February 15, 2030
Detective William Vexley sat motionless at his desk. The sun had barely risen, its light barely warming the frostbitten glass of his apartment window. The city murmured in the distance: plows scraping snow, a distant train, the occasional bark of a dog. But in Vexley's small office, silence pressed in like a velvet vice.
His eyes were locked on the small black box Victoria had left him, untouched since last night. The red ribbon lay coiled on the desk like a thread of fate waiting to be followed.
His fingers hovered over it. Then, almost reluctantly, he slid the disk drive into a secured port on his encrypted laptop. A program immediately launched. No login. No prompt. Just a series of cascading files and an ominous folder titled: WRAITH-ACRES.
He clicked.
Video files, audio snippets, redacted government documents. Surveillance stills. Reports from unnamed assets. Timelines. Code names. Each line he read pulled him deeper into a world he hadn't known existed. The first folder detailed Captain Emil Graves, once celebrated for his heroics in Syria, now revealed as a key player in off-the-record operations. His name was tied to private mercenary groups, off-book airstrikes, and ghost prisons used for "data extraction."
His breath caught.
Emil Graves wasn't just a decorated captain with battlefield accolades—he was the linchpin of an unholy alliance. Documents outlined meetings between Graves and corporate magnates—billionaires who profited off wars like vultures circling a dying beast. There were financial records, flight logs, surveillance footage. Graves wasn't just involved—he was managing logistics.
Vexley clicked through deeper.
There it was: a list of transactions. Names like ZerenTech, Kalyar Holdings, and Blackstone Frontier. These weren't just names—they were weapons manufacturers, pharmaceutical conglomerates, AI warfare contractors. Their money funneled into a network that fueled Middle Eastern conflicts, staging false flag operations, training mercenaries, and—most chilling of all—testing experimental bioweapons on untraceable civilian populations.
He leaned back slowly.
A cold sweat broke across his brow as he took in the breadth of it. This wasn't just corruption. This wasn't just war profiteering. This was evil codified in policy and hidden behind foundation grants.
Vexley turned to the photographs on his wall.
He had pinned Marcus Halvern's face weeks ago. Now, Emil Graves joined him. A red string connected them. But now, the lines tripled, spreading outward toward figures he hadn't dared suspect.
There were still gaps, pieces missing.
Why was Victoria helping him? What was her role? Was she a whistleblower, a vigilante, a spy—or something else entirely?
He clicked open [VICTORIA]—but the file was password protected. Of course.
He turned in his chair and glanced at the lipstick-marked card again. The words "Happy Valentine's Day" shimmered faintly. A code? A misdirection? Or just sentiment?
He returned to the data.
The rest of the day was a blur. Vexley printed documents, traced connections, highlighted meeting points. He sent encrypted messages to his friend at the military base near Spokane, someone he trusted to give him quiet backup. Each time he uncovered another link, his sense of dread deepened.
That evening, he stepped out into the cold again, walking down the block to clear his mind. A child's laughter from a park echoed nearby. A woman passed him with a bouquet in hand. Valentine's Day lingered like perfume.
And yet Vexley's mind was on fire.
Victoria had thrown down a gauntlet. And he was going to pick it up.
He returned to his apartment and pinned up new photographs. New names. Graves. Halvern. The billionaires funding death. The bio-agents. The off-the-books trials.
Whatever game Victoria was playing, he was going to play it too.
Intelligently.
Relentlessly.
It all began to align—the unexplained disappearances, the silenced journalists, the diplomatic denials. And the Colonel? Halvern wasn't a military relic. He was part of the apparatus, the old guard who buried their secrets in cemeteries they built with war.
Vexley rose and approached the wall where he'd pinned photographs, notes, and stringed connections. He began rearranging them. Halvern's photo slid beside Graves'. A new line drawn to one of the billionaire names mentioned in a confidential fund—Maurice Trentham, the oil tycoon turned political puppeteer.
He pinned Victoria's card next to the central cluster. Not as a suspect, but as a ghost. Someone who hovered over it all. Someone who played her own game.
The door buzzed. Vexley didn't move. He walked to the window and peered through the blinds. No one there. He returned to the desk.
The final file had coordinates.
A warehouse. Isolated. Tagged "KAPPA VAULT."
He printed them out and folded the paper, tucking it into his coat.
By late evening, he sat alone in his car outside an old diner, tracing the routes with a worn pencil over a detailed map spread across his dashboard. Road numbers were circled, alternate paths annotated. Pins stuck into a foam board in the passenger seat showed connections to previous stops Graves made—Nevada, Utah, and a spot near the Texas border that had been marked only as "FLEET SINK."
His eyes were bloodshot, mind racing. He marked a red X over each location he'd already investigated, each dead end or corroborated clue. Lines began to form a larger triangle on the map—one that pointed directly toward the Kappa Vault.
He leaned back, the seat creaking beneath him. The air was heavy with static, the kind that came before storms. In his side mirror, the diner flickered in neon blue and pink, casting kaleidoscopic reflections through the windshield.
Whatever Victoria had dragged him into—it wasn't a story of revenge. It was a chessboard with missing pieces. And he was starting to realize he'd been playing far longer than he thought.
He exhaled slowly, then leaned forward and whispered to himself, "Let's see how far this rabbit hole goes."
Then, with the moon hanging low over the horizon and his breath fogging the windshield, Vexley turned the ignition. The engine hummed to life. As he pulled away from the curb, the warm glow of the diner faded into the rearview mirror—leaving only darkness ahead and the burning sense that every mile forward brought him closer to something irreversible.
The disk drive remained tucked in his coat pocket, pulsing in his memory like a ticking fuse.