Page 5 of Code Name: Hunter
Not just of the woman long thought dead in Prague, but of everything we buried with her. The truth. The lies. The blood on our hands. Whatever this is, whatever game someone is playing now, it started the night she vanished—and tonight, it begins again.
I adjust the cuff of my black suit jacket and pivot toward the baccarat table where a man in a thousand-dollar waistcoat is losing ten grand like it's pocket change. He's not my concern.But the brunette who just slipped into the booth behind him? She is.
For a moment my breath catches, and I swear my heart stops. I nearly say her name aloud—Vivian—but the word catches behind my teeth like a blade. Too dangerous. Too soon. Too late. Elegant, dangerous, and deliberate. She has a beauty that doesn’t just turn heads—it turns tides. Her presence is like a loaded weapon dressed in silk, quiet but never safe. Seeing her now is like spotting a match held just above gasoline—impossibly bright, undeniably volatile, and difficult to look away from.
The name tastes like smoke and ash in my mouth. Vivian Black—Nocturne—former MI-6 asset, shadow operative, and the only woman who ever got under my skin without shedding a drop of blood. She was an expert in infiltration, seduction, and disinformation—deadly with a whisper and lethal with a lie.
Officially, she’s dead. Unofficially? She’s sitting fifteen feet from me in a backless black dress, legs crossed like a queen, and sipping scotch like it’s the only thing keeping her anchored to this reality.
Her presence doesn’t just stir my memory—it ignites something deeper. My pulse hitches. My spine locks. And just for a second, I smell her perfume—jasmine and smoke, like it clung to her skin and the wreckage she always left behind. I hear the echo of her laugh from Istanbul, feel the press of her fingers on my jaw in that alley in Prague, right before it all went to hell. She's not just an apparition. She's my apparition. And now she's breathing again.
That old injury she left behind—Prague, a bridge, a betrayal stitched with a touch—starts aching like it never healed. She’s a phantom I thought we’d buried alongside Wolfe. But now she’s back, not just alive, but charged with intent. And the dossier in her possession? It doesn’t just have the power to burn those highup in the government and intelligence fields. It could fracture alliances across borders, pit agencies against their own, ignite the type of war that doesn’t make headlines—just casualties.
Somehow, she’s at the center of it all again. Just like last time. Only this time, I’m not unarmed.
She shouldn’t be here, but she is. Alive. Dangerous. And looking straight at me with a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes—a smile that feels like a cipher, hiding something jagged beneath the surface. Her eyes scan the room behind me, as if tracking more than threats. A message, maybe. A warning. Or bait for a trap I haven’t seen yet.
I clock the exits, the security mirrors, the dealer’s tell when a whale hits the table max. My right hand brushes the edge of my jacket, reassured by the weight holstered beneath. I move toward her without thinking, my shoes silent against the velvet carpet. Each step calculated. Controlled. I’ve interrogated warlords with less adrenaline in my veins. She doesn’t flinch as I slide into the seat opposite her. Neither of us speak and I let the silence stretch between us.
"You’re supposed to be dead," I say finally.
“I get that a lot,” she responds, raising her glass to her lips.
I lean in close, my voice a low warning. "What do you want?"
She turns her head, lips inches from mine. “The dossier for my life." Her gaze doesn’t waver, but her left hand traces the rim of her glass, slow and deliberate, like she’s measuring my reaction.
I lean back, eyes narrowing slightly. "We're going to need more than what you've sent," I say finally, voice low and clipped. "We need proof that doesn’t just light a spark—it sets the night on fire. If you want me to stick my neck out for you—if you expect me to take this to Fitz before we piss off every alphabet agency on the continent—I need to know what kind of war you’rereally starting... and whether you expect me to fight it with you, or against you."
3
VIVIAN
By the time I reach the crumbling gates of Villa Tenebrae, the glitter of the Crown & Scepter still clings to me like smoke. The winding drive snakes up the cliff-side in silence, flanked by cypress trees whose resin-sweet scent clings in the damp night air, their branches brushing against the stone wall with a papery scrape. No lights. No neighbors. Just the hushed sprawl of Monte Carlo below and this rotting husk of a villa above—abandoned, decaying, and whispering about stories told by locals with nervous laughs.
Villa Tenebrae. The place no one wants to buy. They say the place watches you back. The walls sigh as if they remember things I’d rather forget.
It’s perfect for me.
I’ve converted the old cook’s quarters off the east wing kitchen into something livable. It’s not luxurious—not even close—but there are a couple of narrow windows and a small, attached bath buried beneath decades of ivy and forgotten rumors.
I’ve reinforced the door with steel bars, welded straight into the stone, and installed a hidden keyless deadbolt lock—one of a kind. The walls are wired with motion sensors, and I’ve rigged afalse ceiling that opens into a narrow crawlspace in case I need a quick extraction.
There’s a trapdoor tucked behind a shelving unit, leading through a maze of wine cellars and out onto the cliffs. I’ve also managed to convert one of the old dumbwaiter shafts into a secondary escape route—tight but usable.
A small satellite dish and propane generator are hidden beneath the thick ivy outside. Crude, but it gives me just enough power and limited internet access to stay connected—just enough to survive.
The second I click the deadbolt into place with a whisper, I’m home. Not safe. Never that. But prepared. It’s not safety I chase—it’s the illusion of control. The kind I can build with steel bars and deadbolts, because the kind I lost in Prague doesn’t come back. Not really.
Then the next lock. Then the third.
Nevertheless, I don’t breathe.
With the reinforced door shut behind me, I press my spine to it and wait. Listening. Not just for the sound of footsteps, but for the subtle clues that someone's been here—an air shift, the faint hum of displaced electronics, the distant tick of a device warming up that wasn’t on before. I close my eyes, tuning myself to the static hush of danger that always comes before the chaos. My pulse thuds in my ears, slow but deliberate, syncing to the tension in the walls.
In this line of work, silence isn’t safety. It’s a loaded chamber. I shift my weight, feeling the grit under my boots, eyes tracking every shadowed corner. The quiet here isn’t soothing; it’s loaded. Like a gun left on a kitchen table. Like a heartbeat that vanishes just before the ambush. It tells me something’s already in motion. And if you can’t hear it? You’re already too late.
Old habits don’t die—they only sharpen with time.
