Page 112 of Her Soul to Own

“Money that Evander used to tank Lyra’s public profile. He paid off analysts to flood negative SEO, seeded anonymous forums, and even bribed one of the platform mods to delay her post reinstatements.”

My fists curl. “He buried her reputation.”

“He tried. But it seems like she’s not staying buried. That video yesterday got a lot of attention.”

I look at Noah. Really look at him. The man’s always been half shadow, half sarcasm, but there’s steel in his eyes tonight. The same kind of steel I remember from black-ops. The kind you only sharpen with regret.

“You think this ends with Evander?” I ask.

Noah’s smile is humorless. “I think it ends with us making damn sure it doesn’t start again.”

He slides the drive into his jacket. “I’ll vanish for a bit. You’ll get pings if anything goes sideways. You know the drill.”

I nod. “Thanks.”

He starts toward the shadows, but then he pauses, and his voice is low when he says, “You’ve got something rare with her. Don’t fuck it up.”

I don’t reply. I just continue watching him fade into the dark as though he were never here.

We leave the garage under the cover of quiet. The city’s noise fades behind us like an old nightmare since we’re followinga newer one now. The man in the mirrored sunglasses, our courier, drives west toward the docks, though not the bright parts with the beer gardens and yacht clubs. He drives toward the rusted edge, where streetlights flicker and buildings give up pretending to be useful.

Noah sits beside me, his eyes fixed ahead like a dog with a scent. He cracks his neck and says, “Do you want to drive, or would you prefer to ride in the back and look intimidating when we box him in?”

I glance sideways. “I’ll take the wheel. You’re better at saying scary things with a smile.”

His lips twitch into something that isn’t a smile but knows the shape of one. “Fair.”

We trail the courier’s rented Audi until he pulls into a gravel lot behind an old shipping warehouse, the kind where secrets get loaded into crates, and nobody asks for a manifest. He steps out like he’s stretching after a long day at a desk. Then, he smokes a cigarette and checks his phone. Looking like just another man unwinding. But we know better.

Noah steps out first, casually, like he’s just out for a stroll. He starts walking toward the guy, hands in his coat pockets, carrying that eerie calm that always comes before something sharp happens.

“Excuse me,” Noah calls out in that almost-cheerful voice he uses when he’s about to do something unpleasant. “I think you picked up something that belongs to us. Mind if we have a quick conversation about it?”

The courier turns and squints at us in the low light. “What the hell are you talking about?”

I circle around the other side of the lot, keeping to the shadows. It’s all muscle memory now, like slipping into an old uniform soaked in someone else’s blood.

Noah closes the distance, step by step. “You received a USB drive a few minutes ago. Beige casing, red sticker. Pretty standard courier handoff. The problem is… that drive’s not yours. And I don’t like lending things to strangers.”

The man’s confusion twists into defensive bravado. He starts to speak, his voice rising. Probably about rights, lawyers, and how he doesn’t know who we are or what we think we’re doing. But I don’t need to hear it.

Because Noah is already moving.

Faster than breath, I step in and jam a syringe deep into the man’s abdomen, twisting it with brutal precision. The courier gasps, shock cutting off his words mid-sentence. His hands go to my shoulders, weak and scrambling. He tries to push me away, but his legs betray him.

“This is a mixture of ketamine and halothane,” Noah murmurs into his ear, almost kindly. “With just a touch of fun that I cooked up in Jakarta. It’ll feel like drowning in your own nerves.”

The courier collapses, his mouth slack, his eyes rolling back. A soft, wet noise escapes his throat, somewhere between a choke and a plea. His body convulses once, hard, then goes boneless.

I catch him before he hits the earth. His weight’s nothing. Deadweight never feels heavy when rage lifts it.

Noah crouches and goes through his pockets methodically, like he’s sorting tools in a kit bag. “Here it is,” he says, holding the USB drive up to the moonlight. “It’s still warm. And oh, would you look at that… a safe deposit keycard. Prague. He was stashing something else for Evander.”

I don’t answer because I’m too busy dragging the man’s twitching, fading corpse toward his car. The skin at the back of his neck is slick with sweat and terror, and he groans once. A low, bubbling sound.

Noah joins me as I prop him up in the driver’s seat. “We’re staging it?”

“Of course we are.”

---