The train groans under the weight of cold steel and contraband. Beneath its belly, inches from the screaming rail, Simon "Ghost" Riley grips a rusted support bar with one gloved hand. Snow batters his shoulders, melts in streaks down his mask. Every mile east is another second lost.
Frost crunches with the vibration. His other hand holds the burner phone—screen dimmed, message still glowing:
> "Midnight. Cracked Lantern Club. Bring cash. Leave your gun. No repeats."
He flicks the message away, checks the time. Less than six hours.
The train rounds a bend. Lviv rises in the distance—concrete towers and onion domes slouching in winter fog. Ghost lets go.
He hits the embankment rolling, knees biting gravel, breath sharp. He vanishes into the tree line before the train even slows.
---
The butcher shop stinks of bleach and old blood. Meat hooks sway overhead—some empty, some not. Ghost steps past the counter without a glance. A narrow staircase waits behind a plastic curtain, lit by a red bulb.
Down he goes.
The Cracked Lantern Club thrums beneath the earth, carved out of wartime stone and rusted rebar. A thudding bass rattles glasses on the bar. Smoke clouds the ceiling—cheap tobacco, maybe worse. The air tastes like old gun oil and betrayal.
Ghost moves through the crowd like a blade through fabric. Eyes track him—ex-GRU with neck tattoos, cartel muscle flexing boredom, mercenaries with teeth too white for this life. No greetings. Just measuring stares and twitchy hands.
He carries no visible weapon. Just a duffel bag heavy with untraceable euros, slung at his side like a bribe or a threat.
Past the dancefloor, past the booth girls and dead-eyed bouncers, he finds the back. One table under a flickering red light.
Zorian's supposed to be here.
Ghost doesn't sit. Not yet. He scans the exits. The faces. The mirrors.
---
The booth looks like a crime scene waiting to happen—red bulb overhead, cracked leather seats, ashtrays packed to overflow. Zorian Markevich doesn't look up when Ghost approaches. Just flicks ash off a clove cigarette and sips something dark from a chipped glass.
Ghost slides into the booth like a shadow taking shape. The duffel thumps onto the seat beside him.
"You're late," Zorian mutters in a rusted accent, voice low enough to blend with the bassline.
"You're old," Ghost answers, tone flat as concrete. Neither smile.
Zorian's eyes dart—calculating, cornered. "Didn't expect you to show in person."
"You called for a ghost," he says, deadpan. "Here I am."
For a beat, nothing but the warble of synth music and distant laughter from the bar. Then Zorian leans forward, elbows on the table, voice even softer.
"You realize who's circling this name, right? Vultures with military pensions and no flags. Spectre's got a bounty on his own shadow."
Ghost doesn't blink. "I'm not here for warnings."
Zorian sighs, like a man signing his own death warrant, and reaches into his coat. Ghost doesn't move—but his hand ghosts to his thigh, ready if needed.
A burner drive clicks onto the table between them.
Zorian taps it once. "This? It doesn't come with insurance."
Ghost picks it up, eyes still on the man across from him. The weight in the air shifts. Something's wrong, but not yet loud enough to name.
Yet.
---
Zorian flicks his cigarette into the ashtray and leans in. The bassline vibrates the glasses on the table, but his voice cuts through it like a blade.
"Name you want's expensive," he says. "This one's radioactive."
Ghost doesn't blink. He waits.
Zorian pulls a thumb drive from his jacket, the casing black, taped over like it's been passed between too many hands. He slides it across the table.
Ghost picks it up and jacks it into the burner laptop from his duffel. The screen boots. A single file pings open. One word flashes in bold:
Spectre – Alaric Voss
Zorian talks while Ghost reads, voice low, fast. "Voss was NATO—signals intel, Tier-One clearance. Went off the grid after Mosul. Presumed dead until last year. Now he's freelance. Blackbook mercs. Deep crypto funding. Doesn't answer to any state."
Ghost scrolls—images, schematics, tagged comms intercepts. Voss's face appears in thermal, then in grainy CCTV footage boarding a chopper in Tripoli. He's older now. Harder.
Zorian's fingers tap a nervous beat on his glass. "If you're smart, you walk away. Anyone gets near that name? Ends up rotting in a hole or burning in one."
Ghost shuts the laptop with a quiet snap. His eyes stay on Zorian.
"I'm not smart," he says.
And somewhere behind them, the bartender finishes drying a glass—with one hand, the other already reaching under the counter.
---
No one in the Cracked Lantern blinks, but the air tightens.
Then—click.
The bartender lifts a sawed-off from behind the bar, arm steady.
Around the room, jackets shift. Pistols surface like teeth bared in a cornered animal. A dozen eyes fix on Ghost.
Zorian stands, calm now. "You brought death in with you," he says, brushing lint off his coat. "Spectre's paying double to erase anyone who knows his name."
Ghost doesn't move.
"You think this is about you?" Zorian continues, gesturing. "This whole room was waiting. You opened the drive—means you're marked."
Ghost scans—no exits, no shadows deep enough to vanish in.
His voice cuts through the tension like bone on steel. "You should've killed me before I walked in."
Zorian smirks. "We're fixing that now."
The bartender's finger tightens on the trigger.
Ghost drops the table. The shotgun roars.
---
The table crashes down—splinters, euros scatter. Ghost fires twice, tight rhythm. The bartender's chest folds inward, legs buckling behind the bar.
Muzzle flash stabs the dark. The room erupts.
Ghost rolls left, narrowly dodging a spray from a Czech-made Scorpion. Bullets chew plaster. He plants, pivots, boots a chair into a gunman's knee. The man howls. Ghost fires once—center mass, then again when he drops. Another bleeds out against the jukebox.
He draws from the boot holster—a SIG P365, compact, brutal. The techno thunders as bodies scramble for cover, but Ghost moves with predatory calm.
One man lunges from behind a column—knife in hand. Ghost sidesteps, grabs the wrist, turns the blade in, shoves it deep. The attacker jerks, slumps.
Three remain. One hides behind the bar, reload fumbled. Ghost fires—chest. The man flops against the bottles.
Two flank from opposite booths. Ghost ducks, reloads one-handed behind a pillar, then leans out—fires once, twice. One down. The second dives, firing blind.
Ghost doesn't chase.
He waits.
Footsteps.
When the man rounds the table, Ghost is already there—grabs him by the coat, drives his head into the corner of the booth.
Silence.
Smoke coils in the strobe light. Blood glistens on neon tiles.
Ghost steps over bodies, scanning. No sign of Zorian.
He's already running.
---
Footfalls hammer the butcher shop floor above the carnage. Ghost moves like smoke—up the stairs, through hanging plastic sheets slick with condensation. Fluorescents buzz overhead, flickering off stainless steel and rust-red drains.
Zorian bursts through the swinging freezer door, slipping on a patch of thawed blood. He claws at the lock on the rear exit, shoulder slams it open, vanishes into alley shadows.
Ghost doesn't rush. He knows panic echoes.
Through the freezer, past frozen carcasses swaying like condemned men, he follows. One hand on the knife hilt at his chest rig.
Outside, wind howls. Snow falls sideways. A metal dumpster rattles. Ghost moves low, quiet—boots sinking into slush.
Zorian reappears at the alley's end, gun shaking in his grip. Fires once—wide. A second shot ricochets off a fire escape.
Ghost ducks left, disappears behind hanging tarps flapping like sails. He loops around the butcher's walk-in cooler, and—
Slams into Zorian from behind. The gun skitters across the ground. They crash down beside a frozen beef carcass swinging on a hook.
Ghost mounts him, pins the arms. Cold steel kisses the soft hollow beneath Zorian's jaw.
"Who else has that name?" Ghost growls, voice serrated.
Zorian chokes, breath clouds in the cold. "Voss meets with a buyer… an old chapel… outside town. Midnight. Tomorrow."
Ghost's blade presses deeper.
"That's all," Zorian wheezes. "I swear. Buyer's ex-Spetsnaz. Black Sun contract."
Silence. Just the wind.
Ghost jerks the blade sideways—fast, efficient. Zorian's breath stops mid-plea.
The body twitches once. Then stills.
---
Ghost crouches over Zorian's body in the alley, blade still warm in his grip. No time for sentiment. No time for mess.
He strips the corpse with surgical precision—flash drives tucked in the boot, burner tucked in the coat lining, ID clipped beneath the waistband. Clean hands make ghosts harder to trace.
Snow begins to fall harder. The city muffles.
Inside the butcher shop, the stench of cordite still hangs heavy. Ghost reenters through the broken rear door. One glance sweeps the carnage—bodies sprawled like discarded mannequins, blood painting the tile in arterial arcs.
He ducks beneath the bar, finds the gas main beneath a loose floorboard. One twist, one spark rigged from the bartender's lighter and a strip of frayed wire.
He's walking away before the hiss becomes a roar.
Outside, his boots crunch snow. No rush. No glance back.
Three blocks out, the butcher shop erupts. Flame punches skyward, glass shatters down the street. Alarms shriek awake. People scream.
Ghost doesn't flinch. Doesn't look.
He fades into the smoke and snowfall like a rumor.
---
The safehouse is nothing—a condemned apartment five floors up, walls flaking, radiator dead cold. Ghost doesn't need comfort. Just silence.
He plugs the stolen flash drive into a burner laptop balanced on a crate. No internet. No network bleed. He runs the script, decrypts the payload.
Names spill across the screen like blood spray: dead assets, dirty handlers, scorched intel.
One name lights up red. MacTavish, John. Codename: Soap.
Ghost's jaw tenses. He scrolls—next to it, a timestamp: Chapel. 0000 hrs. Buyer Confirmed.
He leans back. Breathes slow. They're moving on Soap next. Could be a sale, could be a setup.
He closes the laptop, tosses it into a duffel. Opens a drawer—rifle, comms jammer, thermal optics. Each piece goes into the rucksack with the quiet rhythm of a man building a coffin from memory.
He checks his sidearm, slides it home.
There's no time to warn Soap. No channels left that aren't watched. This isn't a mission anymore—it's personal.
He zips the bag shut.
One last glance at the decrypted file. One last glance at the photo taped above the rusted mirror—Soap laughing, bruised and wild-eyed, holding a cigarette and a bloodied knife.
"Hold on," Ghost mutters. "I'm coming."
---
The burner phone buzzes once—no signal, just the battery warning. Ghost ignores it.
He sits in shadow, knees up, rucksack at his feet. Rain needles the cracked window. It's not enough to wash the blood from his gloves.
The photo still glows on the phone's dim screen: Soap, mid-laugh, eyes raw with adrenaline, red running down his temple. A moment from another war. Another life.
Ghost's thumb hovers over the image like a trigger he won't pull. His voice is low, rasped.
"Too many dead already."
He pockets the phone. Slides on the gloves. Checks the blade once more—not for sharpness, but memory. Every scratch on the steel means something.
Then he stands.
No notes left behind. No trail to follow.
He steps into the cold. The city breathes behind him—sirens in the distance, smoke on the wind, the butcher shop still painting the skyline in orange.
But Ghost doesn't look back.
He fades into the alleys like a shadow with weight, heading toward the chapel.
---
Fog rolls like breath across a dead field. Frost-stiff grass snaps beneath Ghost's boots as he crouches behind a toppled gravestone, the chapel slouched in silhouette below—half-swallowed by time, roof sagging, its bell tower cracked open like a skull.
His scope catches movement through the shattered stained glass. Three heat signatures—tight grouping, deliberate pacing. Not parishioners.
Ghost exhales slow. Checks the rifle's bolt, then slings it again. The chapel's too quiet. No birds. No distant dogs. Just the cold whisper of wind through hollow stone.
He speaks low, into the comms mic tucked beneath his collar.
"Soap," he mutters, "If you're in there… don't die before I get to you."