When he rushed to check on Lena, the bunker door was ajar. And then… her voice came over comms. But it wasn’t her voice. Not the one he knew. Calm. Cold. Commanding. “Daniel,” she said. “Stop looking for shelter. You’re already inside the trap.” And in her hand? A weapon that shouldn’t even exist on U.S. soil—let alone at Grayson.

Daniel freezes. His breath fogs in the dim bunker light, his hand hovering over his sidearm. Every instinct sharpened by decades in black-ops training screams that this is wrong—all of it. Lena’s voice in his ear is calm, surgical. Calculated like an assassin’s heartbeat. And she’s right.

He is already inside the trap.

“Lena,” he says into his comm, hoping for even a flicker of recognition. “You don’t have to do this.”

But the voice that returns isn’t the woman who once whispered secrets into his chest at 3 a.m. It’s a stranger wearing her skin.

“I told you,” she says coolly. “I’m just visiting my grandson.”

That line.

He replays it in his head like a ghost note in a jazz song—off-beat, deliberate, code. The kind of phrase you only drop if you’re hiding something under layers of scripted memory.

But he doesn’t have time to decode it.

Because outside the bunker, more explosions ripple through the compound. Screams. Gunfire. Then—silence. Deafening silence.

Cross yanks open the gear cabinet and pulls out an M4 and two flashbangs. There’s no playbook for this. Not when your own people turn the base into a war zone. Not when the woman you once loved is The Ghost—a legend whispered about in counterintelligence circles, blamed for high-profile assassinations from Berlin to Bogotá. Until now, no one had ever seen her.

No one had lived to.

He climbs the ladder from the bunker into the dim light of the command hall. The ceiling’s half collapsed. Blood streaks the white tile. Harrow is down—his body slumped over the central comms panel, eyes open, mouth agape in disbelief. Still clutching a shredded folder marked Zeta Protocols.

Cross swallows hard and checks his pulse.

Gone.

He barely has time to breathe when the monitors flicker to life. All of them.

Every screen displays the same image—Lena’s face, calm and unreadable, behind black tactical glass.

“Zeta Protocols are no longer secure,” she says, her voice echoing through the shattered ops center. “You have five minutes, Daniel. After that, this site becomes a crater. I’m sorry.”

He stares at her, sweat starting to bead at the back of his neck. “Why are you warning me?”

But she’s already gone.

He scrambles to the computer and starts typing. Zeta Protocols weren’t just surveillance data—they were the keys to sleeper agents embedded in Eurasia. Identities, locations, activation codes. If Lena got her hands on that…

No. When she got her hands on it—it was already over.

Unless—

He punches in his clearance code. Level Four override. Denied. Tries Harrow’s access, dead man switch still warm in his palm. Bingo. The screen blinks green.

Self-destruct disabled.

For now.

A sound behind him—a metallic click.

Cross turns slowly, weapon up.

Lena stands in the hallway, no longer wearing the Fifth Avenue coat. Now it’s black tactical armor. Custom fit. Lightweight. Unmarked. In her hands, that weapon—the one he couldn’t name—humms softly, the barrel glowing like a dying star.

“I hoped you’d try to fight,” she says, stepping closer. “But I also hoped you’d run.”

“Why, Lena?” he whispers. “We trusted you. I trusted you.”

Something flashes in her eyes. Almost regret. Almost.

“I told you once,” she says, “you don’t build a life in the shadows. You survive. That’s all.”

His knuckles whiten around his rifle, but he doesn’t raise it.

“You’re The Ghost,” he says. “But why come here? Why now?”

She exhales slowly. “Because Grayson wasn’t just listening. It was replicating. Every signal, every code… every kill order.”

She flicks her wrist, and a holographic display lights the air between them. Names scroll past—dozens of them. Coordinates. Time stamps. And pictures.

People.

Civilians. Targets. Collateral.

“We were supposed to protect them,” she says, her voice shaking now. “Not erase them from the world.”

“You went rogue.”

“No. I woke up. And I gave them a choice. I gave you a choice. Leave the bunker. Let it burn. Walk away.”

“And if I don’t?”

She raises the weapon.

Then—a gunshot cracks through the hallway.

Not from her weapon.

A second shot follows. Cross hits the deck, rolls, aims—too slow.

Lena’s already sprinted to the side, the mysterious weapon skidding across the floor. She’s not the one who fired.

From the shadows behind her steps Mika Tanaka, Cross’s recon specialist. Bleeding from a head wound, her arm dangling uselessly, but still standing.

“I knew she was a spook,” Mika growls. “She sipped the coffee too slow.”

Lena snarls and launches forward, but Cross intercepts her mid-stride. They crash into the comms room, glass and cables flying. She fights like a ghost too—silent, fast, brutal.

But so does he.

And this time, he fights like a man with nothing left to lose.

They slam against the steel wall. She elbows him in the ribs. He headbutts her. Her blade flashes, grazing his cheek. Blood spatters the wall.

But when he looks her in the eye again… he sees it.

She hesitates.

That’s all he needs.

Cross drives her back, pins her arm, rips the weapon from her grasp. The hum dies instantly. She’s panting now, her lip split, her face pale.

“Do it,” she gasps. “End it.”

He shakes his head.

“You don’t get off that easy.”

Outside, the compound lights flicker again. Backup generators kick in. Reinforcements arrive—an emergency response unit out of Fairbanks, finally tracking the emergency beacon Mika managed to trigger before the first blast. Cross hears the rotors before he sees them. Feels the rush of air through the shattered roof.

Lena slumps to her knees, defeated but not broken.

“You don’t understand,” she says. “They’ll come. Others. I wasn’t alone.”

Cross lowers the weapon. “Then we’ll be ready.”

He turns to Mika. “Secure her.”

Mika limps forward, zip ties in hand. “With pleasure.”

Within minutes, the compound is crawling with black ops retrieval teams. Bodies are bagged. Survivors accounted for. The wounded airlifted. Snow buries the evidence before sunrise.

Lena sits in the rear of a reinforced transport, hands cuffed, eyes vacant. She doesn’t speak again. Doesn’t fight.

Just stares.

Cross watches her from the tarmac, arms folded, heart bruised.

She saved him once. Warned him, in her own way. She chose not to kill him.

That means something.

But it doesn’t change what she did.

As the vehicle door seals shut, she lifts her eyes to him one last time.

Mouths two words.

“Find it.”

Then she’s gone.

He stands there, wind whipping through the wreckage of Camp Grayson, Lena’s final words echoing in his ears.

He doesn’t know what she meant.

But he knows this isn’t over.

Because deep in the wreckage, beneath the severed wires and ash, the real weapon might not have been that glowing barrel after all.

It might have been the truth.

And The Ghost just gave him a trail.