She didn’t look back. Her hand snapped out, and a single, thin throwing knife—forged to look like a rose’s stem—buried itself in his throat. He made a wet, gurgling sound and collapsed.
The safehouse smelled of stale coffee and ozone. Agent 17, known in seventeen classified files as “Red Rose,” pressed a fresh clip into her sidearm with a soft, decisive click. Her codename wasn’t poetic; it was a warning. A red rose meant beauty with thorns. The “HOT” appended to her file stood for High-Value Objective Termination. Agent 17 Red Rose HOT-
“Package intercepted. The thorn has been applied. I need a clean-up crew at the old thermal plant.” She didn’t look back
Her target tonight: Vasily Krovopuskov, an ex-SVR asset gone freelance, peddling a quantum decryption algorithm to the highest bidder. He was hiding in a decommissioned thermal plant on the edge of the Black Sea. The heat was literal. Steam hissed from ruptured pipes, and the infrared overlay on her goggles painted the world in shades of angry orange and deep, dangerous red. The safehouse smelled of stale coffee and ozone
She moved like a ghost through the turbine hall. Her heels—thin, lethal, and surprisingly silent on the grated walkways—were her signature. Others wore tactical boots. Agent 17 wore stilettos. It unnerved people. It made them look at her legs instead of the razor wire garrote in her hand.