Chapter 3 A veteran silence

Chapter 4:

A Veteran's Silence

Brian Woodward was not the kind of man you noticed at first. He sat quietly in cafés, typed on a dusty laptop, and carried around notebooks filled with shorthand no civilian could decipher. But beneath the tattered trench coat and calloused exterior was a seasoned police officer who had once dismantled a human trafficking ring in Queens using only a burner phone and a fake press ID.

The town's mayor trusted only one man with the most delicate operations: Woodward. On paper, he was a freelance journalist covering government corruption. In practice, he was a ghost-untraceable, invisible, efficient. His job now? Investigate the sudden movement of offshore contracts, embezzlement buried under municipal dog-funding projects, and expose an internal network that seemed to bleed across borders.

But the assignment changed when he was handed a file containing one name: Philip Morina.

The phrase "Rabbit has the key" had triggered more than the surveillance algorithm at Morina's bank. It had bounced through multiple encrypted tunnels, landed in Interpol's cybercrime watchlist, and finally dropped into Woodward's lap with a red flag stamped priority eyes only.

He sat in his dim office, a half-empty whiskey bottle glinting in the lamplight, reading through Elizabeth Taylor's known aliases and cross-border travel logs. Her connections to Razor a covert intelligence faction disbanded after a failed operation in Damascus were vague but telling. Philip Morina wasn't a suspect. Not yet. But the proximity was too close, and Woodward had seen too many good men fall because they mistook sensual entanglement for safety.

Woodward wasn't always alone. He'd had a wife once Naomi. Brilliant, kind, patient. She stayed through the first allegations, the long hours, even the gambling. But when their only child died in a car crash while Woodward was on a stakeout, something cracked. Naomi left two months later.

Internal Affairs opened a file. The Narcotics Team followed. He had borrowed favors from all the wrong places to pay debts, and though he never touched dirty money, his silence had kept worse men afloat. Still, his badge stayed intact barely. His name remained spoken with reverence by rookies who hadn't yet learned that even gods bleed.

Now, his heart was a locked vault, and the only thing he trusted was the mission.

Brian started tailing Elizabeth three weeks before the message. She met with three men with different passports in a two-day window. Twice, she entered buildings without surveillance access places wiped clean of metadata. She changed phones weekly. But when she started sleeping with Philips, Brian's instinct flared.

This wasn't love. It was containment. Philip had something access, authority, or information and she was tasked to extract it. But from who? And for what?

Brian's leads pointed in circles. Contracts linked to shell companies, names connected to former Razor field operatives, and a whisper of a new black-budget tech weapon called Citrine something that "could open any digital vault without a trace."

Rabbit has the key.

Suddenly, Philips wasn't just a civilian. He was a bank executive with high-level clearance to international asset vaults. If he unknowingly held Citrine's activation code, then Elizabeth was the field agent sent to seduce, study, and secure it.

Brian's orders were clear: Observe. Report. Do not engage.

But then came the call.

A Violation of Distance

The mayor's voice was tight. "She's moving on him faster than predicted. Razor may be operational again. We need confirmation-tonight."

Brian exhaled smoke into the cold night. He hated rushing. He hated improvising even more. But he hated seeing men like Philip being chewed and spat out by intelligence agencies most of the world didn't even know existed.

He checked the camera feeds. She was already inside Philip's penthouse.

He grabbed his coat, loaded his backup piece, and stepped into the rain.

Brian parked three blocks away from Philip's building and moved through the shadows like water. The surveillance van he'd requested was delayed, so he relied on instinct.

Inside the penthouse, the lights dimmed. Through the scope of his long-range lens, Brian watched as Elizabeth walked to the window, her silhouette cutting across the city's lights. She was naked beneath a silk robe. Beside her, Morina sat on the couch, shirt half-unbuttoned, holding a glass that shook slightly in his hand.

Brian zoomed in.

He saw Elizabeth lean down, whisper into Morina's ear. He flinched.

Then she kissed him. Long. Too long.

Brian cursed under his breath. It's the cover. Not love. He doesn't know yet.

But then Morina pulled away and asked something. Brian couldn't hear the words, but he saw the question on his face suspicion, fear.

Elizabeth froze.

It lasted just two seconds.

Then she smiled. Not the smile of a lover. The smile of someone trained to end conversations with lips, not lies.

Brian's finger hovered over the trigger of his mic.

If she made a move if she reached for the black duffel she'd hidden beneath the dresser he would breach protocol.

He counted her steps. One. Two. She reached down.

Brian's eyes locked.

Not for love. Not for orders.

But because men like Philip never saw it coming and someone had to.

He stepped out of the shadows.