DOGS DON'T BITE IN SILENCE
667 Words
Night found her pacing the rooftop of a warehouse she once called a safehouse.
The city below hummed like a dying engine, all golden lights and broken promises. Sarafina Lucetti stared at the skyline of Rome, one hand curled tightly around her phone, the other in the pocket where the USB used to be.
You’re not ready, Dante had said.
But what did he know of readiness?
She had lived through fire. Buried friends. Buried secrets. Woken up in rooms she didn’t recognize with blood on her hands and no idea whose.
And now, she had given the most important piece of evidence in her father’s death — in her own unraveling — to a man who didn’t even flinch when people died.
The thought made her stomach turn.
He’ll keep it. Use it. Maybe even weaponize it. And I’ll be next.
Her phone buzzed. An encrypted ping from an old Lucetti signal.
She hesitated, then opened it.
SENDER: UNKNOWN
MESSAGE: You gave him the key. He’s already using it. Check the broadcast at 0200.
Sarafina’s breath caught. She checked the time. 01:58.
She ran downstairs to the office below, where she kept an ancient satellite monitor hooked into a string of backdoor feeds her father had built into military satellites. Most of them were dead. But one still blinked.
Channel 441.
Static.
Then: a black screen.
Then a voice.
Cold. Calm. Dante.
“This is Dante Moretti. Effective immediately, the silence network has been reinstated. All dormant agents will report for reactivation. Unmarked assets will be neutralized.”
Sarafina stared at the screen, heart pounding.
He had activated the project.
No warning. No discussion.
Just a clean command to a system that had been designed to erase identities and rewrite truths.
The broadcast ended with a familiar image:
The lion. Mouth sewn shut.
She backed away from the monitor.
He lied.
She should have known.
Her phone buzzed again.
Unknown:
Now do you understand what you gave him?
She slammed her hand on the desk, rage tearing through her chest.
If Dante thought she was just another name on a list, he had grossly miscalculated.
She grabbed her coat, her weapons, and the burner phone from the vault. Her contacts were limited — most of them had either gone dark or flipped sides long ago — but there was still one person who owed her a favor.
One person even Dante didn’t know about.
Noemi.
An old friend. Former intelligence analyst turned ghost in the system. If anyone could decode the backup copy Sarafina had made of the USB — secretly, moments before Dante arrived at the café — it was her.
She slid the drive into her pocket and left the warehouse without a sound.
---
Three hours later, Sarafina stood at the edge of Lake Bracciano, her boots sinking slightly into the soft soil. The air was colder here. Cleaner. Farther from the city’s rot.
Noemi emerged from the trees like a shadow in human form. Hair short. Eyes sharp behind wire-rimmed glasses. A pistol holstered casually against her ribcage.
“You look like hell,” Noemi said.
“Good,” Sarafina replied. “It’s honest.”
They walked in silence to the boathouse, where Noemi had set up her portable lab. Screens blinked. A hard drive hummed.
Sarafina handed over the backup.
“Can you crack it?”
Noemi smiled faintly. “Honey, I could do it in my sleep. But you won’t like what we find.”
“I already don’t like what I gave him.”
Noemi plugged in the drive. Files bloomed like veins across the screen.
And there, at the heart of it, nested inside a system marked ALMA // XIII, was a single locked profile.
USER: S. LUCETTI
CLEARANCE: PRIMAL
STATUS: ACTIVATED
Sarafina stepped back.
“What does that mean?” she asked quietly.
Noemi’s voice was almost afraid. “It means you weren’t just part of the project.”
She turned.
“You are the project.”
- Writer
