And I wasn’t going anywhere until I found out what—and why.
2
LEVI
The apartment smelled like shit coffee and cigarettes.
Not mine—I didn't smoke, and the coffee I drank came from a press pot I'd carried halfway across Europe. But these two assholes? They lived like pigs. Empty takeout containers littered the kitchen counter, clothes piled in the corners, a half-empty bottle of cheap vodka sitting on the windowsill like they thought they were sophisticated.
Former Specialists, both of them. Jeremy Kittleton and Dale Popper. Army guys who'd done their time, gotten out with honorable discharges, and then decided the best way to pad their retirement was to sell out every Green Beret team operating in Europe.
Traitors.
The word sat in my gut like a stone, cold and heavy and absolutely fucking certain.
I'd been tracking them for three weeks. Started with whispers in the intel shop—rumors of compromised safe houses, blown operations, extraction points that suddenly had hostile forces waiting. Someone was feeding information, and the officialinvestigation was going nowhere because the people running it didn't actually give a shit.
They talked a big game. Counterintelligence. Rooting out bad actors. Protecting the mission.
Bullshit.
I'd spent a year assigned to this unit—a special corner of Army intelligence that was supposed to be like internal affairs, hunting down spies and traitors embedded in our own ranks. When I'd first gotten orders, fresh off my last deployment as an operator, I'd been excited. Instead of a boring desk job to sleep off war, it was supposed to be real work. Important work. The kind of thing that mattered.
Turned out the whole unit was a joke.
They shuffled papers. Wrote reports. Held meetings where everyone nodded seriously and then went back to their desks to do jack shit. Meanwhile, good men—my brothers, guys I'd served with—were getting burned because these fucking bureaucrats couldn't be bothered to actually follow through.
So, I'd started doing it myself.
Quietly at first. Just … looking at the intel a little closer. Running down leads on my own time. Making a few calls. Nothing official. Nothing that would ping anyone's radar. It helped that I was stationed in Germany and slipping across country borders was like visiting another state in the U.S.
I was good at it. Better than good. I'd found two sources in the first six months—low-level leaks that I'd quietly plugged. No fanfare, no medals, just the satisfaction of knowing I'd stopped the bleeding.
Kittleton and Popper, though? They were different.
They were selling operational intelligence to foreign nationals with ties to Iran. Not minor shit, either. Unit locations. Movement schedules. The names and faces of operators.
The kind of information that got people killed.
I'd confirmed it two days ago. Followed them to a café in the 7th arrondissement where they'd met with a French national named Fouad Nasser—businessman on paper, Iranian asset in reality. They'd passed him a thumb drive right there in the open, casual as ordering a fucking croissant.
That was all I'd needed.
Tonight, they were meeting him again. Right here, in this shithole apartment off the Champs-Élysées. I'd slipped in an hour early, picked the lock on the service entrance, and now I was standing in the hallway just outside the living room, listening.
Kittleton’s voice drifted through the cracked door. "… next week. Marseille. There's a team rotating in from Stuttgart. We'll have names and photos by Friday."
Popper laughed, low and easy. "Nasser's gonna cream his pants."
"Long as he creams our bank accounts, I don't give a shit," Kittleton said.
Nasser said something in accented English—something about payment schedules and encrypted channels. I didn't need to hear the rest.
I lifted the suppressed pistol from the holster at my back. Custom piece, threaded barrel, hand-loaded rounds. Quiet enough that the neighbors wouldn't hear a thing.
I stepped into the room.
All three of them froze.
