead zones.”
My grip on the SIG tightens. “You’ve got ten seconds to explain why I shouldn’t remove your tongue.”
He smiles. “Because this isn’t your story anymore.”
Kinley stirs. “Volker?”
The man gives a slight nod. “He used that name, once. A mask, like any other. The real story isn’t his identity. It’s what’s converging here.”
Mara speaks for the first time. “Convergence of what?”
He turns toward her. His gaze doesn’t slide—it lands.
“You. Him. The lines you’ve both crossed and can’t walk back.”
