Two years earlier.
Baltic Sea. Unknown Coordinates.The facility wasn't on any map. The kind of place built by men with unlimited funds, untraceable budgets, and no conscience.
Concrete. Salt. Iron. Electric hum.
They called it The Mooring — an old Soviet naval bunker refitted by Western intelligence after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hidden from satellites by engineered cloud cover.Perfect for making people disappear.
Her name was Ella Mercer.
Twenty-three. Biochemist. Codebreaker. And Asher's little sister.
She had been brilliant once. Before the abduction. Before they took her.
Why her?
Because she broke something she wasn't supposed to — an encryption backdoor in the World Monetary Network.She didn't even know what she was doing at first. A curiosity project. A grad school thesis gone too right. And when the data started pouring in, she tried to publish it.
Two days later, The Wolves dragged her out of her Geneva apartment.
Now, she sat in the freezing dark, wrapped in her own thin arms, coughing blood every third hour.Not from disease.From interrogation.
They wanted her to finish the job.To help them rebuild the broken code.To make it stronger, invisible again.
But Ella?
She refused. Every. Single. Time.
Asher didn't know where they'd taken her at first. His intel contacts went dark. His old handlers lied. His friends started disappearing. Even his criminal allies abandoned him — terrified of Strand's reach.
Until Valeria appeared.
Elegant. Deadly. Holding an old photograph of Ella — bruised, alive, just enough hope in her eyes to shatter a man's spine.
"Help us catch Damien Voss," Valeria had purred, "and you'll see her again."
But what Asher hadn't known then… was that Ella didn't need rescuing.
Ella was already planning her own escape.
Inside The Mooring, 3 weeks before Zurich—
Ella sat with her legs crossed, surrounded by discarded circuit boards and bits of wire she'd carefully collected from repairmen's pockets over the months.
The guards thought she was broken.They were wrong.
Because Ella wasn't just a codebreaker.She was a builder.
The lock on her cell buzzed. Another faulty power fluctuation. Another soldered bypass she'd spent months designing by hand, with nothing but wires and stolen screws.
And as the red light flickered green for exactly four seconds, Ella slipped through like a ghost wearing bones.
In Zurich, at the exact moment Asher betrayed Damien for her freedom, Ella Mercer was already three hundred miles south, forging new identities, leaking location data of The Mooring to rebel networks…
… and sending one message on a stolen NATO frequency:
"Tell Asher: I don't need saving.I'm saving him."