Chapter 5: Unleashed

Chapter 5: Unleashed

The holding cell smelled of disinfectant and despair. Marcus Thorne—no, he was Marco Gallo now, he had to remember that—sat on the edge of a thin plastic mattress, the rough fabric of the standard-issue orange jumpsuit chafing his skin. It was a humiliating downgrade from the silk dressing gown he’d been wearing when they’d kicked in his door. The sheer audacity of it still made his blood boil. He wasn’t a common criminal. He was an architect of a new life, a king in a glass tower, and they had dragged him out like a rat from a sewer pipe.

He replayed the arrest in his mind, searching for a face, a name, a reason. But there was nothing. Just a ten-year-old warrant for a name he had buried under a mountain of money and fabricated credentials. Marcus Thorne was a ghost, a story he sometimes told himself to remember how far he’d come. For that ghost to rise up and drag him down was impossible. It wasn’t a mistake or a random database sweep. It was a targeted strike. Someone had found him. Someone had ratted.

The thought was a venomous snake in his gut. Who? Who from that dirt-poor town, from that pathetic high school, would have the means or the nerve? He ran through a mental list of faces, victims, rivals. None of them had the sophistication. They were gnats. This was something else.

The metallic clang of the cell door opening jolted him from his thoughts. A guard stood there, impassive. "Gallo. You made bail."

Marcus stared, incredulous. He hadn't even spoken to his lawyer yet. "Bail? For what?"

"For everything," the guard grunted. "Now move it."

He was led through a series of sterile corridors to a processing room where a man in a perfectly tailored suit waited for him. This wasn't his usual lawyer. This man radiated an aura of quiet, expensive menace.

"Mr. Gallo," the man said, his voice as smooth and cold as polished marble. "I'm here on behalf of Mr. Croft. He has posted your bond." He slid a file across the table. The number on the bail bond receipt was astronomical, enough to buy a small island. It wasn't bail; it was a statement of power.

An hour later, Marcus was stepping out of a black town car and into the private elevator of a downtown skyscraper that made his own penthouse look modest. The doors opened directly into a sprawling office. One entire wall was a floor-to-ceiling window offering a god's-eye view of the city. A man stood with his back to them, staring out at the urban sprawl. He was of average height and build, dressed in a simple grey suit, yet he commanded the room with an unnerving stillness.

Julian Croft.

"The police impounded my assets," Marcus said, his voice tight. It was the first thing he could think of to say, a pathetic attempt to explain his failure.

"A temporary inconvenience," Croft said without turning around. "Your assets are a drop in the ocean, Marco. My ocean. What I cannot abide is the leak. The mess."

He finally turned, his eyes flat and devoid of any discernible emotion. They were the eyes of a shark. "You were arrested on a decade-old warrant for aggravated assault. A piece of digital garbage from your former life. A life you assured me was hermetically sealed."

"It was," Marcus insisted, his old arrogance flaring. "Someone dug it up. Someone with an axe to grind."

"It's more than that," Croft said, his voice dropping to a near-whisper. He gestured to a nearby monitor, which flickered to life, displaying a cascade of diagnostic code. "While you were enjoying municipal hospitality, we had a breach. A ghost slipped past our sentinels, right into the archives. They were clever. Surgical. They took something—a client ledger. They were in and out in under four minutes, but they tripped a hunter-killer program on their way out. The timing is too precise to be a coincidence. The person who tipped off the police is the same person who hacked my system."

Marcus felt a chill that had nothing to do with the office's air conditioning. The rat wasn't just someone from his past. It was a high-level hacker. The two events—his arrest and the breach—were pincers in a coordinated attack. He had been the distraction, the bait that drew all the attention while the real damage was being done. The humiliation of it burned hotter than his anger. He wasn't the target; he was just the key used to unlock the door.

"Find them," Croft said simply. "The police are an annoyance. Federal agencies can be bought or blackmailed. But a ghost in my machine? An unknown variable with my client list? That is an existential threat. I have insulated you, Marco. I plucked you from obscurity, gave you a new face, a new life, a kingdom. I did this because you were useful. Because you were ruthless and efficient. A loyal attack dog."

He took a step closer, his cold gaze pinning Marcus in place. "But a dog that leads wolves back to the flock is not a guard dog. It's a liability. And liabilities must be liquidated."

The threat hung in the air, unspoken but absolute. Eliminate, or be eliminated.

Croft smiled, a thin, reptilian stretching of his lips. "But I am not without mercy. Your history, the very thing that has become a problem, is now your greatest asset. This ghost is from your past. They knew your real name. They knew where you came from. So you will go back. You will find this person. You will use the skills I have nurtured in you—the intimidation, the violence, the utter lack of restraint that made you so appealing in the first place."

He gestured to the desk, where a sleek, encrypted tablet sat next to a set of car keys and a credit card with no name and no limit. "The organization's resources are at your disposal. Surveillance, tracking, asset location. Anything you need. Find the source of this leak. Bring them to me."

Croft paused, his eyes flicking toward the window, toward the distant city lights. "I understand you have an ex-wife and a child living in anonymity in Oregon. A clean slate, paid for by us. It would be a shame if their new lives were… disturbed."

The final piece of the ultimatum clicked into place, cold and sharp as a shiv under the ribs. This wasn't just about his life anymore.

"I understand," Marcus said, his voice a low growl. The fear was there, but it was being rapidly consumed by a vengeful fire.

"Good," Croft said, turning back to the window. "Find the rat, Marco. Find the ghost who ruined your life."

He was dismissed.

In the car, speeding away from the tower, Marcus opened the tablet. Croft’s people had already populated it with every shred of data from his old life. Scans of his high school yearbooks, public records, old news clippings. A digital reconstruction of the world he had burned to the ground.

He scrolled through the faces of his old classmates, ghosts from a life he despised. Jocks, cheerleaders, nerds. Most of them were nobodies, still stuck in the same town, living the same pathetic lives. Who among them could possibly have the skills? Who held a grudge that deep?

He dismissed most of them instantly. They lacked the spine, the brains, or both. But a hacker… that meant brains. And a ten-year grudge… that meant he’d hurt them. Badly.

His finger stopped on a grainy yearbook photo. A skinny kid with oversized glasses and a terrified look in his eyes. The kid he used to corner by the lockers, the one who never fought back, just took it. The one he’d left bleeding on the hot asphalt the last time he saw him.

Elias Vance.

It was laughable. Vance was a worm. He couldn't have done this. But the name stuck in his mind. A worm, if left alone long enough, might just learn how to bite. He was a starting point. A thread to pull. Marcus’s lips curled into a predator's smirk. The hunt was on. He was no longer the baited prey. He was the hound, unleashed and baying for blood. He would start with the weakest of the herd and work his way up. And he would enjoy every second of it.