The silence of the Enge penthouse was no longer the silence of a home; it was the heavy, suffocating quiet of a battlefield between skirmishes. The digital clock on the oven glowed a cold, neon green, marking the hour at exactly one in the morning. Outside, the Zurich fog pressed against the windows like a physical presence, swallowing the streetlights below. Inside, the shadow of Kai moved with the practiced stealth of a ghost, his boots making no sound on the polished hardwood as he slipped through the front door.
His breath was shallow, hitched slightly by the lingering fire in his lungs from a high speed pursuit through the industrial district. He had just finished a cleanup operation for Ethel, a messy affair involving a defector who had possessed too much information and too little
