Chapter 2: Echoes of the Past

Chapter 2: Echoes of the Past

The morning after felt like waking up in a stranger’s house. The light was the same, the scent of pine and coffee was the same, but the woman lying beside him was a ghost. Liam watched the slow rise and fall of Elena’s shoulders as she slept, her dark hair fanned out across his pillow. Yesterday, he would have seen an angel. Today, he saw a target.

He slipped out of bed, his movements quiet and deliberate. The rage from the night before had cooled, solidifying into something far more dangerous: purpose. He went through the motions of their morning routine—grinding the coffee beans, setting out the mugs, the quiet dance of two people who knew each other’s rhythms. Or so he had thought.

When she came downstairs, wrapped in his flannel robe, she smiled that enchanting, devastating smile. “Good morning, my love.” She slid her arms around his waist from behind as he stood at the counter, pressing a soft kiss between his shoulder blades.

His entire body went rigid, a primal urge to recoil warring with the cold, hard discipline of a man who had once lived a life of masks. He forced himself to relax, to lean back into her touch. “Morning,” he said, his voice a near-perfect imitation of the man he’d been just twenty-four hours ago. “Sleep well?”

“Like a baby,” she purred, oblivious. “I was dreaming of our trip. Paris, maybe? For our one-year anniversary.”

Our one-year anniversary. A date she had no intention of reaching with him. The audacity of it was breathtaking. He turned, forcing a tender smile onto his own face. “I’d like that.”

He was playing the part. The loving husband. The simple fool. Every word was a lie, every touch a calculated maneuver. He needed her comfortable. He needed her arrogant and unsuspecting. Because while she was dreaming of Paris, he was dusting off the skills he’d sworn to leave buried forever.

Later that morning, she left for her “housekeeping job” at the lodge. He knew now it was a cover, a convenient excuse to meet her lover or conduct her business, but he kissed her goodbye at the door as if he believed every word. The moment her car disappeared down the gravel drive, the curtain fell.

Liam’s home, once a sanctuary of peace, became an operations center. The man who tracked deer and monitored fire risks was gone. In his place was the intelligence analyst, the man who hunted for needles in haystacks of data.

He started with the obvious: her laptop, her tablet. They were clean, almost sterile. Social media profiles, emails to family in Romania that were filled with saccharine sweetness, online shopping receipts. It was a perfectly curated digital life, designed for a cursory inspection. Amateurs left their secrets on their primary devices. Elena was no amateur.

The drunken confession of her brother, Marius, echoed in his mind. That night in Istanbul… we earned this. It wasn’t just a slip of the tongue; it was a pressure point. A crime significant enough to “set them up for life.” Something like that would require records, proof, leverage. People like Elena and Marius didn’t operate on trust. They operated on mutual self-interest, backed by the threat of mutually assured destruction. She would have a copy. Something to hold over her brother’s head, and vice-versa.

He moved through the cabin with a methodical precision he hadn’t used in years. He wasn’t just searching; he was performing a psychological profile. Where would she hide her true self? It had to be somewhere personal, yet unassuming. Something he would see every day but never think to inspect.

His eyes landed on her nightstand. Next to a framed photo of them smiling on their wedding day—a grotesque monument to her deception—sat a small, cheap-looking matryoshka doll. She’d told him it was a gift from her grandmother, her only keepsake from the old country. It was garishly painted, a caricature of Russian folk art. He’d always considered it an eyesore.

He picked it up. It felt light, hollow. He twisted the largest doll open. Inside was a slightly smaller one. He opened that, and the next, and the next, until he held the smallest, solid-looking doll in his palm. It was too light. He ran his thumb over the base and felt a faint seam. With a bit of pressure from his thumbnail, the bottom popped off.

Tucked inside the tiny cavity was a minuscule black flash drive. No bigger than a fingernail.

He felt a grim, cold satisfaction. It was perfect. A symbol of her nested lies, hidden within a token of feigned sentimentality.

He didn't dare plug it into his own network. He went to the heavy oak footlocker at the end of his bed, a relic from his old life he’d never had the heart to throw away. He keyed in a combination and lifted the lid. Inside, beneath neatly folded park service uniforms, was another man’s life. A hardened, air-gapped laptop, a satellite phone, and a set of encrypted communication devices.

He booted up the laptop. The operating system was unfamiliar to most, a stripped-down, security-focused interface. He connected a device and slid the flash drive in. As he expected, it was heavily encrypted. A digital brick wall. He could probably crack it himself, given a few weeks. He didn’t have weeks.

He had one call he could make. One ghost from his past who owed him a favor bigger than any he could ever repay.

Using a secure messaging client routed through three continents, he sent a single, untraceable message to a contact labeled simply ‘Spectre.’

Liam: Cabin’s cold. Need a ghost key.

He didn’t have to wait long. The reply was just as terse.

Spectre: Door’s open. Send it.

A secure upload portal appeared on his screen. No names, no pleasantries. Caleb—the man behind the handle—was the best digital forensics analyst the agency had ever had. A wizard who could pull secrets from shattered hard drives and corrupted servers. Liam had pulled him out of a collapsed building in Kandahar. This was the payback.

He uploaded the drive’s contents and then he waited. The hours crawled by. He cleaned the cabin, prepped dinner, did everything the loving husband was supposed to do. When Elena returned, he greeted her with a kiss, the metallic taste of betrayal on his tongue. They ate together, talked about nothing, the chasm between them a universe wide.

Late that night, long after Elena had fallen asleep, his burn phone vibrated. A new message from Spectre.

Spectre: L, what the hell did you get married to? This isn’t a green card scam. This is big. Federal-pound-me-in-the-ass-prison big. File’s unlocked. Be careful.

Liam’s heart hammered against his ribs. He opened the decrypted file on the hardened laptop. It wasn’t a collection of love letters from another man or incriminating photos. It was a simple spreadsheet, a ledger.

But the contents were anything but simple.

Columns of dates. Shipping manifest numbers. Codenames for ports of call: Marseille, Tripoli, Odessa. A column labeled ‘Cargo’ was filled with alphanumeric designations he recognized with a sickening lurch—serial numbers for Kalashnikov rifles, caches of Semtex plastic explosives, crates of Russian RPGs.

And then, the final columns. Payouts. A complex web of wire transfers through shell corporations in Cyprus and the Cayman Islands, all culminating in a single account. An account under the name Elena Volkov.

His eyes scanned the dates until they found it. A single transaction, dwarfing all the others. The date matched a port of call in Istanbul. It was the week before Marius’s drunken visit.

The world narrowed to the cold, blue glow of the screen. This wasn't just infidelity. It wasn't a simple con for a new life in America. He had unwittingly married himself into an international arms smuggling ring. Elena wasn’t a grifter. She was a gunrunner. A merchant of death hiding behind an enchanting smile.

He closed the laptop. The silence of the cabin was absolute. He finally had it. The weapon he was looking for. And it wasn't a dagger to wound her pride. It was a warhead, capable of annihilating her entire world.