The morning after Red Hook came slow and colorless.
Marcus Allen stood in the attic of a brownstone deep in Queens, the old wood creaking beneath his boots.
His eyes, rimmed red from a sleepless night, were vacant, unfocused, as though still back at the warehouse, still staring at that girl's lifeless body on the cold concrete.
The image hadn't left his mind—not her blood, not the crates, and especially not the numbers that had burned themselves into his memory like brands on flesh.
He was alone. Alone in a house that used to smell like lavender and chamomile tea.
A house that once held warmth, gospel music on Sunday mornings, fried okra, and his Aunt Laverne's scratchy voice humming hymns under her breath.
Now it was quiet. Sterile. Stripped of the soul it once held.
Three weeks had passed since her funeral. He hadn't even delivered the eulogy—Rachel, his younger sister did.
He couldn't bear it. Couldn't look people in the eyes and pretend to be strong. Not when everything inside him was unraveling like rope under tension.
And now, the home was being cleared out. Furniture boxed. Closets emptied. The property would be sold in a matter of weeks.
"Just check the attic," Rachel had said before she left for work. "Make sure there's nothing you want to keep."
Marcus hadn't planned on staying long. Just a glance.
But now, here he was—standing in a room choked with dust and silence. The air was stale and dry, tinged with mildew and the scent of yellowed newspaper.
A sunbeam stretched across the wooden floor, cutting through the haze like a sword of light.
Cardboard boxes towered against the walls, some buckled from age, others torn open from previous rummaging.
Most were labeled in Laverne's tidy cursive: CHURCH CLOTHES, NURSING SCHOOL, MAC'S BABY PHOTOS. He barely glanced at them.
He moved automatically, shifting boxes, flipping through old yearbooks, a crocheted afghan from the '70s, an old VCR. Nothing spoke to him. Nothing pulled.
Until he kicked something hard beneath a pile of moth-eaten tarps.
Clang!
Metal. Cold and heavy.
He knelt and yanked the tarp away, revealing a military-style footlocker.
Olive-drab, dented at the corners, a thick rusted padlock hugging the latch like a clenched jaw. His breath caught in his throat.
It was his father's. No mistaking it.
His fingertips brushed the steel. The surface was pocked and worn, the kind of wear that only comes from time and travel.
He hadn't seen it since he was ten years old, since the day the state handed him and Rachel over to Laverne's care, after the funerals, after the smoke settled.
He had asked about it once. Laverne had said it was locked and left in the attic years ago.
"Too many memories," she'd whispered. He hadn't pushed. He never came back for it.
Until now.
Marcus stood slowly, eyes narrowing. He went down to the garage, rummaged through a toolbox, found an old crowbar, and returned.
The padlock resisted at first, groaning against the pressure.
He muttered, "Come on… you've held secrets long enough."
Snap! The rusted metal surrendered with a shriek.
The lid opened with a low groan, hinges stiff from disuse.
He stared.
Inside, the first thing that hit him was the faint, metallic scent of dried blood.
Not fresh, but still distinct. Iron and old memories. He reached in and gently pulled out a small cloth bundle.
As he unfolded it, a NYPD lieutenant's badge fell into his palm—his father's.
The edges were caked with old crimson stains, faded now, but still visible.
Marcus didn't breathe.
He sat down slowly, the badge heavy in his hand.
"Dad…" he whispered.
Something hot burned behind his eyes, but he blinked it back. His hand trembled slightly.
There was more inside.
A small leather-bound journal, wrapped in wax paper, the cover cracked and curled with age.
His fingers traced the edge, reverent, almost afraid. He placed it beside him, not yet ready to open it.
Then, nestled beneath layers of old documents, he spotted a small flash drive.
Coated in dust, smudged with the ghosts of old fingerprints.
A yellowed tag was tied to it by a brittle string. Faded handwriting scrawled in blue ink read:
Failsafe – EV/HA.
His breath hitched. His mother's initials. Evelyn. And his father's.
He turned it over in his palm, lips parting.
"Failsafe," he muttered aloud. "What the hell were you two preparing for…?"
There was one more item.
A torn envelope, its edges curled and yellowed with age, tucked between the wall of the trunk and the journal.
It was sealed once, but time had pried it open. His eyes widened at the handwriting on the front.
His mother's. Instantly recognizable. Graceful cursive. Emotional, always a little hurried.
The envelope read:
"If he ever comes for us."
Marcus froze.
The attic, already silent, became stiller than a grave. Dust floated lazily in the sunlight. Outside, a bird sang. A dog barked down the street. Life moved on.
But here, time had stopped.
He stared at the words.
"If he ever comes for us."
He read it again.
His heartbeat quickened, his throat dry.
He whispered, "Who…? Who the hell were you talking about, Mom?"
He rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to piece it together.
His mind flooded with questions, each one crashing into the next.
"Why had they kept this? What was on the flash drive? Why the badge, the journal, the ominous warning? Why did my father have a failsafe labeled with both their initials?"
And why hadn't anyone ever told him this existed?
Marcus stood, slowly, pacing the attic, the envelope in one hand, the badge in the other.
His boots thudded dully against the floorboards. A thousand thoughts collided in his skull.
They weren't just cops.
They knew something.
They were scared.
"If he ever comes for us…" That wasn't just paranoia. That was preparation.
He dropped into the old rocking chair near the attic's edge, wood groaning under his weight.
The attic groaned too, as if protesting the revelation with every breath of the house's bones.
"I don't know what the hell you two were mixed up in," he said aloud, voice cracking slightly. "But I'm starting to think your deaths weren't some random robbery gone wrong."
It sounded mad to say it aloud, but deep down, he knew. He knew.
He turned the badge over again, blood-stained and tarnished.
"You were hunting something. Or someone," Marcus muttered. "And they hunted you back."
He looked down at the journal. The wax paper crinkled as he peeled it away.
The cover was brittle leather, a dark brown that flaked slightly under his touch.
The initials H.A. were pressed faintly into the corner. His father's handwriting filled the first few pages—cop shorthand, procedural notes, names, dates, timelines.
His fingers itched to read. But he paused.
He looked back at the flash drive.
"I'll need Leo to crack this," he said to himself. "Whatever's on here… it might finally give me answers."
A thump below made him pause—just the house settling, maybe, or the echo of ghosts long gone. He didn't flinch.
Instead, Marcus stood, the items now held like sacred relics.
He walked slowly to the attic door. Sunlight spilled down the narrow staircase, the scent of old wood and dust chasing him.
As he descended, he whispered under his breath, "I'm going to finish what you started."
A vow, low and solemn.
He looked back once at the attic, the footlocker still open like a casket dug up from the earth.
And then he shut the door behind him.
———————————————————
Marcus didn't remember most of the drive to the precinct.
He must've gone on autopilot after backing out of the cracked driveway of Aunt Laverne's old home.
The old red-brick house sagged in the mirrors behind him, swallowed slowly by distance and morning haze.
But his mind? It stayed in the attic.
The scent of mildew and mothballs still clung to his nostrils. The creak of warped wooden floorboards echoed in the drumbeat of his heart.
The flash drive was in his coat pocket now, weighing heavier than a gun.
His father's badge—still smeared with dried blood—was tucked in his glove compartment, wrapped in an old microfiber cloth.
The streets blurred past in the morning traffic. Horns honked. Engines coughed.
A jogger passed him at the red light on Amsterdam and 123rd, but Marcus barely noticed.
His eyes were forward. His thoughts were backward.
"Failsafe – EV/HA."
Evelyn Allen. Harold Allen.
His parents. Both gone. Both buried with questions he never had the courage—or clarity—to face. Until now.
"Why the hell would they leave a flash drive in a military footlocker? What the hell is on it?"
The yellowed tag twisted in his mind like an omen.
He pulled into the lot behind the 26th Precinct, the engine cutting off with a reluctant choke.
The precinct loomed ahead, its red-brick face pocked with years of graffiti, age, and one-too-many patch jobs.
Above the back door, the floodlight flickered and died with a buzz, as if the building itself wasn't ready for what Marcus was bringing inside.
He stepped out, felt the cold slap of city air against his face, and tugged his coat tighter.
Inside the precinct, fluorescent lights buzzed overhead.
Officers passed in twos and threes—some laughing, others looking like they'd clawed through a long night and barely made it out.
Marcus ignored all of them.
He didn't go to his desk. Didn't clock in. Didn't drop a word to Reyes or Patel. Not even a nod.
He moved like a ghost down the stairwell to the basement, two floors below the hum of official business.
Here, where the techies worked in exile and the city's digital rot was dissected byte by byte, the world sounded different.
Cooler. Quieter.
Electric hums replaced human chatter. Fans whirred from inside stacked servers.
Screens cast sickly blue glows on cement walls. The air carried the scent of plastic casings, soldered wires, and stale energy drinks.
And then there were the boots.
Size-12s, muddy and scuffed, propped up on a battered metal desk like the legs of a man without a care in the world.
Detective Leo Grant sat leaned back in a mesh chair, his jacket half-off his shoulders, a half-eaten candy bar balanced on his chest like a trophy.
He was a former FBI cybercrimes analyst turned NYPD digital forensics expert.
Once hailed as a prodigy, Leo was discharged after uncovering a covert trafficking ring tied to black-ops operations — a truth the Bureau chose to bury.
Disillusioned but brilliant, he was recruited into the NYPD by Captain Julia Reyes.
Now the brains behind NYPD, Leo handles everything from hacking encrypted networks to tracing digital money trails.
Sarcastic, sharp, and skeptical of authority, he's a vital asset in a war fought as much in cyberspace as on the streets.
Leo's eyes were fixed on three different monitors, each running strings of green code, security cam loops, and search protocols that made Marcus's head throb.
Classical jazz murmured through the room—Coltrane, slow and mournful.
"You know," Leo said without looking away from the screen, "...one of these days, your people upstairs are gonna realize I'm using half the department's network to run keyword sweeps on TikTok accounts. The algorithm's obsessed with garbage. But you–"
Marcus stepped into the room, the door creaking behind him.
Leo swiveled lazily, squinting through thick-rimmed glasses.
"Woah! The mighty Sergeant Allen graces me with his glower. What's the occasion?" He swung his legs off the desk and tossed the candy bar onto a pile of wires.
"Let me guess—bootleg wiretaps again? You and your cowboy team bust another underground blackjack den?"
Marcus pulled the flash drive from his pocket and placed it carefully on the desk. No words. Just that.
Leo raised a brow. "Please tell me this isn't porn from the Clinton administration. I'm begging you. Retro's not my thing."
He poked at it with the eraser end of a pencil like it might bite.
Marcus didn't smile. Didn't blink.
He said, flatly, "It's from my father."
That wiped the smirk off Leo's face.
Marcus sat down, folding his arms. His voice was low but heavy, like wet stone. "I found it this morning. At my aunt's house. Wasn't supposed to exist. It was in a locker I hadn't seen since I was a kid."
Leo's fingers stopped moving. The jazz faded into background noise as the room thickened with silence.
Marcus continued. "There was more. His old badge. Blood still on it. A journal. A letter from my mother. She wrote… 'If he ever comes for us.'"
Leo didn't reply.
He leaned back again, hands steepled in front of his lips, staring at Marcus like he was trying to recalibrate what he thought he knew about him.
"For what it's worth…" Leo said at last, his voice softer than usual, "I always thought your folks didn't just get caught in a bad neighborhood at the wrong time. Never made sense. Two cops like that? Shot in a mugging gone sideways? Bullshit."
Marcus's jaw flexed. "I knew something was off. Always did. But I buried it. You bury enough pain, it starts to look like concrete. Solid. Unshakeable. But now?"
He exhaled sharply, rubbing his eyes.
"It's all cracking."
Leo nodded once, slowly. Then he reached into his desk drawer, pushing aside a few granola bar wrappers and a busted USB hub.
He pulled out a portable air-gapped laptop—clean, no precinct network, no traceable activity.
He inserted the flash drive.
The screen blinked. Loaded.
Leo leaned forward, adjusting his glasses. "Okay… no auto-execution. That's good. Whoever made this didn't want to be sloppy."
Marcus watched in silence as Leo navigated the root directory.
Three folders appeared. No names. Just dates. All from over sixteen years ago.
Leo hovered his mouse over one. "There's encrypted files. Video, audio logs… PDF scans. I'll need time to crack it open. Could take hours if it's layered."
Marcus nodded. "Then start now."
Leo glanced sideways. "I'll do it, but I want it clear: this doesn't go on any NYPD server. Not even Reyes gets a whiff."
"She won't," Marcus muttered. "Not until I know what this is."
A beat passed.
Leo narrowed his eyes. "You think your father was investigating something?"
Marcus's fingers tapped rhythmically on the table. "No. I think he was burying something. Or hiding it. From someone bigger than both of us."
Leo gave a low whistle. "Jesus..."
Marcus looked up, eyes harder than stone. "You still in?"
Leo stared at him for a moment, then leaned back in his chair again and cracked open a fresh can of Red Bull.
"You brought me Cold War-level spycraft and a haunted expression that looks like it's been aging in bourbon. I'd be offended if you didn't come to me."
Marcus allowed the faintest twitch of a smile. Barely.
Leo raised the can in a mock toast. "To buried secrets, doomed flash drives, and the last thread of truth that might get us both killed."
Marcus just watched the screen. His voice was low, distant. "No. Not us. Me."
The jazz kept playing.
And somewhere beneath the notes, between the electric hum of old machines and the ghost-code on Leo's screen, the truth waited.
Marcus stood behind Leo, arms crossed, stone still. The flash drive—the one marked Failsafe – EV/HA—was plugged in.
It hadn't been easy.
The drive was encrypted using something far beyond commercial software—military-grade, likely AES-256 with custom salt keys layered over legacy ciphers.
Someone had known what they were doing. And whoever that was had wanted this information buried.
Leo leaned back, chewing the Twizzler like it might give him answers.
"This thing's not your average locked diary, Mac," he muttered, eyes dancing between lines of code. "We're talking Fort Knox levels of security here. Your old man ever moonlight for Langley?"
Marcus gave a slow shake of his head. "He was NYPD. Fifteen years. Homicide and Organized Crime. Before that, Army Intel."
Leo made a low whistle. "Well that'd do it. Explains the encryption architecture. This setup... it's Cold War style. Modified, but old-school paranoid. Someone wanted this drive to survive a nuke and be readable only by a ghost."
Marcus's eyes didn't move from the screen. His fists, however, clenched slightly at his sides.
"I don't care how long it takes," he said, voice low. "You crack it. I need to know what's on there."
Leo gave him a sidelong glance. "Already working on a brute-force chain. Give me a few hours. You might want to sit. Or read something. It's gonna grind for a while."
Marcus exhaled, finally allowing himself to move. He sat on the battered stool across from the workstation.
His father's leather-bound journal lay on the table between them—aged, cracked, and sealed with a rubber band that had long since petrified.
He peeled it open.
The smell hit first—musty paper, dried glue, and something faintly metallic. Old ink.
He recognized the handwriting before he even began reading—his father's looping cursive, sharp and confident, etched with the kind of pressure that made the pen bleed.
The first pages were field notes. Time-stamped entries of stakeouts, suspicious cargo manifests, aliases, dates.
"November 3, 1997 – Contact at Pier 61 confirms another shipment moved under Falcon tag. False ID: Dominion Logistics."
"Dec 12 – Surveillance log compromised. Evelyn suggests coded shorthand going forward. She's smarter than I am. Always has been."
Marcus's eyes flicked over Evelyn's cursive beside Harold's—it was smaller, more deliberate, interspersed between her husband's broader notes.
Where Harold's entries were structured like intel reports, Evelyn's were emotionally charged, almost poetic.
"They're closing in. He's not a man. He's a machine. A machine that thinks ten moves ahead and erases everyone who gets within six. I've started calling him 'The Architect'—because he's building something too big to see from the ground."
Marcus's chest tightened. He flipped another page. Then another. Diagrams. Sketches of port schedules.
Customs bribes. Crude maps of shipping lanes, with red ink circling locations in the Balkans and NYC ports.
A familiar name emerged more than once: The Grimaldis.
And always, scrawled somewhere on the margin—sometimes circled, sometimes underlined—was the codename:
"The Architect."
Marcus's voice broke the silence.
"My parents were investigating something... bigger than just smuggling. This whole time, I thought they were just in the wrong place. Just... bad luck."
Leo didn't respond at first. He was neck-deep in code, but he heard every word.
Marcus flipped to the final pages. There, taped to the back cover, was a photo—one he didn't remember ever seeing.
His mother and father, standing at a Brooklyn pier. Behind them, an NYPD van.
His father in uniform, his mother in a leather jacket and slacks, holding a clipboard. They looked... tense. Smiling, but the strain was visible in the lines around their eyes.
"They knew they were being watched," Marcus muttered, tracing the edges of the photo. "They left this all for me."
He clenched the book in both hands and leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
"All these years... I kept telling myself that the system failed them. That it was a fluke. A robbery gone wrong, a set-up that spun out. But this? This wasn't random."
"This was surgical. Planned. Coordinated. And now the silence makes sense. Why no one in the department pushed harder. Why the reports were sealed. Why everyone kept telling me to let it go."
"Because it wasn't just corruption. It was design. My father called him The Architect because he didn't just exploit the system—he built it. And I've been living in it ever since."
The decoding rig chirped. A series of tones—rising and fast. Leo perked up, shoving the Twizzlers aside.
"We're in."
Marcus stood like he'd been shocked.
Leo tapped a few keys, launching the file structure on the flash drive.
At first glance, it was disappointingly minimal: six folders and a single .txt file floating at the bottom.
Leo raised a brow. "Well, that's... anticlimactic."
Marcus didn't blink. "Open them."
The first folder was labeled SHIPMENTS\_97-98.
It held dozens of PDFs—scanned manifests from freighters, many with Department of Defense logos partially blacked out. Leo clicked one open.
"Jesus," he muttered. "These crates... they were rerouting arms from Serbia. Not legally, either. Look at these ports—Gdańsk, Constanța, and then—bam—Red Hook and Long Island docks."
Marcus leaned in, heart pounding.
"Who signed off on this?"
Leo dragged a file labeled "CORP\_LINKS" onto the screen.
Inside were shell company charts—dummy firms all traced back to private security contractors.
Some were tied to defense lobbyists. Others had been dissolved years ago.
He opened the third folder.
"DOC\_INTERNAL – CONFIDENTIAL"
There it was.
An internal memo, Department of Defense letterhead.
Top clearance.
The subject: "Unaccounted Expenditure and Unauthorized Mobilization of Black Assets."
Marcus scanned it, and then—
His breath caught.
There. On the last page.
A signature block.
"General Augustus Thorne."
Beneath it, another seal—Approved.
Marcus stepped back, jaw tight. "General Augustus Thorne... He was there from the start."
Leo looked up, voice low and edged.
"This guy—he didn't just have access. He directed the whole goddamn operation. Arms, logistics, execution."
Marcus's hands curled into fists. "He got them killed."
Leo's face darkened, jaw chewing a phantom thought. He clicked open the fifth folder.
"WITNESSES:"
A simple list. Dozens of names.
Some familiar—detectives, journalists, customs agents.
Almost all were marked: Deceased. Shot, overdosed, missing.
Only three weren't crossed out.
Harold Allen. Evelyn Allen. Rachel Allen.
Marcus's heart stopped. He swallowed hard, voice barely above a whisper.
"He was going to kill Rachel..."
Leo didn't respond. He didn't need to.
The final file was the .txt.
"If you're reading this..."
Leo opened it. The screen filled with text. Marcus read aloud:
"If you're reading this, he got to us. We were too close. Thorne isn't just a soldier. He's the architect. He built this system to be untouchable. Every shipment, every syndicate—it all traces back to him.
Trust no one. Not the department. Not the brass.
Keep looking.
And survive."
Silence.
The kind that crawls into the bones and sits there.
Marcus stared at the screen, jaw set, every nerve coiled like wire.
And then, softly—barely audible—he spoke.
"I'm going to burn it all down."
Leo didn't offer a quip this time. He just nodded once and reached for another Red Bull.
"Well?" Leo asked, voice low, eyes never leaving Marcus.
Silence answered first.
Marcus sat perfectly still. One leg bent, arms resting on his knees, the fingers of his right hand curled tight around the flash drive like it was the last thread holding the world together.
His face didn't move. Not a twitch. But his eyes… they were oceans in storm.
Leo leaned back in his chair with a sigh and ran a hand through his hair. "Mac… this kind of stuff?" he said, softly but firm, "This isn't just some cold case we reopened. This is war."
Marcus didn't blink. He stood, slow, like a mountain rising.
A creak echoed from the stool as his weight shifted off it.
He took three deliberate steps forward toward the long rectangular window at the end of the lab.
The glass was tinted and thick with grime, but he could still make out the silhouettes in the parking lot—cop cars idling, boots pacing, some rookie lighting a cigarette behind a patrol cruiser.
He rested his hand against the window's cold frame.
His breath fogged the pane.
Then—without turning—he spoke.
"No more ghosts," he muttered. "No more whispers in footlockers. No more guessing in the dark."
His voice had dropped. Not loud, but not uncertain. Like a man reading his own sentence.
Leo stood slowly, wary. "Mac. I get it. You finally got the name. The truth. Hell, it's worse than we thought. But you can't just—what? March into a general's mansion with a sidearm and justice in your eyes? He's not some street thug you can chase through an alley!"
Marcus turned his head just slightly, enough to flash that cold fire in his eyes.
"You think I don't know that?"
Leo lifted his hands in a slow gesture. "I think you do, and that's the problem."
Marcus turned fully now, the flash drive still clenched in his fist. His jaw was a line of granite.
"I spent a decade chasing shadows because the system told me my parents died in a random robbery gone wrong. I believed that. I built my entire damn career inside the same machine that let their killer rise to power."
His voice cracked—not with weakness, but rage honed into precision.
"He signed the order, Leo. He sent the Grimaldis to pull the trigger. He erased every trace. Bribed the brass. Buried it under shell corporations and classified memos."
He stepped forward, the shadows from the monitors painting sharp lines on his face.
"And now I have the map. I have the names. I know who built this empire of rot, and I know where the foundation cracks."
Leo exhaled, rubbing his temple. "And what? You're gonna take it down brick by brick, alone?"
"I won't be alone."
"You sure?" Leo snapped. "You think Captain Reyes signs off on this? You think IA looks the other way when you start digging into retired generals and federal contracts? You think they won't come for you, Mac!?"
"I'm counting on it."
Leo's expression shifted. A mixture of disbelief and grief. He stepped forward until they were only feet apart.
"You're not hearing me," he said, quieter now. "Thorne's not just a name on a file. He's a network. He's got senators, judges, commissioners. He's the kind of monster who doesn't fight in daylight. He eats people like us for breakfast and spins their bones into headlines."
Marcus's gaze didn't waver. "Then I'll bleed him in the dark."
Leo cursed under his breath, pacing to the side of the room.
He ran his hand across the edge of the terminal, stopping to stare down at the lines of decrypted documents still onscreen.
He spoke to the screen, not to Marcus. "You remember what I told you when we first partnered up? That day in the Bronx when we chased the Molinaris across three rooftops and you dislocated your shoulder catching one of them?"
Marcus was quiet. Leo continued.
"I said, 'You've got a death wish,' and you told me, 'No. I've got a justice wish.' And I believed you. I still believe you."
He turned now, voice softening but edged with something else—fear.
"But this? This isn't just about justice anymore, Mac. This is revenge."
Marcus's eyes narrowed. "You saying I'm compromised?"
"I'm saying you're human." Leo stepped closer. "And the thing about humans is we break. And when we break chasing revenge, we don't take down kings. We just leave a trail of bodies and end up exactly where they wanted us—dead or discredited!"
Marcus looked down at the flash drive in his hand. He turned it slowly, as if weighing it for the first time.
"You're right," he said, finally.
Leo blinked, taken aback. "Wait—what?"
Marcus raised his head again. "I am angry. I'm grieving. I'm standing in a room built by lies holding the only truth I've had in twenty years. But that doesn't mean I'm going in blind."
He turned, his footsteps echoing faintly on the concrete floor as he approached the terminal.
With careful hands, he ejected the drive, tucking it into an evidence bag and sealing it with a slow press.
"I won't pull the trigger in rage," he said. "I'll pull it with purpose."
Leo folded his arms. "You got a plan?"
"I've got the foundation. Now I dig."
He lifted the evidence bag.
"This is the match. And Thorne built himself an empire out of gasoline."
Marcus turned to the window again. The clouds above the city had thickened, painted in bruised shades of gray and violet. Thunder rumbled faintly across the skyline.
"He's protected. Surrounded by old flags and false oaths. But so was every tyrant in history, until someone lit the fuse. He thought he buried my parents. He didn't. He planted them. And now I'm what grew from that grave. A blade shaped by silence. A storm forged in loss."
Behind him, Leo sighed. The kind of sigh that came with knowing you'd already lost the argument but cared enough to voice it anyway.
"You're going to get yourself killed, man!"
Marcus didn't turn around.
"If that's the cost," he said, "then so be it. But I'll make damn sure he hears the thunder coming before I go."
Leo muttered something under his breath, then crossed the lab and tossed him a USB case.
"At least clone the drive and leave the copy with me. If you vanish, I want insurance. I need to know someone will finish what you start."
Marcus caught the case without breaking eye contact. A nod passed between them—reluctant respect, the kind forged in fire.
"Thanks," Marcus said, voice raw but steady.
Leo hesitated at the doorway. "You ever consider walking away?"
"Every day," Marcus replied. "And every day, I remember who's buried in Forest Hills under headstones that read "robbery gone wrong." "
The door swung shut behind Leo, leaving Marcus alone.
The lab buzzed quietly again. Just machines and a man with ghosts.
He turned once more to the window. The rain had started now, tapping gently against the glass.
His reflection looked back at him—older, weathered, but alive. Burning from the inside.
He raised the sealed flash drive to his chest and closed his eyes.
"This is what I've been waiting for. The moment when all the pieces fall into place. I've carried this burden for too long, dragging it through every patrol, every arrest, every sleepless night."
"They told me to let it go, to move on, but how do you move on when the truth is a blade lodged in your heart? Thorne took my parents, but he didn't just take them—he tried to erase them."
"I've walked through the ashes of that loss, fueled by anger and silence. Now, that silence breaks."