My Husband Works for the CIA,’ My Sister Boasted—Until He Saw My Mark and Knew I Was ‘Sky-Fall’…

 

Part 1

The crystal goblets were already vibrating from the tension long before anyone noticed. It started with the way my sister’s laugh bounced too loudly off the crown molding, the way my mother’s bracelets clinked each time she pretended not to stare at my empty ring finger, the way my father kept clearing his throat like there were words he wanted to say but had never learned how.

All of that was background noise.

The moment that mattered was smaller than a breath.

I reached across the mahogany table for the cranberry sauce, and the cuff of my beige cashmere sweater slipped up my forearm just an inch.

That was all it took.

Candlelight slid over my skin and caught on the jagged black ink curled into the inside of my wrist: a stylized hawk diving straight down through a fractured storm of triangles and spirals, the whole design looking more like a burn than a tattoo. Most people, if they ever saw it, assumed it was some artsy linework I’d gotten during an angsty phase.

Most people were wrong.

Across the table, Mark’s fork stopped halfway to his mouth. His eyes locked onto my wrist, and suddenly the air in the dining room sharpened, every breath edged in glass. His knuckles tightened around the fork until they turned the color of old bone.

The fork slipped from his hand and hit his plate like a gunshot.

Everyone jumped. No one understood why.

But he did.

“Where,” he rasped, voice shredding on the single syllable. “Where did you get that?”

His gaze didn’t climb as high as my face. It stayed glued to the mark on my wrist as if he were staring at a live grenade someone had casually rolled onto the tablecloth.

Chloe blinked at him, annoyance snapping across her perfectly contoured features. “Jesus, Mark, it’s a tattoo, not a—”

“That’s the Sky-Fall sigil,” he hissed, words strangled, sweat beading at his hairline. “That’s Shadowside Operations. Wet works logistics. That mark isn’t supposed to exist outside level-seven compartments.”

The table went quiet.

My mother’s hand hovered in midair with a forkful of stuffing. My father’s eyes ticked from Mark to me and back like he was watching tennis in a language he didn’t speak. Out of habit, I rolled my sleeve back down, covering the ink, like closing a door.

Two hours earlier, this had just been Thanksgiving dinner.

Now it was a crime scene.

To understand why Mark looked like he’d seen a ghost, you have to rewind, back to the appetizers—back to when the only thing bleeding in this house was the roast.

The air then had been thick with butter and Chloe’s voice.

My sister held court at the head of the table like she’d been elected to it. She’d chosen a white dress that could only be described as aggressively festive, all sharp lines and designer labels, and she had positioned herself where the chandelier lit her like a stage. For forty straight minutes she’d been building a legend, brick by self-serving brick.

“And of course, when you work in Mark’s department, you never really sleep,” she sighed dramatically, patting his arm. “It’s always, ‘Honey, I can’t talk about it,’ and you just know it’s some classified emergency.”

Mark smiled, the kind of modest half-smile of a man who wants everyone to know he’s being modest.

I took a sip of cheap red wine, swirling it slowly in my glass. The label had a picture of a lighthouse and tasted vaguely like regret.

I knew what Mark actually did. I’d seen his personnel file. I’d seen the performance reviews about his tendency to overuse bullet points in internal memos.

He tracked supply chain orders and vendor contracts for a mid-tier directorate in Brussels. And he wasn’t even particularly good at it.

But my family didn’t know that.

They heard “CIA” and instantly filled in the rest with movie posters and dust jackets. In their heads, Mark’s job came with tuxedos, car chases, and smoldering one-liners delivered in foreign alleyways. Never mind that his most dangerous confrontation that quarter had been a disagreement about chair models.

“He’s so brave,” my mother said, practically sighing the words. “The stress he’s under, I don’t know how you do it, Mark.”

“Oh, you get used to it,” he said, doing his best impression of a man who had stared down warlords instead of spreadsheets. “It’s not glamorous. Someone has to walk into the shadows so the rest of you can live in the light.”

I had to cough into my napkin to hide the laugh.

Chloe shifted the spotlight with the practiced ease of someone who’d spent her life dragging it back onto herself. Her gaze slid down the table until it landed on me. That smile—sharp, pitying, rehearsed—curled on her lips.

“And then there’s my baby sister,” she said brightly, lifting her wineglass. “Elena, the librarian.”

“Archivist,” I corrected softly.

She ignored it. “She keeps the dust off the shelves at the Library of Congress. Isn’t that the cutest thing? Mark saves the world, and Elena saves… receipts.”

The table chuckled in chorus. Safe, polite, mean.

“Somebody has to,” I said lightly, cutting a piece of turkey that had the texture of cardboard. “Wouldn’t want history wandering off.”

My father joined in, his voice gruff with what he thought was affection. “We’re just glad you’ve found something stable, honey. You were always the… sensitive one. Libraries are quiet. That’s good for you.”

Good for me.

Right.

They were so careful with me, as if I might splinter if they hit me too hard with their expectations. It would’ve been funny if it hadn’t been so exhaustingly insulting. They had no idea that the same hands holding the fork had once snapped a man’s neck in a stairwell in Karachi, then calmly adjusted a borrowed wedding ring before walking back into a reception.

The loudest people in my family had always been the weakest. They filled the silence with stories because they were terrified of discovering what it might say about them if they listened for too long.

“Do you at least have security clearance for the staff room?” Chloe asked, smirking. “Or do you have to knock and wait for someone to let you in?”

The table laughed again.

In my head, I was somewhere else entirely.

A concrete room with no windows. The hum of filtered air. A general’s voice rising an octave too high as he screamed that I had no authority, that his stars outranked my job title. The way he’d shut up when I’d slid the black badge across the table and said, barely above a whisper, “Under Protocol Seven Alpha, I outrank your stars. Sit down.”

He’d sat.

But here, at my sister’s table, I was the safe, quiet one.

Mark leaned in, enjoying the warmth of the spotlight Chloe had trained on him. “You want to talk about clearance?” he said. “At the Agency, there are levels you can’t even imagine. Sometimes they tell us ghost stories about the really deep stuff. Units that don’t technically exist. My division has this rumor about a codeword program called Sky-Fall. Total black. No paper trail. ‘Boogeyman for the bad guys,’ they call it.”

“Sky-Fall,” my mother repeated, impressed by how cool it sounded without understanding a thing.

“Oh, Mark,” Chloe breathed, eyes shining. “Tell them what you can, at least.”

He swallowed, clearly thrilled with himself. “There are whispers that Sky-Fall doesn’t use field agents the way we think of them. They don’t pull triggers, they pull strings. Logistics, approvals, black-site management. People who can erase an operation with one phone call.”

I buttered a roll with slow precision, fighting the urge to roll my eyes.

If Mark had known that the “ghost story” he was describing had spent the morning signing off on an extraordinary rendition that would never exist on any map, he might have chosen his words more carefully.

But he didn’t know. None of them did.

That was the point.

My phone vibrated against my thigh. A low, insistent buzz that climbed up my bones. At almost the same moment, Mark’s government-issued brick of a phone lit up on the table with its own dull hum.

He frowned, glancing at the screen. Some calendar notification or low-priority log. Whatever it was, it didn’t qualify as urgent.

Mine did.

I slid my phone from my pocket without ceremony. The matte-black chassis caught the light wrong; it looked like any other smartphone, but anyone trained to see would notice what was missing. No branding. No standard ports. A sliver of reinforced plating along the edges.

Mark noticed.

He cut off mid-sentence, eyes narrowing. “Elena,” he said slowly, his voice losing its performative confidence. “Is that… is that a secure-burst mod? On a civilian unit?”

A little hush fell over the table.

“Hmm?” I said, feigning distraction. I hit the side button, silencing the alert without glancing at the code on the screen. “Oh. No, it’s just an old model. I’m frugal, remember? I don’t upgrade unless I have to.”

It was a lie, and not even a particularly clever one, but people believe the lies that confirm what they already think. Elena is cheap. Elena is boring. Elena isn’t important.

Mark tried to let it go. I watched him force his eyes back to his plate, watched him stack clauses of denial in his head.

That’s when Chloe made the mistake that shattered her carefully curated little universe.

“Speaking of frugal,” she said, reaching for my hand with a giggle, “are you still wearing that sad little college bracelet? God, Elena, you really need to treat yourself once in a while.”

I tried to pull back, but she was already tugging my sleeve, intent on exposing a cheap charm bracelet that didn’t exist.

The cashmere slid effortlessly up my arm.

The mark appeared.

The hawk in free fall. The storm geometry burned into skin.

Time didn’t stop, but it thickened. The candles guttered uneasily, wax dripping down their sides like nervous sweat. Somewhere, a car drove past the house, bass reverberating through the walls. The world kept going.

The room did not.

“That’s… that’s not…” Mark whispered.

His chair scraped loudly as he pushed back, the legs catching on the rug. He stumbled, hitting the hardwood with a thud. The plate he knocked from the table shattered, shards skidding under the sideboard.

“Let go of her arm, Chloe,” he gasped. “Let go. Now.”

She froze, fingers still wrapped around my wrist. “Mark, what the hell is wrong with you? It’s a tattoo.”

He shook his head violently, his gaze never leaving my skin.

“That is a unit designation,” he said hoarsely. “Sky-Fall isn’t a place. It’s not a joke. It’s a kill-chain authority. Shadowside Operations. They don’t have… archives. They have targets. They don’t keep records, they erase them.”

My mother laughed weakly, the sound cracking in the middle. “Mark, honestly. It’s just a little—”

“That,” he cut in, pointing at me with a shaking hand, “isn’t supposed to exist at this table.”

He finally looked up, really looked at me, the way people do when they realize they’ve been walking past a loaded gun for years thinking it was a paperweight.

“You’re not a librarian,” he breathed. “You’re… you sign off on covert actions. You’re the one who stamps the redactions. You’re Sky-Fall.”

The fragile glass wall between my two lives crumbled with a quiet, decisive snap.

I rolled the sleeve back down slowly, covering the ink. It felt strangely ceremonial, a last attempt to tuck the monster back into the closet even as it stepped firmly into the light.

“Sit down, Analyst,” I said.

My voice wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. Years of command settled into the single word like weight.

He sat.

His knees obeyed before his brain caught up, muscles conditioned by a hierarchy he’d never expected to find at his in-laws’ dining table.

My father stared at me like he was trying to reconcile the daughter he remembered—the one who broke her arm falling out of a tree at eight—with the woman who had just made an Agency analyst sit on command. My mother’s mouth opened and closed soundlessly, mascaraed lashes blinking too fast.

Chloe, offended in a way only truly self-absorbed people can be, gave a brittle laugh.

“Can we stop this?” she demanded. “Elena is not some assassin. She organizes books.”

My phone buzzed again.

The sound didn’t belong in a dining room. It belonged to a bunker, a war room, a place where maps are pinned with red circles that mean life or death.

I didn’t even hesitate.

“Director,” a distorted voice crackled when I thumbed the screen to answer, the output coming through speaker. “Operation Nightshade is green-lit. Drone wing is in holding pattern, asset is confirmed in the kill box. We’re standing by for your biometric authorization.”

No one at the table moved.

I switched languages, my tongue sliding into the clipped syllables of an authorization protocol my family had never heard. “Alpha-Nine Zulu,” I said calmly, reciting the rest of the string. “Execute.”

“Copy, Director. Nightshade is live.”

I ended the call.

The silence that followed wasn’t like the earlier quiet. That had been social. Awkward.

This was structural. A vacuum.

I folded my napkin and placed it next to my plate.

“The turkey was dry, Chloe,” I said casually. “But the cranberry sauce helped.”

Her jaw worked soundlessly.

I stood, pushing my chair back. The scrape of its legs across the hardwood sounded louder than the fork had when it hit the plate, louder than the word “Director,” louder than the drone that was currently circling an unnamed piece of airspace, waiting for the numbered countdown from the kill-chain I had just completed.

“Elena,” my father finally managed. “What… what was that?”

“That,” I said, smoothing my sweater, “was work.”

Mark stared at his Agency phone like he expected it to explode.

“Do I—” he started, swallowed. “Do I need to report this as an unauthorized contact? If you’re operating under Title Fifty covert action authority and I’ve just witnessed a command sequence, I might be in violation of…”

His training was a lifeline he was trying to cling to in an ocean he’d never even seen on a map.

I leaned down so my words would reach only him, my voice low and almost gentle.

“You don’t have the clearance to report me, Mark,” I said. “If you tried to type my call sign into your system, your screen would go black and your supervisor would get an alert about a malfunctioning workstation.”

I let that sink in.

“As far as the Agency is concerned, this dinner never happened. You had too much wine. You told your in-laws scary stories about ghosts you don’t really believe in. And then you went home.”

He nodded, a jerky, terrified motion. “Right. Yes. I… understand.”

No, he didn’t. Not really.

But he understood enough to be afraid.

I turned toward the foyer.

No one tried to stop me. For the first time in my life, my parents didn’t insist on hugging me goodbye, didn’t ask when we were going to “really talk.” They sat rooted in place, as if any sudden movement might draw my attention the way splashing draws a shark.

The November air hit me like a reset when I opened the front door. Cold, crisp, full of distant traffic and a dog barking three houses down. The quiet of suburbia wrapped around me.

And then my world slid into view.

A black SUV with reinforced plating idled at the curb, its running lights glowing like the eyes of something that hunted at night. Minivans and sedans lined the driveways up and down the street, all of them suddenly looking like props on a set.

The rear door of the SUV opened. Two men in dark suits stepped out, scanning the space with the easy, unhurried vigilance of professionals who entirely believe in their ability to kill or be killed in under three seconds.

The taller one inclined his head. “Director,” he said.

I got in.

As the door shut behind me, the sounds of my sister’s house—clinking dishes, muffled voices—cut off like someone had hit mute.

The convoy pulled away from the curb. In the brief gap between the curtains of the dining room window, I saw them all still sitting there, framed by candlelight and shock, small and helpless as children watching a storm roll past the horizon without understanding that they were never the center of it.

For thirty-three years, they had underestimated me.

They finally saw what the rest of the world only whispered about.

Sky-Fall.

 

Part 2

The SUV’s interior smelled like leather, gun oil, and recycled air—home, in other words.

We slid through the suburbs in silence, the low hum of the engine and the occasional crackle of encrypted radio filling the space that might otherwise have demanded conversation. The men in the front seats were technically my subordinates, but they moved with that particular stillness of people who had seen me make decisions they couldn’t unsee.

“Nightshade status,” I asked.

The driver’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. “Wing One reports splash in three minutes, ma’am. Target convoy has hit the choke point.”

“Collateral?”

“Projected nil. We diverted civilian traffic ten minutes ago under the alternate route cover.”

“Good.”

I let my head fall back against the seat, closing my eyes.

For a moment, it was like the last thirty minutes hadn’t happened. There was no dining room, no turkey, no fork punctuating the room like a gunshot. Just the mission briefing that had lit up my secure channel two hours earlier, the red-coded header that had appeared on my screen in the SCIF and changed the trajectory of my evening.

“High-value facilitator,” my operations chief had said, tossing a thin file onto the table in front of me, the paperclip glinting under fluorescent lights. “Alias Bernal. He’s got connections threading through three continents and five terror cells. We’ve confirmed he’ll be in a soft-skinned convoy at this location, this time, tonight.”

“Tonight?” I’d asked, glancing at the clock. “You mean, in about… four hours.”

He’d shrugged. “You did say Thanksgiving with your family was optional.”

It had been a joke. We’d laughed. The sort of grim, brittle humor people in our line of work used to surface our awareness that we were not, in fact, normal.

Then I’d signed the preliminary authorization.

Operations like Nightshade started with my pen and ended with a notification sent to my phone wherever I happened to be. Tonight, that happened to be my sister’s table.

I opened my eyes.

City lights had replaced tidy lawns and identical cul-de-sacs. The SUV slipped into the underbelly of a government building through a side entrance no one without clearance would ever notice.

We parked. The doors opened in choreographed sequence.

The SCIF on the twelfth floor hummed when I stepped inside. Rows of monitors glowed with satellite feeds, maps, columns of data scrolling past in real time. The air-conditioning was set too low, the way it always was in rooms full of expensive hardware and hotter tempers.

“Director on deck,” someone called.

No one stood up or saluted; that wasn’t our style. But backs straightened, voices smoothed, movements sharpened. The room recognized me like a body recognizes its own heartbeat.

“Talk to me,” I said, moving toward the main display.

My operations chief—a compact woman named Ruiz, with dark hair scraped into a knot and eyes that missed nothing—stepped forward.

“We’ve got live feed from Wing One’s lead bird,” she said. “Bernal’s convoy is entering the canyon now. One SUV, one pickup. Four armed in the truck bed, two in the lead vehicle with driver and HVT. They’re right where our asset said they’d be.”

“Verification on the asset?”

“Triple-checked. He’s dirty but scared. That’s our favorite.”

I watched the screen. A grainy, black-and-white view showed a dirt road cutting through a narrow gorge. The convoy’s headlights washed over the ground, turning rocks into glowing smears.

“Civilian traffic?” I asked.

“None within a twenty-kilometer radius. Our people did their job.”

“Time to splash?”

“Seventy seconds.”

I thought about cranberry sauce.

Chloe had spent thirty minutes talking about the shade she’d chosen—“not too bright, it cheapens the table”—while I’d been mentally calculating risk ratios on a drone strike half a world away.

The dissonance was always there, humming under my skin. Tonight it had finally broken the surface.

“Director?” Ruiz prompted.

“I’m here,” I said. “Proceed.”

On the screen, a tiny crosshair slid over the lead SUV.

“Wing One, you are cleared hot,” Ruiz said into her mic.

“Copy, cleared hot,” an accented voice replied through the speakers.

The room inhaled as one.

A burst of light bloomed on the monitor, white-out brightness flaring, then resolving into smoke and scattered heat signatures. The truck behind swerved, tried to reverse, met the second strike coming down like the wrath of a god no one prayed to.

“Assess,” I said.

“No secondary explosions. Looks like we got their hardware in the first impact. No movement from the HVT’s position. Truck bed is… no survivors,” Ruiz reported. Her tone was professional; the tightness around her eyes was not.

“Package?” I asked.

“Confirming.” Fingers flew across keyboards. “Confirmed. Bernal’s biometric chip just went cold. He’s done.”

There was a quiet, collective exhale. The kind you never let yourself indulge in until you are absolutely sure the thing is over.

“Clean up,” I said. “Initiate protocol with local partners. No footage leaks, no chatter. In three hours, we’ll have a plausible accident story ready to feed anyone who asks.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

As the room shifted into its post-op rhythm, I stood in front of the screen a bit longer, watching the ghostly smoke dissipate.

People imagine power as loud. They think it looks like speeches, parades, gold stars on shoulders. In reality, it looks like this: a woman who just left a family dinner giving a thirty-second authorization that changed the trajectory of a continent.

I turned away.

“Director,” Ruiz said, falling into step beside me as I headed toward my office. “Sir… you all right? You left dinner a little earlier than planned.”

She knew where I’d been. The Agency liked to pretend it didn’t have eyes on its own people, but the deeper you went, the more of your life became a series of watched corridors.

“My sister got curious,” I said dryly. “My brother-in-law got terrified.”

“Ah.” Ruiz grimaced in sympathy. “Family.”

“Family,” I echoed. “The original unsecured channel.”

We reached my office. The door closed behind us with a soft click that muted the rest of the floor. My office had a wall of glass that overlooked the Potomac, the river a black ribbon threaded with city lights. The other walls were lined with shelves, not of books—Chloe would’ve loved that irony—but of locked binders and red folders.

I sank into my chair.

“You want us to do anything?” Ruiz asked carefully. “About the… curiosity.”

The question contained a dozen others she didn’t voice. Do we need to monitor them? Move them? Erase them?

I thought of the look on Mark’s face when he’d recognized the sigil on my wrist. It hadn’t been just fear. It had been something almost like betrayal.

“He’s an analyst,” I said finally. “He understands what happens to loose ends.”

Ruiz nodded. “We’ll add a passive flag to their comms. Nothing overt. Just a tripwire if anything travels where it shouldn’t.”

“That’s fine.”

She hesitated. “Director… forgive me, but why did you show him?”

“I didn’t,” I said, sharper than I meant to. I rubbed my thumb over the spot where the ink lay hidden beneath cashmere, phantom heat tingling there. “He saw something he was never meant to see. That’s different.”

For most of my adult life, I’d played the role of ghost willingly. I let my family pity me. I let them talk over me, set me up on dates with men I could never even tell my last name to. I smiled and nodded and pretended it didn’t bother me when my father bragged louder about Mark’s mediocre evaluations than he’d ever acknowledged any of my accomplishments.

“It was easier,” I said quietly, half to myself. “Letting them think I was small.”

“And now?” Ruiz asked.

I thought of the SUV outside my sister’s house, the two worlds parked next to each other like cars in parallel universes.

“Now,” I said, “the fiction has cracked. But the clearance hasn’t. That line still holds.”

Ruiz understood. She always did.

“Understood, ma’am. We’ll keep an eye on the crack.”

She left me alone with the view and the quiet.

I swiveled in my chair and stared out at the black water. My reflection hovered faintly in the glass: dark hair pulled into a low knot, simple sweater, no jewelry. I looked like any mid-level manager in any generic office building.

The mark under my sleeve itched.

I remembered the day I’d gotten it.

It wasn’t in some parlor in a cool part of town, the way Chloe had gotten her dainty script on the inside of her ankle. Mine had been burned into my skin in a clean room deep underground, the air smelling faintly of antiseptic and fear. The man who’d done it had never told me his name, and I’d never asked. When the hawk was finished, he’d met my eyes and said, “Congratulations. You’re now officially erased.”

I hadn’t understood, then, just how literal he meant it.

My old records, university transcripts, job applications, every paper trail from the day I’d been recruited had been quietly rerouted, overwritten, buried. On paper, I worked at the Library of Congress. I had an employee badge. I knew my way around the building well enough to pass as harmless if anyone checked.

But my real job—the one that came with black badges and drones waiting for my command—had no HR file.

I’d chosen that life. I believed in its necessity, even when I hated its cost.

Tonight, for the first time, I’d seen that cost reflected back at me in my family’s eyes.

I shouldn’t have cared.

But somewhere under the layers of training and missions and late-night decisions about who lived and who didn’t, there was still a girl who had once sat at this very table, younger and quieter, desperately wanting someone to ask her a real question.

My secure console chimed softly. A message window popped up, tagged with an internal code only a handful of people had access to.

You good? it read. – C

I smiled despite myself.

C, in this context, wasn’t Chloe. It was Caleb, one of the few people in the building who knew both what I did and why I did it without needing to turn it into legend.

Any casualties? I typed back.

Negative. Clean op. That why you sound weird? he replied.

Family dinner, I wrote. Long story.

He sent back a single emoji: a tiny exploding head.

I huffed a laugh, the tension in my shoulders easing by a fraction.

You ever tell yours? he asked after a moment.

No, I replied. Tonight they saw enough to be scared. That’s all they’re getting.

He sent back: Sometimes fear is safer than the truth.

He wasn’t wrong.

I closed the chat before he could prod further. The restroom mirror on this floor had seen me cry exactly once. I didn’t intend to give it a sequel.

Hours blurred into the low, steady hum of post-op paperwork. Sanitized language, precise coordinates, phrases like mission success and no collateral. Somewhere around three in the morning, I finally shut down my console.

The ride back to my apartment was quiet. The city was mostly asleep, the streets slick with earlier rain, reflecting traffic lights like smeared jewels.

In the darkness of my living room, I stood for a long time without turning on the lights.

On the coffee table, a stack of unopened mail sat in neat, impersonal white. A card from my parents for my last birthday lay propped up against a lamp, the handwritten message inside generic and warm and utterly unaware of who they were writing to.

Happy birthday, sweetheart. We’re so proud of you. You’ll find the right man soon. Love, Mom & Dad.

I’d laughed when I’d opened it. Not because it was funny, but because it was so perfectly them.

I rolled my sleeve up and looked at the mark on my wrist.

Sky-Fall.

Chloe would probably be on the phone with someone right now, processing her outrage. Mark would be staring at the ceiling, replaying the night second by second, wondering if his career had just collided with something too big to survive.

I should have been thinking about Nightshade’s after-action report. Instead, I thought about how my mother had looked when that distorted voice had called me Director.

As if the word itself had rearranged her understanding of the universe.

“Sometimes being underestimated is an advantage,” I murmured to the empty apartment. “Sometimes it’s just lonely.”

Three months later, I would understand exactly which one this was.

 

Part 3

Three months is a long time in my world.

In ninety days, regimes wobble, alliances shift, covert funding dries up and reappears under different names. The map on my wall grew new pins and lost others. Operations with names like Emberline and Glasshouse spun up and burned out. People died. People disappeared. Some of those categories overlapped.

In my personal life, almost nothing changed.

Which is to say: very little existed to change.

The invitations from my family stopped.

At first, my mother sent one more Sunday dinner text. Just a simple line in the family group chat: Dinner here at six? Chloe’s making pot roast.

The three dots appeared under my name for a full ten seconds as I stared at the screen, thumb hovering. Then I locked my phone and tossed it onto the couch.

An hour later, my father texted me privately: You all right, kiddo?

I typed back: Busy with a project. Have a good night.

After that, the group went quiet. No more invitations. No more passive-aggressive comments about my “hermit life.” No more photos of Chloe’s table settings.

I’d have been lying if I said I didn’t notice.

“Adjustment period,” Ruiz said one night, catching the flicker of some emotion I failed to hide. “They’ll rewrite the story in their heads to cope. People always do.”

“How do you think they’re rewriting it?” I asked.

“Best case? You’re some kind of high-ranking bureaucrat they didn’t know about,” she said. “Worst case? You’re exactly what Mark told them you are.”

They are afraid of you was the unspoken end of that sentence.

Fear was safer than curiosity. Fear kept people from poking where they shouldn’t.

Professionally, my life had never been sharper. The Nightshade op had gone down in the cleanest way possible, and the fallout was already being felt in the chatter we monitored. A network that had seemed untouchable six months ago was now bleeding out, its operators stumbling in the dark.

On a Tuesday morning in February, I walked into my office to find Caleb sitting in my chair.

“You know that’s a capital offense,” I said as I shut the door behind me.

“If you’re going to arrest me, can you at least get me a better chair in the cell?” he countered, swinging his legs down and standing up.

His expression, underneath the banter, wasn’t light.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He held out a thin folder.

“You remember Bernal’s supply chains?” he said. “We’ve been tracing back some of his logistics lines, trying to see which of our gray channels he was piggybacking. We cross-referenced with internal procurement to see where any leaks might’ve come from.”

“Let me guess,” I said, taking the folder. “Our own people left the back door open.”

“Worse,” he said. “Someone handed them the key.”

I flipped the folder open.

The report inside was dense, graphs and charts and highlighted sections. One line jumped out like it had been written in blood.

Originating analysis: Logistics Division, Brussels. Liaison: M. Dalton.

I stared at it, the name registering a beat too late. M. Dalton.

My brain filled in the rest automatically.

Mark.

“Is this a mistake?” I asked quietly.

“No,” Caleb said. “We triple-checked. Some of the shipping manifests Bernal’s people used to hide their transfers were initially flagged by our own analysts as ‘low-priority irregularities.’ The notation recommending no further investigation came from Dalton’s terminal.”

I closed the folder.

“That doesn’t make him dirty,” I said. “It makes him sloppy.”

“Agreed,” Caleb said. “If we thought he was knowingly complicit, he’d already be in a black van somewhere. But it does mean he has proximity to channels that were being exploited by people we killed three months ago. And it means anyone looking for weak points is going to look at him hard.”

“And by ‘anyone,’ you mean Internal Oversight, Counterintelligence, and anyone else who likes to justify their budget with a witch hunt,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said. “And here’s where it gets messier.”

He pulled out a second document, laying it on my desk.

It was a summary of a flagged search query from an internal system. The name Sky-Fall appeared three times.

The user ID attached to the queries was one I recognized without needing the key.

It was Mark’s.

My chest went cold.

“When?” I asked.

“First query came five days after Thanksgiving,” Caleb said. “Two more over the next week. The system redacted the results automatically, kicked back a denial notice, and sent a ping to Counterintelligence. Standard protocol for anyone poking around in compartments above their pay grade.”

“Have they talked to him yet?” I asked.

“Not yet,” Caleb said. “They’re poking around the edges. Doing what they do. Which is why I’m here.”

He held my gaze.

“They don’t know your connection to him,” he said. “Not yet. But if they keep digging, they might. Do you want to get ahead of this?”

He didn’t need to spell out the options. My line of work rarely offered many, and they were almost never pretty.

I could let Counterintelligence follow their usual playbook. They’d bring Mark in, make him sweat, dig through every file he’d ever touched, every email he’d ever written. If they decided he was more liability than asset, they’d quietly shove him out the door with a severance package and a nondisclosure agreement thick enough to break a nose.

Or, if someone higher up decided to be extra cautious, they’d make sure he had a more… permanent gag order.

Or I could intervene.

Burn him myself.

Or recruit him.

The idea startled me as soon as it formed. Recruit Mark? The man who got a thrill out of exaggerating his clearance at a dinner table?

But information had value. And so did leverage.

“What do you think?” Caleb asked.

“I think he’s an idiot who got curious about the wrong bedtime story,” I said. “I also think if Internal decides to make an example out of him, it’ll only make more people ask questions about what Sky-Fall is, and I have no interest in becoming an urban legend used in training slides.”

Caleb smiled faintly. “Too late for that.”

I ignored it.

“Set up a meet,” I said. “Off-book. Neutral ground. If I don’t like what I see, we let Internal do what they do. If I think he can be an asset, we pull him into a compartment he’ll never talk his way out of.”

Caleb’s eyebrows rose. “That’s generous.”

“That’s strategic,” I said. “He’s already seen the mark. He already knows enough to be dangerous, even if he doesn’t understand it. We can either let him flail in the dark or give him a very narrow hallway to walk down. With guards at both ends.”

“Got it,” he said. “Any preferences on location?”

“Somewhere we’re not seen together by anyone who knows either of us,” I said. “And somewhere he’ll show up even if he thinks it’s a bad idea.”

Caleb’s lips quirked. “Family has its perks. He’ll show up if you ask.”

I didn’t like that he was right.

That night, I sat at my kitchen table with my personal phone next to my black work device. The contrast between them had never felt so sharp.

I typed out a message.

We need to talk. In person. Tomorrow, seven p.m. 415 K Street parking garage, level three. Come alone.

My thumb hovered over the send button longer than it had any right to.

Then I hit send.

The three dots appeared almost instantly. Then vanished. Then reappeared.

Finally, a reply: Is this… safe?

I considered my answer.

No, I typed. But it’s necessary.

He didn’t respond again.

I spent the next day doing the work I was actually paid for, but everything had a faint echo around the edges, like I was hearing it from down a hallway.

At 6:45 p.m., I stood on level three of the parking garage, the concrete smelling faintly of oil and damp. My footsteps echoed, the sound swallowed quickly by distance. Caleb and two others were stationed out of sight, watching angles, ready to intervene if anything unexpected arrived with Mark.

At 7:02, his sedan pulled onto the level, its engine sounding too loud in the emptiness.

He parked crookedly and sat gripping the steering wheel for a full thirty seconds before finally climbing out.

He looked older than he had at Thanksgiving. Or maybe just smaller, stripped of the swagger a friendly audience gave him. His tie was loose, his hair mussed from where he’d run his hands through it.

“Elena,” he said, voice wobbly. “I… I didn’t know if this was really you.”

“No one else would pick this location,” I said dryly. “Too humid, not enough monogrammed napkins.”

He flinched.

“Right,” he said. “Look, I—I didn’t tell them. I didn’t tell anyone what happened at dinner. I swear. I know I made a mistake… asking about Sky-Fall. I just… I needed to know if my entire life was a joke.”

“That depends on how you define joke,” I said. “You’ve been exaggerating your importance for years. That part is on you.”

Color rose in his cheeks. “I know,” he said. His voice cracked. “I just thought… I was making them proud.”

The admission was so raw I almost stepped back from it.

We stood in the quiet hum of the garage, the city above us rumbling, my hidden team tucked into shadows.

“You poked a system that punishes curiosity, Mark,” I said. “Internal has your search history. They’re circling you.”

“I figured,” he whispered. “I got called in for a ‘routine’ review yesterday. They asked a lot of questions about my access, my contacts. I didn’t mention you.”

“Good,” I said. “You mentioning me would not end well for anyone.”

“I’m not stupid,” he said quickly. “Just… naive.”

“That’s a luxury,” I said. “One most people in our line of work don’t get to keep. You had it because you lived in the shallower end of the pool. Now you’ve taken a step toward the deep end. The water’s colder here.”

He swallowed. “Am I going to be… fired?”

“It depends,” I said. “On whether you can follow instructions very precisely.”

His eyes snapped up. “Instructions… from you?”

“You’re the one who went looking for Sky-Fall,” I said. “Congratulations. You found it.”

He stared at me, fear and something like awe warring in his expression.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“Nothing heroic,” I said. “No fantasies. I want you to go back to work, stay in your lane publicly, and quietly feed me anything that looks like our enemies have been using your division’s channels. No more curiosity for curiosity’s sake. If you see something that makes your stomach drop, you bring it to me through a secure path, not through open systems.”

“You want me to be… an asset,” he said, tasting the word.

“I want you to be useful,” I corrected. “The alternative is you being a liability. We both know how liabilities are handled.”

He paled. “And Internal?”

“I’ll make sure their focus is redirected,” I said. “We have other, juicier leads to give them. Consider it… a trade. Your cooperation in exchange for their boredom.”

He laughed once, a weird, strangled sound. “I used to want the higher clearance,” he said. “Now that I’ve seen what’s up there, I think I liked my PowerPoints.”

“Then act like it,” I said. “Play the part of the plodding analyst. Never reach above your head again. You do that, and you might get to retire with a pension.”

He nodded so fast it almost looked like a tic.

“Elena,” he said as I turned to leave. “Why… why did you choose this? Why not tell them? Your family. Mine.”

I thought of my mother’s face, the way it had gone slack with shock when she’d heard someone call me Director. I thought of my father, suddenly at a loss for stories that topped mine. I thought of Chloe, eyes wide and angry and small.

“Because they need me to be normal,” I said. “And the world needs me to be what I am. I can’t be both.”

“Chloe was… destroyed,” he whispered. “Not because you were dangerous. Because you made me look… small. She couldn’t forgive that.”

My chest tightened, a strange mix of anger and pity knotting there.

“Chloe built her life on a fantasy,” I said. “I’m not responsible for her realizing it was made of cardboard.”

He looked down at his shoes. “She left,” he said softly. “Filed for separation. Says she can’t be married to someone who lied. She meant me, but… you were the lie she was really mad about.”

My stomach dropped, even though I’d known this was coming. The surveillance summaries I’d skimmed had hinted at arguments, slammed doors, a suitcase wheeled down the driveway.

I hadn’t expected to feel quite so responsible.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He gave a broken laugh. “Are you? Really?”

“Yes,” I said. The word surprised me with its weight. “Not sorry for what I am. But sorry for the collateral damage.”

He nodded slowly.

“I’ll do what you asked,” he said. “I’ll send anything relevant through the channel you set up. Just… please… don’t make me disappear.”

“Don’t give me a reason to,” I said.

He got back into his car with all the energy of a marionette whose strings had been cut.

As he drove away, Caleb stepped out from behind a concrete pillar.

“Well,” he said. “That went better than it could have.”

“That’s our bar now? ‘Not catastrophic’?” I asked.

“It’s a living,” he said.

We started toward the stairwell.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

Unknown number.

I answered.

A distorted voice, different from Nightshade’s tech, slid through the line.

“Hello, Sky-Fall,” it said. “Nice little asset you’ve recruited. Shame if someone else were already watching him first.”

The line went dead.

The hair on the back of my neck rose.

“Problem?” Caleb asked sharply.

“We’re not the only ones paying attention to Mark,” I said.

For the first time in a long time, I felt something unfamiliar at the edges of my control.

Someone was playing in my shadows.

 

Part 4

The voice on the phone wasn’t one I recognized.

That should have narrowed the possibilities. In my world, there were only so many people with access to my call sign and the nerve to use it as a greeting.

None of those categories were comforting.

“We’ll trace it,” Caleb said instantly, already tapping into his tablet. “Spoofed, obviously, but they might have slipped somewhere.”

“They didn’t slip,” I said, still staring at the dead screen like it might start speaking again. “They’re careful. That call was to make a point, not a mistake.”

“What point?” Caleb asked. “That they know your codename? Congratulations, they’re in a very exclusive club.”

“And that they’ve been watching Mark,” I said. “Which means they know what he is. And what he isn’t.”

“Meaning?” Ruiz’s voice cut in over our comms as she joined us in the stairwell, having heard enough of the conversation through our shared channel to be concerned.

“Meaning we might not be the only ones looking for leaks in Brussels,” I said. “Someone else might be trying to tug the same thread. And if they get to him before we do…”

“They won’t,” Caleb said. It was bravado, but I appreciated it.

“Whoever it is,” Ruiz said, “they used your codename openly. That narrows it to someone internal. Or someone who thinks they’re untouchable enough to pretend to be.”

Sky-Fall was not a name that traveled outside certain walls. Even most people in the upper echelons of the Agency only knew it as a rumor. A cautionary tale told to remind themselves that there were rooms they’d never get to see.

“Internal rogue?” Caleb suggested. “Someone trying to undercut Shadowside?”

“Or an allied service we pissed off,” Ruiz said. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone decided to poke the spider.”

“Whoever it is, they have reach,” I said. “Enough to have eyes on an analyst in Brussels and a Director in D.C. That’s not a freelancer.”

The stairwell echoed around us, concrete and metal lending a hollow, resonant quality to our words.

“So what do we do?” Caleb asked.

“What we always do,” I said. “We pull on the thread and see what unravels.”

We spent the next seventy-two hours digging.

Digging was what my division did best. We traced the call through a series of hops that led nowhere, which was exactly where a professional wanted them to lead. We cross-referenced any recent mentions of Sky-Fall or Shadowside in internal channels. We scraped chatter, both dark and dull. We checked Mark’s travel, his recent contact list, any anomalies in his bank records.

“He’s boring,” Ruiz reported finally, sounding almost offended. “He goes to work, he goes home, he buys mediocre takeout. The most suspicious thing he’s done in the last month is spend ninety dollars on specialty coffee equipment.”

“Crime against taste,” Caleb muttered.

“What about external eyes on him?” I asked. “Any tails, electronic or physical?”

“Negative on traces we can see,” Ruiz said. “But if whoever called you is as good as they think they are, they won’t be easy to spot.”

I stared at the cascade of data on the screen.

“Maybe we’re looking at this wrong,” I said slowly. “Maybe Mark isn’t the target. Maybe he’s bait.”

Caleb frowned. “Bait for who? You?”

I didn’t answer.

In the absence of solid leads, my brain started filling in the gaps with names from my past.

Targets who’d survived longer than they should have. Assets who’d gone quiet. Operations that had gone sideways in ways that had never sat right.

One name kept surfacing. A ghost in my own machine.

Warden.

That wasn’t his real name, obviously. It was a callsign he’d acquired over a decade of making other people’s prisons for them. Renditions. Detention black sites. He’d run an arm of Shadowside before I stepped into my role.

He had not enjoyed being replaced.

“We think he’s dead,” Ruiz said when I finally voiced it out loud. “Remember? The convoy outside Tripoli. The explosion.”

“We think he was in that convoy,” I said. “We never got DNA confirmation. Just a lot of charred wreckage and wishful thinking.”

“You’re saying you think Warden might be alive and spying on one of our mid-level analysts as a way to get to you,” Caleb said, summing it up.

“I’m saying if I were Warden, and I’d been quietly cut loose by the very machine I’d helped build, I might be interested in poking the one person in the organization whose existence makes me obsolete,” I said.

“Friendly guy,” Caleb said.

“That sounds… personal,” Ruiz observed.

“It would be,” I said. “Warden didn’t like that I kept records of every detention we ran. He thought transparency, even inside a locked box, was weakness. I thought having some kind of log was the only thing keeping us human.”

“You were the conscience,” Caleb said.

“No,” I said. “I was the ledger. Conscience is optional. Accountability is not.”

If Warden was alive, he’d see me as both traitor and competition.

And he’d know my weak spots.

“Family,” I said out loud.

Ruiz’s eyes narrowed. “You think he’d go after them?”

“If he wanted my attention, yes,” I said. “If he wanted to hurt me, absolutely.”

“Your family is still unflagged in our system,” she said. “By your choice. We don’t monitor them heavily. That was the deal you made to take the mark. You keep them out of it, we keep them off the grid.”

“Time to cheat on that deal,” I said.

“Surveillance package?” she asked.

“Full but discreet,” I said. “Remote cameras on the street, signal monitoring, no physical tails unless you see a direct threat. If anyone else touches them, I want to know before they do.”

She nodded. “We’ll make it happen.”

The weight of the decision settled onto my shoulders. I had spent years keeping my family separate from my work, like two magnets held just far enough apart that their fields never snapped together.

Now I was bringing them into the same box.

Caleb watched my face.

“You okay?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “But being okay was never part of the job description.”

As the team spun into motion, I sat alone in my office and stared at a photo I kept in my bottom drawer. It was one of the few personal items I allowed myself in this space.

Four people at a beach. My parents younger, my father without the paunch, my mother without the gray in her hair. Chloe in a swimsuit, teenage and furious that the wind was messing up her hair. Me, thirteen, holding a book even as the waves lapped at my feet.

We looked normal.

We’d never been, of course. Even then, the seeds of who I would become were already there, buried under sand and sunburn and the nagging sense that I didn’t quite fit the way everyone else seemed to think I should.

My phone buzzed.

Surveillance feed, flagged as urgent.

I tapped the screen.

A still image filled it: the front of my parents’ house. A car parked at the curb that I didn’t recognize. A man standing on the porch, his back to the camera, head tilted in a way that suggested he was listening for more than just footsteps.

The algorithm had flagged him because of gait, build, and a dozen other subtle markers.

“Who is he?” I asked over the line.

“Not one of ours,” Ruiz said. “Facial recognition is still running. He knocked, talked to your parents for approximately four minutes, then left. No sign of forced entry. No raised voices.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“We’re scrubbing the audio from the street mics,” she said. “Stand by.”

The seconds between then and the next update stretched thin.

Finally: “We got most of it. He introduced himself as a security consultant doing a ‘routine neighborhood safety survey.’ Asked some pointed questions about who lived in the house, how often you visit, whether your brother-in-law still comes by.”

My grip on the phone tightened.

“He asked about Mark,” I said.

“Yeah,” Ruiz said. “Your mom mentioned that he and your sister are… ‘taking a break,’ her words. The guy asked how often he stopped by alone. She said not much anymore. He left a card.”

“What’s on the card?” I asked.

“A generic company name. Atlas Strategic. Address is a front. We already checked. The number routes through three levels of spoofing.”

“So not the kind of security consultant that sells home alarms,” Caleb said grimly.

“No,” I said. “The kind that evaluates vulnerabilities.”

“They don’t know what you are,” Ruiz said gently. “To them, this was just a polite stranger asking nosey questions.”

“To him, it was recon,” I said.

Facial recognition pinged.

A file slid onto my screen.

The man on the porch looked back at me. Early forties, blandly handsome in a forgettable way. The kind of face you stop seeing two seconds after you pass it on the street. The name under his photo was one of several aliases.

But the codename attached to his record was the one that made my stomach go cold.

Warden.

“So much for Tripoli,” Caleb muttered.

“He’s alive,” I said.

“And he’s standing on your parents’ porch,” Ruiz added.

For the first time in my career, I felt something that wasn’t just professional alarm.

I felt rage.

Warden had always believed in pressure. He liked to find the softest part of any system and push until something broke. It hadn’t occurred to him back when we worked together that I had no family listed anywhere. I’d kept them far away, average and uninteresting, their names carefully absent from my files.

Now he’d found them anyway.

“What’s his play?” Caleb asked. “He couldn’t have done more than ask questions and get some cookies.”

“He’s telling me he can touch them,” I said. “He wouldn’t risk a direct move yet. Not until he knows how far I’m willing to go.”

“How far are you?” Ruiz asked quietly.

I didn’t hesitate.

“As far as I have to,” I said.

We stepped up the surveillance. Additional cameras, deeper signal monitoring, behavior pattern analysis for everyone within a three-house radius. My parents went about their lives, blissfully unaware that a quiet net had settled over their cul-de-sac.

Chloe moved into a small apartment downtown. Mark stayed in Brussels, buried in spreadsheets and his growing anxiety.

For a week, nothing else happened.

Then, on a gray Saturday afternoon, as I was leaving the SCIF, my phone vibrated with an alert that made every nerve in my body go taut.

Emergency flag. Domestic. High priority.

The feed that popped up was from a camera we hadn’t installed.

It was from Mark’s apartment building.

Fire alarms blared in the background. Smoke curled along the ceiling of the hallway outside his door. His neighbors were fleeing down the stairs, faces tight with fear.

Mark’s door was open.

Inside, a man stood with his back to the camera, his posture eerily familiar. He was watching Mark, who knelt on the floor with his hands laced behind his head.

My brain registered details faster than my conscious thoughts: the angle of the man’s shoulders, the way he held his weight on the balls of his feet, the slight tilt of his head.

Warden.

He’d escalated.

The audio kicked in, cutting through the wail of the alarms.

“—don’t misunderstand me, Mr. Dalton,” Warden was saying, his tone almost bored. “If I wanted you dead, you would be. If I wanted this building to come down, it already would have. This is a conversation. The fire is just… atmosphere.”

“I’m not… I don’t…” Mark stammered.

“I know what you are,” Warden said. “A man who just discovered he’s been living in the shadow of something much bigger than him. A man who’s realized his wife loved an illusion, and his sister-in-law is the monster under the bed.”

He bent, picked something up off the table.

It was a photo. I couldn’t see of what.

“You know what fascinates me about your little family?” he continued. “The power imbalance. Your wife married you because she thought you were the important one. The protector. The hero. Turns out the real gravity in that orbit was hiding in plain sight the whole time.”

“Please,” Mark said. “I don’t know anything. I swear. She—Elena—she hasn’t told me anything.”

“I know,” Warden said. “She’s careful. That’s why I’m interested. She’s also sentimental. That’s why I’m confident she’ll come if I pull the right strings.”

He straightened, finally turning toward the hallway.

Toward our camera.

For one second, his eyes met the lens.

Then he smiled and crushed it in his hand.

The feed went dark.

“How the hell did he know about that camera?” Caleb demanded.

“He didn’t,” I said. “He assumed we were watching everything. He was right.”

“Do we have a location on the building?” Ruiz asked.

“Brussels,” I said. “But by the time we get there, they’ll be gone. The fire is a distraction and a smokescreen. Literally.”

“What does he want?” Caleb asked.

I stared at the black screen.

“Me,” I said.

The next message came an hour later.

It appeared on my secure console, bypassing three layers of encryption in a way that should have been impossible.

A single line:

Family dinner. Tomorrow, seven p.m. Your parents’ house. Come alone, or I start breaking things you care about. – W

Attached was a picture.

My parents at their kitchen table, my mother mid-laugh, my father reaching for the salt. Chloe, tense but present, sitting at the end of the table where I used to sit.

The timestamp was fifteen minutes old.

I closed my eyes.

Warden had always understood symbolism.

He wanted me at that table.

He wanted to rewrite the last dinner we’d had there, but this time with him at the head.

“Trap,” Caleb said. “Obvious trap.”

“Of course,” I said.

“So we don’t go,” Ruiz said. “We can’t risk you in a confined, uncontrolled environment. We extract your family, neutralize Warden on our terms.”

“How?” I asked. “He’ll be watching. Any sign of an approach, he’ll put a bullet in my mother’s head before your team is through the door.”

Silence.

“We have contingency plans for hostage situations,” Ruiz said. “We can—”

“Not ones where the hostage-taker knows our playbook as well as we do,” I cut in. “He wrote half the chapters.”

They knew I was right.

Warden had built some of the procedures they would be trying to use against him. He’d anticipate angles they didn’t even know they had.

“I go,” I said.

“No,” Ruiz said instantly. “Absolutely not.”

“This isn’t a vote,” I said.

“With respect, Director, it is when your death leaves a vacuum at the top of an entire clandestine infrastructure,” she snapped. “You keep the lights on for operations we can’t afford to see blackout. You can’t just…” She gestured helplessly at the screen.

“Walk into a lion’s den,” Caleb finished.

“If I don’t go,” I said, “he kills them. Probably in ways designed to haunt me. Then he escalates. Starts picking off assets, operations, anyone he can tie to Sky-Fall. He doesn’t want to destroy the Agency. He wants to humiliate it. And me.”

“Even more reason not to give him what he wants,” Caleb said.

“I won’t be going in blind,” I said. “We blanket the neighborhood. Drones, surveillance, containment teams at the perimeter. Nothing moves without us seeing it. But inside that house, it’s just him and me.”

“And your very squishy, very mortal family,” Ruiz said.

“Yes,” I said. “Them too.”

“This is insane,” she muttered.

“This is work,” I replied.

That night, alone in my apartment, I took out the photo from the beach again.

“What would you have done?” I asked my younger self.

She didn’t answer, obviously. But I remembered how that girl had felt, standing with her toes in the surf, watching the horizon and knowing without words that the world was bigger and darker and stranger than the adults around her wanted to admit.

She would have walked into the dark.

So would I.

I slept for three hours, dreamed of hawks diving through storms.

The next day, we built a plan.

It was ugly, risky, full of contingencies we all knew might fail. But it was the best we could do with the time we had.

At 6:52 p.m., I stood at the end of my parents’ street, the winter air cold enough to bite through my coat. The sky was a flat, iron gray, the kind that made the whole world feel like it was holding its breath.

“Perimeter in place,” Ruiz said in my earpiece. “Drones are up. No movement beyond expected residential traffic. Your family’s devices are all inside the house. No other unexpected signals.”

“Any sign of Warden?” I asked.

“Nothing conclusive,” she said. “At least nothing we can see from out here.”

“Which means he’s already where he wants to be,” Caleb added.

I started walking.

Each step toward the house felt like a countdown.

Five: the neighbor’s dog barking at nothing.

Four: the flicker of a television through a living room window.

Three: the smell of someone’s dinner—a different family, a different world.

Two: the crunch of gravel under my shoes.

One: my hand on the front doorknob.

I didn’t knock.

I walked in.

 

Part 5

The house smelled like my childhood.

Roast, spices, the faint lemon of my mother’s cleaning products. Underneath it all, a thread of something else: gun oil, fresh and metallic.

“Elena?” my mother called from the dining room. “Is that you?”

Her voice sounded normal. That scared me more than if she’d been screaming.

“Hi, Mom,” I said as I stepped into the doorway.

My parents were seated at the table. My father at the head, my mother to his right. Chloe sat where she’d sat at the last disastrous dinner, hands knotted in her lap.

Across from her, in my usual chair, sat Warden.

He looked… ordinary.

Khakis, a button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up. No visible weapons, no overt menace. He could have been a neighbor dropping by. A coworker. A friend.

Only his eyes gave him away. They were shark eyes. Flat. Appraising.

“Elena,” my father said slowly. “This is… Mister Warren. He says he works with you.”

Of course he’d chosen a name close enough to his codename to amuse himself.

Warden smiled, small and polite.

“Good to see you again in a more… domestic setting,” he said.

I didn’t sit.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I said.

“And yet,” he said, spreading his hands slightly, “here we all are. Sit down, Sky-Fall. Let’s be civilized.”

My mother flinched at the word. “He keeps calling you that,” she said, confusion and fear knotting her voice. “What is… what does that mean?”

“Don’t worry about it, Mom,” I said, eyes on Warden. “It’s a work thing.”

“You do a lot of ‘work things’ these days,” Chloe muttered, her tone brittle. “Would’ve been nice if you’d mentioned you were actually important, instead of letting me parade Mark around like some…”

She cut herself off.

Warden chuckled.

“I have to say,” he said, “meeting the supporting cast really rounds out the picture. The insecure sister. The oblivious parents. The brother-in-law who thought his clearance meant something.”

I forced myself to sit, if only because standing made it clear how close I was to bolting across the table at him.

“What do you want?” I asked.

He tilted his head, studying me like a scientist examining an interesting specimen.

“When they told me you’d taken the chair,” he said, “I laughed. They said you’d be different from me. More… accountable. More humane. I thought they were naïve.”

“If you came here to compliment me, you’re doing a terrible job,” I said.

He smiled. “Oh, I’m not here for that. I’m here to see what I helped create by leaving. To see if the shadow they put in my place is bigger or smaller than mine.”

“If this is about your ego—” I started.

“This is about control,” he cut in, and suddenly the polite veneer fell away, revealing the steel underneath. “You took my tools and sharpened them. You wrote logs. You signed authorizations with tidy little signatures that kept the blood neat. You made the machine more efficient. And then you pretended you could live with your family in a little box marked ‘normal.’”

He gestured around the room.

“Look at them,” he said. “They had no idea what you were. You thought that protected them. But all it did was make them blind.”

My father’s jaw clenched. “Young man,” he said, the phrase sounding foreign in his mouth, “I don’t know who you think you are, but you don’t come into my house and—”

Warden looked at him.

Just looked.

My father’s voice faltered and died.

“Who I am,” Warden said, “is the man who built the cages your daughter fills. Who made the decisions before she learned how. Who knows every oversight, every weakness, every little place where a good, obedient cog like her can be broken.”

He glanced at me.

“Tell them what you do, Elena,” he said. “Tell them about Nightshade. About the men you killed while you were sitting at this very table, critiquing the turkey.”

My mother’s eyes flew to mine, wide and wet.

“Elena?” she whispered.

I could have lied.

I could have said it was classified. I could have said he was insane. I could have said a thousand things.

Instead, I said, “He wants to hurt you to hurt me. That’s all this is.”

“Is it true?” Chloe demanded. “Were you… were you doing some kind of… strike… while we were laughing at you?”

Her voice cracked on the last word.

“Yes,” I said.

The room tilted, the floor seeming to slide a fraction of an inch under our feet.

“You see?” Warden said softly. “She keeps records when it suits her. Just not of the parts that might make you stop loving her.”

“You think I care what you think?” I asked him. My voice was steady. I was grateful for that. “You came into my parents’ home to give a monologue. We both know that’s not your style. What are you really after?”

He leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers.

“I want to show you something,” he said. “Then I want to give you a choice.”

He reached into his pocket.

Every muscle in my body tensed. Across the street, I knew Ruiz’s finger would be hovering near a trigger, a dozen rifles sighted on this house.

But he didn’t pull out a gun.

He pulled out a small, black device.

A projector.

He set it on the table and tapped it.

The wall across from us lit up with an image.

Footage. Grainy, high-contrast.

A concrete room, bare except for a chair in the center. A man sat in it, hands bound, head drooping. His face was swollen, bruised. Blood had dried under his nose.

“Recognize him?” Warden asked.

My stomach roiled. The man was one of ours. An asset who had gone missing six months earlier. We’d assumed he’d been compromised by the people he’d been infiltrating.

“Ali Reza,” I said. “He was working a cell in—”

“I know where he was working,” Warden said. “Because he was working for me, too. I built the system that handled him long before you started signing off on the updates. When you decided to tighten oversight, you cut funding to one of my side channels. He got… stranded.”

He tapped the device again.

The footage moved. Someone stepped into frame.

Me.

Younger, hair longer, shoulders tenser. I walked around the chair, looked at Ali, then turned away.

The audio was faint but clear enough.

“Terminate,” I said. “Asset compromised. No retrieval.”

The footage cut.

The wall went blank.

My mother made a small, broken sound.

“You cut him loose,” Warden said. “You told yourself it was cleaner than pulling him out. Cheaper than risking a team. You weighed his life against the operation and decided the numbers didn’t justify the rescue.”

He leaned forward.

“I agree with you,” he said. “That’s what makes this so delicious. You and I aren’t different, Elena. We just take our sins into different rooms.”

“I made a call based on the information I had,” I said. My own voice sounded distant in my ears. “If I’d known—”

“If you’d known he was still alive, screaming in a basement I owned?” Warden asked. “You would have written a longer entry in your log?”

“You recorded this to use it later,” I said. “Which means you anticipated someone like me sitting in my chair. You built your own insurance policy.”

“Of course I did,” he said. “I knew one day someone would try to sand down the sharp edges. To pretend the machine could be kinder, more ethical. I wanted proof that when the time came, they’d choose the same cold calculations I did.”

He spread his hands.

“Here you are.”

“What is this choice you think you’re giving me?” I asked.

He smiled, slow and cruel.

“You can walk away,” he said. “Leave this house. Go back to your office. Keep your family in the dark. Let them live with the vague unease that maybe their daughter is a monster, but not know the details.”

“Or?” I asked.

“Or I send them everything,” he said. “The footage. The logs. The authorizations. Every decision you’ve ever made that got someone killed. I project your sins onto their walls until they drown in them.”

My mother whispered, “Please, stop,” but he talked over her.

“You can try to stop me,” he said. “Have your people outside blow this place to splinters. Shoot me. Drag me away. But I’ve got deadman’s switches, Elena. You know I do. You trained under me. You know how I think.”

He was right.

If we killed him outright, his contingency plans would likely trigger. Data drops. Timed releases. All the careful compartmentalization I’d built could be torn open.

He wanted me paralyzed.

He underestimated me.

“There’s a third option,” I said.

He snorted. “There rarely is.”

“You die,” I said. “And nothing gets released.”

“Ah,” he said. “So naive. I knew you’d clung to some illusions, but really—”

“I didn’t say I killed you,” I said.

His eyes narrowed.

I stood up slowly.

Out on the street, I knew my team was on hair-trigger.

“Mom. Dad. Chloe,” I said, forcing my voice to stay calm. “I need you to listen to me very carefully.”

“Elena,” my father said, his face pale. “What is happening?”

“An old colleague of mine,” I said, not taking my eyes off Warden. “He’s trying to punish me for doing my job better than he did.”

“Better?” Warden scoffed. “More… thoroughly, perhaps.”

“Shut up,” I said.

He did, more out of curiosity than obedience.

“You raised me to follow rules,” I said to my parents. “To be good. To do the right thing, even when it was hard. I took that into a world where the rules are different. Where sometimes the right thing looks like the wrong thing from the outside.”

“This doesn’t look right from any angle,” Chloe muttered.

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t. And I won’t insult you by pretending it does.”

My mother’s hand trembled on the table.

“You… you kill people,” she said.

“Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes I authorize missions that stop very bad people from killing a lot more. Sometimes I make choices that keep the worst things you can imagine from happening in places you’ll never have to see.”

“And sometimes you let people die,” Warden added sweetly. “Don’t forget that part.”

“Yes,” I said. “Sometimes I let people die. Or I choose to spend resources elsewhere. Or I decide that one life is not worth the lives it might cost to save it.”

My father’s eyes burned into mine.

“How do you live with that?” he asked.

“Badly,” I said. “But I live with it so you don’t have to.”

The room felt like it was shrinking.

“The difference between me and him,” I said, nodding toward Warden, “is that I remember their names.”

He rolled his eyes. “Ghosts are ghosts. They don’t care if you file them alphabetically.”

“No,” I said. “But I do.”

I looked at my family.

“I can’t let him weaponize the worst moments of my career against you,” I said. “You don’t deserve that. And he doesn’t deserve the satisfaction.”

“What are you going to do?” Chloe whispered.

I smiled, humorless.

“What I do best,” I said. “Rewrite the story.”

I turned to Warden.

“You want to show them who I am?” I asked. “Fine. Let’s give them context.”

I raised my hand.

He tensed, ready to reach for the weapons I knew he had hidden, even if I couldn’t see them.

But I wasn’t signaling my team outside.

I was activating the device in my ear.

“Now,” I said.

The lights went out.

Total darkness slammed into the room.

My family gasped. A chair scraped. Warden cursed softly.

Outside, the power grid on the entire block had just been rerouted. Our doing, not his. We’d slipped it into place an hour earlier under the guise of a routine maintenance alert.

In the dark, my world lit up.

Thermal overlays flickered in my contacts, painting the room in shades of heat. Warden glowed like a red phantom surrounded by cooler shapes that were my parents and Chloe.

He moved, fast, knocking his chair back and pivoting toward where he thought the biggest threat was.

Me.

He was right.

He was also slow.

I dove sideways as he fired. The sound was deafening in the enclosed space. Chloe screamed. My mother sobbed. My father cursed, the old word torn from him like a piece of cloth.

The bullet hit the wall where my head had been.

“Do not move!” I snapped at my family.

It wasn’t a request.

They froze.

Warden fired again, but he’d lost his advantage. He didn’t see the world the way I did right now. To him, this was blind chaos. To me, it was a map.

I threw myself forward, grabbed the edge of the table, flipped it hard. It crashed over, plates shattering, cutlery clattering. It gave my family a barrier, at least.

Warden sprang backward, silhouette flaring.

“You’re making this very dramatic,” he said, breathing harder. “I approve.”

“Always happy to entertain,” I said.

Outside, Ruiz’s voice was in my ear. “We’ve cut external feeds. No signals in or out. His deadman channels just went dark. He’ll notice.”

“He already has,” I said as Warden snarled, checking his phone and finding it dead.

“You think you can box me in?” he shouted. “I wrote these playbooks!”

“Yeah,” I said, circling. “But I edited them.”

I hit the switch on my belt.

A second wave of tech snapped on.

The device in the middle of the table—the projector he’d brought—lit up again, but this time it wasn’t playing his footage. It was projecting a signal jammer at higher intensity, aimed directly at the device in his pocket.

He hissed as his phone sparked and died.

“You bitch,” he spat.

“Accurate,” I said. “But effective.”

In the darkness, he lunged.

We collided near the sideboard, his shoulder slamming into mine. The thermal overlay went skewed for a second as my head snapped back. We grappled, a messy, brutal tangle. He was stronger. I was faster.

I drove my elbow into his ribs. He grunted. His hand went for my throat. I twisted, brought my knee up, felt it connect with something soft.

He dropped the gun.

It hit the floor near my father’s chair, skidding.

My father, who had been quietly frozen in fear, stared at it.

Our eyes met through the ghostly overlay.

“Don’t,” I said.

He didn’t.

Instead, he kicked it.

Hard.

The gun slid across the room, out of Warden’s reach, disappearing under the fallen table.

For a heartbeat, pride bloomed in my chest.

Then Warden slammed me into the wall, breath punching from my lungs. His hand went to his back, drawing a second gun from a holster I hadn’t seen under his shirt.

“Stop!” my mother screamed.

He aimed—not at me.

At her.

I didn’t think.

I moved.

My body hit him at an angle, throwing his aim off as he fired. The bullet grazed my arm, pain blazing. The shot went wide, splintering a cabinet.

We crashed to the floor.

His gun skittered away.

Outside, I heard something that sounded like thunder.

“Perimeter breach,” Ruiz snapped. “We’ve got movement—”

Her words cut off as the windows shattered inward.

No.

Not his people.

Mine.

Flashbangs exploded in white blossoms, even through my filters. My family shrieked, hands flying to their eyes, ears.

I covered my face.

When the ringing ebbed, I heard boots. Commands. The flat, efficient sounds of my world at work.

“Hands where we can see them!” someone shouted.

My vision cleared.

I looked up to see half a dozen of my operators in the room, rifles trained on Warden, who lay on his back, chest heaving, blood on his lip.

He looked at me and laughed, breathless.

“Cheater,” he said.

“I learned from the best,” I said.

For a moment, everything held.

Then he moved in a way that was wrong, his hand going for his neck.

“No!” I shouted, lunging.

Too late.

He bit down on something.

His body jerked once, then went still.

“Medical!” Ruiz yelled, even as she knew.

I knelt beside him, fingers on his neck, feeling for a pulse I already knew wasn’t there.

Nothing.

“Suicide capsule,” Caleb said grimly from the doorway. “Old-school.”

I exhaled slowly, anger and adrenaline burning off in equal measure.

The crisis was over.

But the damage was not.

My mother was sobbing. My father sat slumped, his eyes open but unfocused. Chloe stared at me like she was seeing me for the first time and didn’t like what she saw.

An operator moved toward them, hands out. “We need to escort you outside, ma’am, sir—”

“Don’t touch them,” I said.

The operator froze.

“Director,” he said carefully, “we have protocols—”

“I know,” I said. “I’ll handle this.”

He nodded, pulled back, started directing his team to secure the scene instead.

I turned to my family.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. But it was all I had that was true.

My mother wiped at her face, fingers shaking.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

“I’m your daughter,” I said.

“You say that like it’s incidental,” Chloe said. Her voice was raw. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to sit here and realize a complete stranger has been living in your family photos?”

“I know exactly what it’s like,” I said quietly. “I’ve felt that way for years.”

“Don’t you dare make this about you,” she snapped.

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m telling you that the distance you feel right now isn’t new to me. I’ve been living with it since I took this job.”

My father finally spoke.

“You killed people,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“You kept it from us.”

“Yes.”

He stared at the table, now a disaster zone of shattered china and spilled food.

“I used to get angry when you didn’t call,” he said slowly. “Thought you were being ungrateful. Thought you didn’t care.”

“I couldn’t call,” I said. “Not when I was in certain places. Not when I was under certain names.”

He nodded vaguely, as if he’d suspected some of that but never let himself fully believe it.

“I don’t know how to reconcile the girl who cried when her hamster died with the woman who just…” He gestured vaguely at the room, at the body on the floor.

“I’m both,” I said. “That’s the problem.”

Chloe laughed, a short, harsh sound.

“You think this makes you the hero,” she said. “You think we were all so shallow, so obsessed with appearances, and you were the martyr doing the real work in the shadows.”

“No,” I said. “I think I made choices you couldn’t have made, so you didn’t have to. That doesn’t make me better. It just makes me… something else.”

“You’ve ruined everything,” she said, tears finally spilling over. “My marriage. Our family. You walked in here like a bomb and detonated.”

“Your marriage broke because it was built on lies,” I said, more gently than she probably deserved. “Mostly his. Some yours. A few of mine. That would have happened whether I showed up in a black SUV or not.”

She looked away.

“I’m going to have to put you all under some very inconvenient security protocols,” I said. “At least for a while. You’ll be monitored. Your travel will be restricted. You’ll have… minder agents. Quiet ones. You’ll hate it.”

My mother sniffled. “What happens if we say no?”

“You can’t,” I said. “Not anymore. You’ve been touched by something that won’t let go just because you want it to.”

“So we’re… prisoners,” my father said.

“Protected,” I said.

“Same thing,” Chloe muttered.

“Sometimes,” I admitted.

We sat in a strange, bleak silence while my team worked around us, collecting evidence, securing Warden’s body, patching up the physical wounds.

My arm throbbed dully where the bullet had grazed me. A medic insisted on bandaging it.

“You’re lucky,” she said. “Half an inch lower, and you’d be signing Nightshade authorizations left-handed from now on.”

“Don’t tempt me,” I said.

Eventually, my parents were escorted, gently but firmly, to a waiting vehicle. They’d be taken to a secure debriefing site, given the sanitized version of what had just happened, offered counseling. Their lives would never go back to what they’d been.

Chloe lingered.

“Are you happy now?” she asked.

I blinked. “What?”

“You spent your whole life letting us think you were… less,” she said. “Now we know you’re more. Does that feel good?”

I thought of Warden’s face as he died. I thought of Ali Reza in the chair. I thought of Bernal’s convoy disappearing in a flare of white.

“No,” I said. “It feels necessary.”

“Do you ever… regret it?” she asked.

“Every day,” I said. “And also not at all.”

She shook her head, baffled. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s the only way it does,” I said.

She studied me for a long moment.

“I don’t know how to be your sister anymore,” she said.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t know how to be your sister either. Maybe we start by admitting that and seeing if there’s something else we can be.”

She didn’t answer.

But when she walked past me to leave, she hesitated.

Then she put her hand, briefly, on my uninjured arm.

“Thank you,” she said, so quietly I almost missed it. “For not letting him hurt them.”

Them.

Not us.

But it was something.

After they were gone, the house felt hollow.

Caleb walked up beside me, hands in his pockets.

“You know,” he said, “most people try to keep their work and home lives separate.”

“I gave it my best shot,” I said.

“Internal is going to have a field day with this,” he said. “Dead rogue operator, compromised civilians, the Director personally engaged in a close-quarters fight in a suburban dining room. It’s going to make one hell of a report.”

“Let them write it,” I said. “I’ll write mine.”

He nodded toward my bandaged arm.

“How are you?” he asked.

“That’s a very complicated question,” I said. “Professionally, I neutralized a significant threat. Personally…”

“Messy,” he supplied.

“Very,” I agreed.

We walked outside together.

The street was full of unmarked vehicles, disguised as delivery trucks and utility vans. Neighbors watched from behind curtains, their stories already rewriting this into something they could talk about at barbecues.

“He had a heart attack,” one would say. “The ambulance was just very… heavily armed.”

“A gas line issue,” another would insist. “I heard them mention a leak.”

No one would say: “A ghost fought another ghost in that dining room, and one of them didn’t walk out.”

Weeks later, in a conference room buried three floors below my office, I sat across from Internal Oversight.

They asked all their careful questions. I gave all my careful answers. They frowned at the parts they didn’t like and sighed at the parts they couldn’t change.

In the end, they filed their report.

Contingencies recommended. Systems updated. Lessons learned.

Sky-Fall to remain in position.

Afterward, alone in my office, I opened my private ledger.

Not the official logs. My own.

I wrote:

Warden – neutralized. Cause of death: self-termination. Collateral: emotional; significant. Family status: protected but altered.

Under that, in smaller letters, I added:

Ali Reza – not forgotten.

Three months after the night in the dining room, I visited my parents in the secure community they’d been relocated to “for their safety.” It looked like any other quiet neighborhood. The difference was in the fences you couldn’t see and the eyes you never quite noticed.

My mother hugged me. My father shook my hand, then pulled me into something that could almost be called an embrace.

We didn’t talk about Warden.

We didn’t talk about Ali Reza.

We talked about the weather. About a book club my mother had joined. About my father’s new hobby of trying—and failing—to grow tomatoes in pots.

Normal things.

On my way out, my father stopped me at the door.

“You always were stubborn,” he said. “I thought it was about small things. Dessert. Curfew.”

“Turns out it scaled,” I said.

He smiled faintly.

“I don’t like what you do,” he said. “I don’t like that you have to do it. But… I understand a little more now why you couldn’t sit at that table and let your sister’s stories be the biggest ones.”

“It’s not about size,” I said. “It’s about importance.”

“To who?” he asked.

“To everyone who never knows my name,” I said.

He nodded, as if that made a kind of sense.

“Come back next week,” he said. “Your mother wants to try a new recipe. She promises not to overcook the turkey this time.”

“I can’t promise I won’t have to step out for a call,” I said.

He shrugged. “Just… turn off the speakerphone.”

I laughed.

“I’ll try,” I said.

As I walked back to the waiting car, my secure phone buzzed.

New operation. New name. New coordinates.

The world didn’t stop just because my personal life had gotten complicated.

In the backseat of the SUV, as the driver pulled away, I rolled up my sleeve.

The hawk on my wrist stared back at me, forever in free fall, forever diving into the storm.

“My husband works for the CIA,” I imagined Chloe saying at some future dinner, to someone new, trying on the old story out of habit.

Maybe she’d say it with a different tone.

Maybe she wouldn’t say it at all.

Either way, there would be someone somewhere, holding a phone, waiting for my authorization.

I tapped the screen.

“Director,” a voice said. “We’re green across the board. Awaiting your go.”

I looked out the window at a park where a child was chasing a dog, laughing.

“Proceed,” I said. “And keep it clean.”

As the line clicked over and the machine I’d helped build spun back into motion, I thought about the girl on the beach with the book.

She’d wanted to be the one who knew the real story, not the one who believed the comforting lies.

She’d gotten her wish.

Sometimes, being underestimated is a shield. Sometimes, it’s a cage.

I had stepped out of mine.

The world hadn’t become safer or simpler because of it.

But at least now, when my sister thought about heroes, she’d know they didn’t all look like the posters on her wall.

Some of them looked like the quiet girl in the corner, rolling her sleeves down over a mark no one was supposed to see.

Sky-Fall.

That was me.

And as long as there were storms on the horizon, I would keep diving.

THE END!

Disclaimer: Our stories are inspired by real-life events but are carefully rewritten for entertainment. Any resemblance to actual people or situations is purely coincidental.