Chapter 1

The bus pulled up to the station at the edge of town.

I stepped off, carrying a faded canvas duffel bag.

My name is Victor Thorne. To the people in this quiet neighborhood, and even to my wife, Sarah, and my seven-year-old son, Leo, I was just a regular guy who spent most of his life at sea.

My cover story was "Senior Offshore Oil Rig Technician," a job that kept me away from home for ten months at a time.

But in reality, my file is locked deep inside the Pentagon's top-secret archives under the codename "Ghost." Simply put, I was a cleaner—a black ops specialist handling the military's dirty work overseas.

For the past ten months, I’d been dropped into the deserts of northern Syria, tracking a local warlord. It culminated late one night a few days ago, when I lay prone on a sand dune for over a dozen hours and put a sniper round right through his skull.

Now, it was all over.

I reached down and patted the side pocket of my duffel. Beneath the thick canvas was a brand-new, limited-edition youth baseball glove—a belated birthday present for Leo.

The town's streets looked the same as always, the halos of streetlights spilling over the manicured lawns on either side. I quickened my pace, walked three blocks, and turned into my own driveway.

But when my eyes fell on the porch of our two-story house, my stomach suddenly dropped.

Something wasn't right.

It was 7:00 PM. Usually, as soon as it got dark, Sarah would turn on the porch light. But right now, the entire house was plunged in pitch black. I hurried forward, my gaze sweeping the front yard. Leo's red bicycle, which should have been parked by the flowerbed, was gone.

There were two deep sets of tire tracks gouged into the lawn. Judging by the exaggerated width, a massive, full-size SUV had driven brutally straight onto the grass.

Sarah and I didn’t own a vehicle like that, and we didn’t have any friends who did either.

I stopped at the front door. By the faint moonlight, I spotted clear metallic scratch marks around the edges of the brass deadbolt. Someone had forced the door open using professional tools.

I took a deep breath. My hand instinctively reached for the small of my back, only to grab empty air. I didn't have a gun on me today. I pulled a folding knife from my pocket, and the black blade flicked open without a sound.

I pushed the door open, softened my footsteps, and slipped silently inside, clinging to the wall.

The living room was a disaster zone. The glass coffee table was completely shattered, and Sarah's various bills and folders bearing her accounting firm's name were scattered all over the floor. The TV screen had a giant crater smashed into it.

My eyes tracked across the sea of broken glass and locked onto a spot between the beige sofa and the rug.

There was a pool of dark red blood.

I rushed over and crouched down. The blood was already drying and turning black. At the edge of the pool lay Leo's favorite plastic toy.

My fists clenched violently. I stood up, eyes red, and tore through every room on the first and second floors like a madman, not even sparing the closets or the spaces under the beds.

There were no bodies. No signs of whose blood it was.

Once I confirmed that, I spun around, bolted to the corner of the kitchen, and yanked open the wooden door leading to the basement storage room. I took the stairs two at a time and marched to the pegboard wall covered in tools at the very back. I gripped a specific screwdriver in the corner and twisted it hard.

The tool wall slid silently to the side, revealing a narrow, soundproof panic room.

Inside sat an encrypted custom-built PC tower. For my family's safety, I had installed micro-cameras in all the blind spots of the house. The feeds were strictly offline, storing everything straight to this hard drive. No one knew they existed except me.

I pulled out a chair, sat down, punched in the passcode to wake the screen, and immediately pulled up the security footage.

I scrubbed backward through the timeline until it hit 4:10 PM today. Sarah was walking up to the front door, holding the hand of Leo, who had just gotten off the school bus.

Sarah was clutching several thick files, and Leo was happily munching on a cookie.

Seeing my living, breathing wife and son on the screen made my throat tighten as if something was lodged in it.

A few minutes later, a heavy black SUV jumped the curb and plunged onto the lawn. Four hulking men in black suits and leather gloves hopped out. The leader was a white guy with a tattooed neck. He deftly picked the lock and led his crew inside.

The camera angle switched to the living room.

Sarah screamed in absolute terror, instinctively clutching the folders tight against her chest. Leo froze.

"Who are you?! Get out, or I'm calling the police!" Sarah yelled, her voice trembling.

The tattooed man strode over, snatched the files from her arms, and tossed them on the floor like garbage.

"Let's keep this short, Ms. Sarah," the tattooed man said, his voice ice-cold. "During your audit this week, you covertly copied a file from the Capstone Syndicate's mainframe. The boss is very pissed off."

Capstone Syndicate? My brow furrowed. They were a massive, state-wide conglomerate. Sarah did indeed handle tax audits for large corporations like them regularly.

Sarah was shaking violently, but she didn’t back down. "Those weren't legal invoices at all! You're using logistics companies to launder money, which is why there are so many rotten accounts that don't add up!"

"Since you've seen it, you should know that it can't be kept around." The tattooed man sighed and drew a heavy metal baton from his belt. "Your company computer has already been smashed to pieces. Where is the flash drive with the data?"

"I'm not giving it to you! I've already—"

Before Sarah could finish her sentence, the tattooed man wildly swung his right arm, violently slamming the heavy steel baton right into the left side of her face.

Thud.

A sickening, muffled crack.

Sarah didn't even have time to scream. The sheer force launched her sideways, and her head crashed violently against the edge of the glass coffee table. Blood instantly began to pool as she collapsed limply onto the rug.

"Sarah!" I stared dead at the screen, a tidal wave of bloodlust surging straight to my brain. My entire body shook, my jaw clenching so hard my teeth ground together.

"Mommy!!!"

From the speakers, seven-year-old Leo let out a throat-tearing shriek. He charged forward like an enraged little beast and wrapped his arms tight around the tattooed man's leg, desperately pounding his tiny fists against the man's knee.

"Bad guy!"

The tattooed man looked down with total apathy, then raised a heavy, steel-toed boot and kicked Leo viciously in the stomach.

Leo was launched backward, crashing into and shattering the TV stand. His tiny body curled into an agonized ball, completely robbed of the breath to even cry.

I zeroed in on that tattooed man's face, my vision blurring at the edges from pure, unadulterated rage.

The tattooed man walked over and hoisted Leo into the air by his collar like a ragdoll. He spoke coldly to the empty living room:

"Sarah, I don't care if you're actually out cold or just faking it, I'm only going to say this once. If you don't fork over that flash drive by the time we get to our underground holding facility, your son's heart, liver, spleen, lungs, and those pretty little corneas are going straight into a cooler, sold piece by piece to the highest bidder on the black market. Take them!"

His two goons grabbed Sarah's lifeless body, dragging her out the door behind the tattooed man. A minute and a half later, the roaring SUV vanished from the camera feed.

The video ended.

The panic room was terrifyingly quiet. I sat in the chair, chest heaving with heavy breaths, cold sweat soaking my back. My wife had been beaten to the brink of death, and my son was taken.

I wanted nothing more than to grab my guns right now, storm into the Capstone Syndicate's headquarters, and slaughter every last living soul inside.

But a sliver of rationality remained.

Based on what that bastard said, as long as they didn't have the flash drive, Sarah and Leo would stay alive—for now. I couldn't afford to be reckless. The second I alerted the syndicate's top brass, they might execute the hostages on a whim.

I had to find that flash drive.

Since Sarah wasn't robbed of it the second she walked in, there was a high probability she had hidden it somewhere in the house.

I rushed out of the panic room and vaulted straight up the stairs to Leo's bedroom. Toys and picture books littered the floor. I forced myself to calm down, my eyes rapidly sweeping every corner. Finally, I stopped in front of a massive Lego spaceship sitting on the windowsill.

Whenever we played treasure hunt, this was our favorite hiding spot.

I pried off the bottom plate of the Lego build. Out from a pile of bricks tumbled a matte-black encrypted USB flash drive.

I grabbed the drive, sprinted back down to the panic room, plugged it into the tower, and ran a decryption program to brute-force the passcode.

As the files popped open on the screen one by one, my pupils instantly constricted.

It wasn't money-laundering ledgers at all! It was a dense archive of logistics shipping manifests. The invoices clearly listed various models of "Premium Grade Medical Coolers," and the notes column next to them contained codenames for freshly harvested human organs—complete with corresponding blood types and the names of black-market buyers.

The Capstone Syndicate wasn't just a conglomerate. It was a human slaughterhouse treating people like spare parts!

I yanked the hard drive out and gripped it deathly tight.

At the thought of my wife and son falling into the hands of these demons, an uncontrollable wave of dread washed over me.

These animals thought they’d just stepped on some insignificant, blue-collar family. They didn't even bother leaving men behind to watch the scene.

They had no idea what kind of monster they had just woken up.

Since I had no clue where their "underground holding facility" was, my only option was to make them deliver the coordinates directly to my doorstep.

And to pull that off, I needed these bastards to believe I was a harmless, pathetic loser who only knew how to cry and dial 911.

I stepped out of the panic room and returned to the ruins of the living room. I picked up the landline phone that had been knocked to the floor and dialed 911 with trembling fingers.

"what's your emergency?" the dispatcher's voice came through.

I clutched the receiver tightly, forcing a heavy sob into my voice. "Help! Please, send the police... I just got back from the rigs and my house has been destroyed... There's blood everywhere! My wife and kid are gone, I don't know what to do! God, please, hurry!"

The trap was set.

Now that I’d called the police, they’d realize the husband was home. And to pry the flash drive's location out of Sarah, there was no way they were going to let me live.