The speaker crackled, a sharp, metallic rasp that sliced through the heavy silence.
“Surprised, right?”
The man known in the underworld only as the Vulture stiffened.
He was a creature of shadow and precision, a fixer who had never been caught off guard in twenty years of service.
It was a bluff—mostly.
The ledger existed, but the two-hour timer was a lie he’d improvised on the crawl through the vents.
Michael chuckled, a cold sound that didn’t reach his eyes.
“You’re a high-stakes gambler for a man standing on a ledge.
You really think she hasn’t prepared for that?”
“She sent you to recruit me, Michael.
You don’t recruit a man you’re planning to burn,” the Vulture countered.
“Let my men walk. I’ll give you the encryption key to the first three files. It’s enough to ruin Eva’s competitors without taking down the whole ship. Think of it as a sign of good faith.”
He stood in the center, his rifle slung low, his eyes scanning the rafters.
“She trusts you so much to do all her dirty work,” Eva’s voice continued, dripping with a smooth, toxic confidence.
“But now everything changes. Turn against your boss and work for me. Or… explain to the police how you got in here with a high-caliber rifle. Military grade….”
The Vulture didn’t move.
He was famous for two things, his clinical efficiency and an iron-clad code of silence.
He was the vault where Isabela’s darkest secrets were kept, all of them.
“And what gives you the nerve to think that I, the Vulture, will betray my client?” he growled.
His deep voice echoed off the corrugated metal walls, a low rumble of a predator cornered but not yet afraid.
“I don’t break, and all my clients know that.”
“Well, at least I gave you a chance,” she sighed, a soft, chilling sound.
A sharp beep erupted from Vulture’s pocket.
He moved with a blur of speed, pulling the phone out, expecting a signal from his team out side.
Perhaps they had found the source of the broadcast.
Perhaps they were coming to save him, but no, it was something else….
He looked at the screen.
His blood turned to ice.
” Shit!!”
“How dare you?” he hissed, his composure finally fracturing.
“I am going to skin you alive for this mother fuckers!!”
“Only if you leave here alive,” she replied, her voice dropping to a whisper that felt like a caress against his ear.
“And even if you don’t betray her, Vulture… they will.”
Eva knew that, the so called vulture would rather go to the grave with whatever information he had on all his clients.
But when it comes to his men, that was his one and only weakness.
“You bitch!”
While he had been standing in the dark, posturing and debating, the world outside had been dismantled.
Michael and a silent team of professionals had swept through the perimeter, The beep hadn’t been a warning, it was a trophy.
The short, grainy clip showed his elite, teammen he had trained himself, stripped of their weapons and tied in a cold, lightless room.
For the first time in his life, the predator realized he was the one in the trap.
The Vulture didn’t wait for her next word.
Since he knew it was an ambush, and the silence following her threat was the countdown to a kill-stroke.
But he knew she didn’t have the nerves for that.
He lunged toward the toilets, his heavy boots muffled.
Just as he ducked behind the wooden door, a rhythmic thud-thud-thud of suppressed gunfire chewed into the wall where he had been a second before.
“Michael’s men,” he hissed, checking his rifle’s chamber.
He didn’t head for the door—that was a graveyard, he knew.
But what other option does he have?
Instead, he looked upward, from the crack at the door which was shot.
High above, near the vaulted ceiling next to the bath room, was a narrow catwalk leading to a ventilation grate.
It was a desperate climb, but the Vulture lived for the heights.
The blinding white light and ear-shattering crack bought him five seconds.
In that window, he leaped onto a stack of crates and pulled himself onto the iron ladder of the catwalk.
“He’s on the rails!” a voice shouted from below.
Bullets sparked off the iron grating beneath his feet.
The Vulture didn’t fire back, he couldn’t afford to slow down.
He reached the ventilation duct, kicked the rusted cover loose with a sickening screech of metal, and dived inside just as a red laser dot settled on his shoulder.
The air inside the vent was tight and smelled of dead rodents, but it led to the roof.
He crawled with frantic precision, his heart hammering against his ribs.
When he finally bursted out onto the gravel-topped roof, the cold night air hit him like a physical blow.
He sprinted for the edge, planning to drop onto the dumpster in the alley, but stopped dead.
Down in the alley, bathed in the harsh glow of a single streetlamp, stood Michael.
He wasn’t even holding a gun; he was simply leaning against the Vulture’s own getaway car, casually tossing a set of keys in the air.
“Going somewhere?” Michael called out, his voice echoing up the brick walls.
The Vulture lowered his rifle, but he didn’t sling it.
He stood at the edge of the roof, looking down at Michael like a gargoyle carved from spite.
“You’ve got my men and you’ve got my car,” the Vulture called down, his voice gravelly but steady.
“But you don’t have the one thing your boss actually wants.”
Michael stopped tossing the keys.
He looked up, his face unreadable in the shadows.
“And what’s that?”
“The ledger,” the Vulture replied.
” Isabella doesn’t just give me ‘dirty work.’ Every payment, every official she’s bought, every body I’ve buried—it’s all logged.
If I don’t check in every two hours, the cloud server pings the authorities.
Kill me, and you don’t just lose a lead, you ignite a bonfire that burns your boss and Isabella together.”