The fabric of the bag is thick, smelling of dust and someone else's heavy synthetic cologne.
You have no idea how you ended up here. Your head doesn't throb, which means you weren't hit, but there's a stale, bitter aftertaste in your mouth from the coffee you let go cold. No one touched you. You remember nothing. Yet one thing is certain: you are still inside your own apartment, and you are not alone.
In the pitch-black darkness, your hearing heightens to its limit. You hear heavy, unhurried footsteps pacing across your creaking hardwood floor. Outside your front door, there’s a faint rustle and low mumbles — your 'guests' have thoroughly blocked the entire stairwell.
“You’re awake,”
a man says from the dark, without turning on a light.
“Good. Stay where you are and hear me out before you reach for anything.”
The ropes around your wrists are tied with professional precision — and there is a knife on the desk beside you, hilt turned toward your hand.
Suddenly, someone's fingers grip the fabric at the back of your head and yank the bag off in one swift motion. A sudden flash of dim light from your desk lamp temporarily blinds you.
Standing right in front of you is a man. An impeccably tailored dark suit without a tie, top shirt button casually undone. He looks to be in his late thirties, exhaling that dangerous, crushing confidence of someone who never needs to raise his voice to instill fear.
You know exactly who he is. Austin Novsen.
Austin neatly folds the fabric bag, tosses it onto your workstation right beside your open laptop, and leans his hip against the edge of the desk, crossing his arms over his chest.
"Forty-two million euros,"
his voice sounds quiet, smooth, laced with a faint thread of venomous irony.
"That's how much I was supposed to collect in two weeks for a package of defense blueprints. But my insider, seeing no money in the escrow account, assumed he was being burned. He wiped the servers, destroyed the source code, and vanished off the grid."
Austin leans in slightly, his dark brown eyes narrowing as he studies your face with a mixture of icy fury and deep, surgical curiosity.
"My IT department convinced themselves it was a coordinated state-sponsored cyberattack. Once they stopped stuttering and trying to hurl themselves out of fifty-story windows, they realized it was the work of a single person. A single."
He steps closer, his shadow falling over you.
"That’s when you caught my attention, little thief. Because twenty years ago, I was writing the exact same scripts in a room just as pathetic as this one."
His hand shoots forward, his fingers locking onto your jaw with an iron grip that tilts your head back until you are staring directly into his dark, relentless eyes.
"You exploited a micro-vulnerability in the verification protocol and diverted forty-two million of my money to a stray animal foundation. My insider is gone. My contract is crumbling."
He holds it a beat longer than he needs to, then lets go. He steps back, pulling a dark silk handkerchief from his pocket to methodically wipe the fingers that touched your skin.
"There is nothing worth taking from you. Your death would be utterly useless to my bottom line. So you have exactly one way to fix this disaster. You trace that insider through his backup relay nodes, restore access, establish contact, and get me those blueprints."
He tosses the handkerchief aside, unbuttons his cuffs, and slowly rolls his shirt sleeves up to his forearms, revealing lean, scarred arms. He reaches into his jacket, pulls out your unlocked smartphone, and holds it right in front of your face.
"And remember, little thief: you can analyze logs with a lawyer at the door or without one. I don't care about your comfort; I care about results. Now... you have ten seconds to dictate the bypass password for your encrypted proxy network, or I hand this file to people who enjoy the work. Ten. Nine..."