Eighteen others were gone.
Brothers and sisters in arms who had shared cigarettes, bad jokes, and blood-soaked stairwells.
Some died in ambushes in the narrow alleys of Exarchia, where gunfire echoed like thunder between concrete walls.
Others vanished in fireballs—IEDs buried beneath olive groves that had stood for centuries before we bled into their roots.
A few fell to clean shots from men who fought for Chapo with the devotion of zealots, eyes empty, fingers steady.
We had killed dozens of his soldiers in return.
Maybe hundreds.
The numbers blurred together after a while, reduced to shapes on thermal scopes and bodies on pavement.
Each victory felt smaller than the last.
Each loss heavier.
I rubbed a hand over my face, feeling the grit ground into my skin, and wondered how many ghosts could fit inside one man before he stopped recognizing himself.
Somewhere in the city, Chapo was breathing. And until he wasn’t, none of us were leaving Greece.
Headquarters had gone silent.
Weeks had passed since our last extraction request, each urgent plea swallowed by the bureaucracy and left unanswered.
The official line, repeated like a mantra in half-hearted emails, read: “The sacrifice of eighteen operators will not be in vain. You are the final element. Complete the mission.”
Translation: we were expendable now. Acceptable losses. Replaceable parts in a machine that didn’t care if the gears bled.
I rubbed the stubble on my jaw, feeling the exhaustion settle in my bones like molten lead.
Every movement carried the weight of nine months of ambushes, explosions, and bullets.
I was only twenty-one, young by any measure, but I’d enlisted at eighteen, straight out of high school.
Something about a life lived at the extremes drew me in—danger made everything sharper: colors brighter, sounds louder, time slower.
This was the only world where I truly belonged, and I had learned to love it.
But my only blood sister, Amy—also part of this secret team—wasn’t made for it. Not really.
A soft clink pulled me from my thoughts, cutting through the oppressive silence of the house. I looked up. A chipped ceramic mug hovered in front of my face, steam curling from the dark, bitter Greek coffee inside.
“Here. Drink,” Amy said, voice low, warm, carrying a softness I hadn’t heard in months.
She stood there in a faded red tank top and worn blue jeans, dark hair pulled into a messy ponytail.
Months of stress and malnutrition had sharpened her features; cheekbones now cast slight shadows on her pale skin, her frame leaner and wiry.
Yet her eyes burned with that familiar stubborn spark I’d known since we were children—the same one that had gotten us both into trouble and sometimes kept us alive.
I took the mug, holding it with hands that trembled slightly from fatigue, and drained it in three long, burning swallows.
The bitter liquid scorched my throat, a reminder that I was still alive, still here, still fighting.
Amy dragged a rickety wooden chair across the warped floorboards and straddled it backward, resting her forearms on the backrest.
