Pain greeted him before light did.
Adrian Kane's ribs ached like broken promises. Blood stained the inside of his coat. He blinked awake to the rhythmic beep of a hospital monitor and the sterile scent of antiseptic.
Still alive. Barely.
His right shoulder throbbed—a bullet graze—and his left side was stitched with bruises. They hadn't tried to kill him. Just sent a message.
He remembered the rooftop fight—two men in black, blades and fists in the dark. Adrian had taken one down hard, but the second pistol-whipped him over the railing.
He should've died.
He didn't.
Instead, someone had dragged him out. Saved him. But who?
The door creaked open.
"Glad to see you still collect concussions like poker chips," said a voice—soft, sardonic, and achingly familiar.
Adrian turned his head.
Morgan Voss.
Tall, sharp-suited, hair swept back like a Wall Street killer. But beneath the polished exterior was a mind wired for puzzles and a soul soaked in secrets. Once Gravesend's top cryptographer. Adrian's old partner—and the man who disappeared after the Hayden Scandal.
"You're supposed to be dead," Adrian muttered.
Morgan smirked. "So are you. Yet here we are. A pair of roaches with better instincts than luck."
Adrian sat up slowly, groaning. "Why are you here?"
Morgan pulled a chair close and dropped a small USB drive onto the bedside table. "You tripped a hornet's nest, Kane. The society—Ouroboros—they know your name now. And mine. So I figured we'd better compare notes before they come to erase the ledger."
Adrian stared. "You were part of this?"
"No," Morgan said, grim. "But I was watching it long before Mercer ever found a thread."
He leaned closer, voice low. "This isn't just political. It's technological. They're using old Cold War encryption methods layered into modern communications. Messages buried in noise—hidden in digital static, piggybacking on abandoned systems. Mercer called it 'The Fractured Code.'"
Adrian's eyes narrowed. "You cracked it?"
Morgan shook his head. "I found the pattern. But someone else is one step ahead. The messages lead to a location... then vanish."
He opened a file on his tablet, flipping through screens of broken code, images with ciphered timestamps, even dead people's names hidden in metadata.
"Mercer thought it was a list," Morgan said. "A list of people targeted by the society. The ones who knew too much. You. Me. Eliza…"
Adrian's hands curled into fists.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because I didn't have proof. I didn't even have the full pattern until Mercer reached out—right before he vanished. I tracked his last signal. He uploaded a cache. It was corrupted, but something got through."
Morgan swiped to a paused video frame.
Adrian's breath caught.
It was a security cam still, heavily pixelated—but unmistakable.
Julian Mercer. Alive. Bruised. Tied to a chair. Inside what looked like a concrete room, maybe underground. A blurred figure stood beside him—someone tall, gloved, with the Ouroboros ring gleaming on his hand.
"We think they're keeping him somewhere in the lower districts," Morgan said. "Off-grid. Mercer must've had something they couldn't delete. So they're holding him. Extracting information the slow way."
Adrian swung his legs off the bed.
Morgan held up a hand. "You need rest. That shoulder—"
"I don't rest while people I care about are tortured in some crypt basement," Adrian snapped. "Where's the cache?"
Morgan handed him the USB. "Encrypted. But I mapped it to a location—one of the last active message hubs. It's in a closed subway line under the city. It's not just a server—it's a vault. And it's protected."
Adrian smirked. "Good. I'm in the mood for a fight."
---
Later That Night – Gravesend Subway, Line Z (Decommissioned)
The platform was dead. Rusted tracks. Flickering signs. A haunting silence hung in the dark like a breath held too long.
Adrian and Morgan descended into the underworld—armed, masked, and moving like ghosts. Morgan carried a small hacking rig; Adrian, his old revolver and a knife taped to his thigh.
The deeper they went, the colder it became.
They reached the designated tunnel—a sealed maintenance corridor behind a welded metal door. Morgan opened his briefcase, pulled out a thermal cutter.
"Thirty seconds," he whispered.
Adrian's nerves thrummed. His instincts screamed they were being watched.
The cutter hissed. Sparks flew.
Adrian turned just in time to see a shadow move.
"DOWN!" he shouted.
Gunfire erupted.
Three men in black surged from the dark—silent, trained, deadly. Adrian dove behind a support beam as Morgan scrambled with the rig.
Adrian returned fire. One man dropped. The second tackled him. They wrestled on the floor, blood and steel flashing. Adrian slammed his knife into the man's neck, breath ragged.
The last attacker made for Morgan—but Adrian shot him clean through the spine.
Silence returned, deafening.
Morgan panted. "I miss paperwork."
The door creaked open.
Inside was a server vault, humming faintly—an eerie, blue-lit chamber of blinking lights, ancient terminals, and analog ciphers mounted like relics.
Morgan rushed to the core unit, hands flying over keys.
"I've got the rest of Mercer's file," he said. "Coordinates. Names. And something else…"
He went pale.
"What is it?" Adrian asked.
Morgan turned the screen.
It displayed a live data feed… with a biometric tag labeled:
> "Subject #017 – Adrian Kane."
Status: Monitored.
Behavior: Deviating from expected pattern.
Directive: Termination—Pending."
Adrian stared, blood gone cold.
"They've been watching me… this whole time."