Chapter 2
2167words
Rooftops of Prague
In the velvet black of a Prague midnight, the Black Harrow arrived not as a storm, but as the stillness before one. Her presence was the negative space between movements, the silent breath before a candle flickers and dies.
The rooftops glistened with recent rain, reflecting the amber flicker of old-fashioned gas lamps and the more vulgar flash of neon signs below. Beneath the slow hum of a luxurious rooftop gathering—an arms dealer’s party, strung with indulgence and carelessness—she crouched in complete silence atop the ornate stone cornice of a six-story opera house.
She was dressed, as always, in black. Not just dark, but an intentional, studied black: non-reflective, heat-absorbent, carefully layered fabrics with precise purposes. A sleek, long sleeve tunic over soft but bullet-resistant armor; pants reinforced with tactical inserts; boots that absorbed rather than echoed every step. Her gloves were frictionless but gripped on command. Her face, as ever, hidden beneath a matte-black veil hood and scarf, only the faint outline of her lips visible in moments of close proximity—not that anyone ever lived long enough to get that close.
No hint of who she once was. Here, she was a legend.
Below, her target—a Slovakian arms broker known only as Marek—lifted a snifter of century-aged cognac, oblivious to the silent approach of his reckoning. He was surrounded by drunk politicians, off-duty military consultants, and private mercenaries hired more for intimidation than competence. They laughed, toasted the death of innocents. One man bragged about a child-soldier auction in Jakarta.
She didn’t blink.
She moved.
Sliding across the stone, she swung down silently behind a pillar, timing her movement between the rhythm of laughter and music. She deactivated two motion sensors with a flick of her custom silencer, disarmed a guard with an untraceable chemical pellet, and melted into the ambient shadow behind Marek.
Her blade slid between ribs like a whisper of regret. He jerked only slightly. She caught his weight, sitting him down as if putting a child into a seat.
Then, without a word, she reached into the inner pocket of her vest and withdrew a single obsidian rectangle, no thicker than a wafer. Burnished initials—BH—etched in soft, gleaming gold. Her identification card. A ghost’s signature. She pressed it to his chest—final, silent judgment—and disappeared without a trace.
But she didn’t leave. Not immediately.
From the dark hollow of an old service hatch above the pergola, Black Harrow crouched in silence—motionless, breath slow, presence erased. The velvet black around her bent to her shape like it knew her name.
Below, the revelry limped on, unaware. Glasses clinked. A joke landed half-heartedly. The quartet continued playing, though one violinist kept glancing toward Marek. He hadn’t moved. His posture still upright, his expression oddly serene. Just another aging man basking in arrogance.
Until the glass slipped from his fingers.
The shatter cracked like a warning shot. Heads turned. One guest laughed, nervously. Another frowned, then leaned in.
She saw it happen—the ripple. The realization. The way color drained from their faces like the blood had gone with it. A woman gasped. A man cursed under his breath and took two steps back. Fear arrived slowly, then all at once.
And then, from the edge of the terrace, a voice:
“Black Harrow,” someone whispered, hoarse and sharp.
The music faltered.
“She’s back.”
That was enough.
She slipped back into the shadows, ghosting along the upper crawl space toward the utility stairwell no one ever locked. Down two floors, out through a maintenance shaft, across an alley she’d mapped twelve hours ago. Her bike waited four blocks south, parked between a shuttered bakery and a drainpipe garden wilting in the heat.
By the time sirens started, she was already gone.
She rode into the night—out of Prague, out of reach. Her motorcycle hummed beneath her like a living weapon, sleek and silent against the dark. She passed neon and cobblestone, cutting through narrow alleys, down old trade roads, into the borderless hush between cities.
By dawn, she would reach a Legion blacksite in the Swiss Alps—unmapped, untraceable. She’d remain there for two days, unseen and untouched, until it was time to fly.
At a pre-designated drop point near the facility, she stashed the bike. No comms. No contact. No trace.
By the time the city's fear caught up with its headlines, the Black Harrow had vanished. Again.
Monday | June 21, 2010
Over the Atlantic | Inside a Custom Bell 429 Helicopter
The sky turned a watery steel blue, then brightened into pale gold as the Black Harrow piloted her custom Bell 429 helicopter across the Atlantic. The body of the craft, like its master, was uniformly black—matte-black paint, silent rotors, signal-masking panels embedded along the tail. A single engine would have sufficed, but this had two. Redundancy was symmetry, and symmetry was control.
Every switch on the panel was perfectly aligned. Every gauge within range. She adjusted the pitch by 0.3 degrees, because the tone had dipped slightly below optimal resonance. That slight vibrational irregularity—most pilots would never hear it. She did.
Order was her only refuge.
Somewhere beneath the clouds, the California coast waited.
She didn’t smile. But she let herself exhale.
The Legion HQ | Black Operations Wing
The helicopter descended into a ravine tucked along the California coastline, where The Legion’s HQ stood carved into the cliffs—a fortress of modern warfare disguised as an unassuming security firm. The facade said private risk management. Inside, it was much more.
Black Harrow descended onto a landing pad reserved for her use alone. Her boots struck the metal with quiet finality. Her helmet stayed on until she had disengaged the engine, powered down every system, double-checked the locks. Then the helmet came off.
Sequence mattered. Every motion precise.
Inside, the halls were dim and almost silent. On the surface, The Legion employed over two hundred professionals—logistics, intel, cybersecurity. Only a handful knew of the Black Division.
No elevator buttons led there. Only a key and retinal scan allowed access.
No one nodded. No one asked where she had been. To most, she didn’t exist.
She approached the only labeled door: a matte steel panel bearing a blank sigil—one of the few symbols known only to the authorized.
Inside, Maxim Thorne sat behind a desk that could double as a war table. Former military strategist, now the quiet architect of a world few knew existed. He did not rise. He didn’t need to.
Black Harrow stepped forward and stood at attention.
“Target?” he asked.
“Neutralized,” she said. Her voice held no pride, only certainty.
“Confirmation?”
She slid a data slate across the table. “Visuals. Bio-sig match. Card left behind.”
He studied her, as any commander would his subordinate.
“Clean work,” he said. “You’re dismissed. Two days off. No contact.”
She inclined her head. The formal signal. The room remained silent. She turned to leave and shut the door behind her.
En Route to Private Cliffside Clearing | Coastal Highway
Her motorcycle roared to life—a purring, dangerous whisper in black steel. No insignia. No plates. No record.
Black leather hugged her frame. She wore full riding armor, minimalist but efficient. Her helmet was solid, except for a gold trim barely visible at high sun. The wind bit at her coat, whipping the edges behind her like the tail of a specter.
She followed the highway south, the cliffs rising and falling in rhythm with the sea.
There was a place she always returned to.
No signs marked the road. No GPS data could find it. It was only memory that guided her.
Fifteen years ago, her parents had died on this road. A sharp turn. A flash of antlers. The crunch of metal.
She had crawled from the wreckage. She had tried to fix them—adjusted her mother’s jaw, cleaned the blood from her father’s shirt. She had tried to realign their arms, arrange their legs evenly, smooth her mother’s scarf just so. When it fluttered in the wind, she tied it down.
It had been the first time her mind demanded the world obey order.
That was where Maxim Thorne had found her—alone, blood-soaked, and eerily calm, standing in the wreckage and arranging her parents like dolls in a child's forgotten playroom. She had smoothed their clothes, straightened limbs, wiped blood from her mother’s face with trembling precision. Not crying. Not speaking. Just obeying the strange, urgent sudden logic of her need for order.
He didn’t call the authorities. He didn’t speak right away. He simply stepped beside her, knee-deep in twisted metal and silence, and offered his hand.
She never took his name. But from that moment forward, he became her anchor—the one unshakable constant in a world she no longer trusted to make sense.
Cliffside Clearing | Southbound Overlook
She stopped the bike in the grass, hidden from view, and walked forward with the sound of surf crashing against rock beneath her.
At the rise, she reached up and unlatched her helmet, lifting it just enough to expose her face to the wind. The chilled air touched her skin like a memory—bracing, real. She closed her eyes briefly, letting the salt and cold fill her lungs. The cliffside below stretched wide and endless, the ocean bruising against stone in a rhythm older than any war.
For a moment, she simply stood there—still, watchful. This place, despite what had happened, always felt like the edge of the world. A place to disappear. A place to begin again.
Then she heard it.
Sharp. Controlled. Suppressed. Military.
She slid the helmet back down, locking it into place with a practiced tug.
She didn’t go directly toward the sound—she flanked it. Dipping behind brush, moving low along a narrow animal trail, her presence melted into the rhythm of the wind.
Below, the black SUV smoked at the edge of the clearing. Doors blown open. Bodies sprawled in unnatural angles. One man—Sebastian, she recognized—was bleeding out near the bumper, barely conscious, blood pooling beneath him.
Her breath hitched. If Sebastian was here—
Then Lucian Sinclair was here, too.
And he was the target.
Her eyes swept the scene with sharpened urgency, cutting through smoke and shadow until—
There. Half-slumped near the rear tire, coat torn, one arm braced against the ground. Blood soaked the side of his shirt, his pulse fluttering at the base of his throat. Conscious, but not for long.
Three attackers remained.
She counted their steps. Calculated timing. Movement. Pattern.
The closest stood with his back to her. She closed the distance, silent as dusk, and in one fluid motion, hooked her arm around his throat, dragged him backward, and snapped his neck with a single twist. She lowered him gently to the ground.
The second turned too late—her knife was already in the air. It spun end over end and buried itself beneath his chin. He dropped with a wet thud.
A third caught a flicker of movement and opened fire, panic tightening his aim. But she was already in motion—low to the ground, gravel scattering under her boots. She rose into a crouch and squeezed off a single round. The shot clipped his shoulder, spinning him sideways with a cry as he staggered into the brush.
He hesitated. Dropped his weapon. Ran.
She let him.
Stepping over bodies, she approached Lucian.
His breathing was shallow. Conscious, but fading.
His phone lay a few feet away, cracked and flickering. She picked it up, tapped the emergency override, and held it to her mouth.
“Redwood outpost. Cliffside road. Man down. Gunfire. Send medics.”
She set it gently beside him, every action calibrated. Then she knelt.
“Help’s coming,” she said.
He blinked slowly, unfocused, breath shallow. His hand trembled faintly, blood seeping through the torn fabric at his side. The air around him was thick with smoke and the acrid tang of scorched fuel.
She didn’t leave immediately.
Her helmet tilted—just slightly—as if she were studying him.
Lucian opened his mouth. “Who are you?”
The question faltered on his lips. He didn’t push it. She saw it—the way he looked at her, as if he already knew the answer he wouldn’t get.
Still, something in her stance shifted. Not sympathy. Not hesitation. Just... awareness.
She stood with controlled grace, the weight of her steps barely stirring the gravel.
She caught the faint motion—Lucian trying to lift his head just as she turned away.
She didn’t pause.
And just like that—before the sirens echoed through the hills—she was gone. A ghost, her footsteps fading into the hush of trees.
No rustle of undergrowth. No broken twigs. Only the eerie stillness that followed her departure, as if the forest itself conspired to erase her presence.
The silence she left behind wasn’t empty—it was full. Full of questions, of impossible precision, of the unmistakable presence of someone who didn’t just move through shadows but belonged to them.
She left nothing behind—except the shift in the air where a shadow had passed.
—To be continued.
