6
After dropping a silent, guilty Julian off at his apartment near NYU, Jordan rode her motorcycle down to Lower Manhattan.
She walked down a dark, graffiti-covered alleyway. The air smelled of rotting garbage and damp brick. She stopped in front of a rusted door disguised as an abandoned dry cleaner.
Jordan punched a long, complex sequence of numbers into the hidden keypad on the brick wall. The heavy steel door slid open without a sound.
The heavy, vibrating bass of electronic music and the sharp stench of cheap alcohol swallowed her instantly. This was a speakeasy, strictly for the underground world.
Jordan ignored the sweaty bodies grinding on the dance floor. She walked straight to the back stairs and headed up to the deepest VIP room on the second floor.
She pushed the door open. Miles was sitting in the dark, surrounded by glowing monitors, his fingers flying across a mechanical keyboard.
Miles saw her walk in. He tossed his empty energy drink can into the trash and groaned, complaining that her stunt at the precinct almost gave him a heart attack.
Jordan walked over to the private bar. She poured herself three fingers of straight vodka and downed it in one burning gulp to suppress the irritation in her chest.
She slammed the empty glass down on the glass table. She cut straight to the point, demanding to know the location of the rare medical sample she needed.
Miles's face dropped. He turned one of his monitors around so Jordan could see the screen.
The screen displayed a highly encrypted dark web auction ledger. The transaction amount was in the tens of millions of dollars.
Miles swallowed hard. He reported that the R-7 sample-the exact compound Jordan needed to synthesize the neurotoxin antidote for the dying patient in her mother's ruby pendant-had just been bought out from under them.
The temperature in the room plummeted. Jordan's eyes turned as cold and precise as a surgical scalpel. A non-human, absolutely rational, and terrifyingly clinical aura flooded her veins.
Her voice was dangerously quiet. She asked who had the guts to outbid her on the dark web for something she had already claimed.
Miles pulled up a complex web of shell companies. He traced the money back to a massive corporate entity: The Prometheus Institute.
Hearing that name, Jordan's jaw tightened. Prometheus was globally respected in the medical field, but she knew they ran illegal human trials in the shadows.
She let out a cold laugh. She mocked the so-called geniuses at Prometheus, stating they wouldn't know how to stabilize the R-7 sample even if they had a hundred years.
Miles looked terrified. He warned Jordan that Prometheus had military-grade security backing them up. He begged her not to do anything crazy.
Jordan walked over to the tinted window, looking down at the dark alley below. Her brain was already mapping out tactical entry points for a breach.
She turned her head. She ordered Miles to get her the architectural blueprints and the guard rotation schedules for Prometheus's underground New York lab within forty-eight hours.
Miles let out a loud groan, claiming it was a suicide mission. But under Jordan's freezing stare, he slowly nodded and started typing.
With the mission set, a wave of pure exhaustion hit Jordan. The international flights, the family drama, and the precinct had drained her physical reserves.
She rubbed her temples. She picked up her leather jacket from the sofa, ready to go back to her apartment and crash.
Miles suddenly called her name. He tossed a tiny, encrypted earpiece across the room. Jordan caught it effortlessly.
He warned her that the handlers from her former, highly classified employers had been asking around the dark web for her. He told her to watch her back, knowing those people never let a rogue asset walk away easily.
Hearing the veiled threat regarding her old life, a complex shadow passed over Jordan's eyes-a mix of deep dread and buried pain.
She slipped the earpiece into her pocket. She gave Miles a tight nod, muttered "I know," and walked out of the room.
The cold night wind hit her face as she left the bar, clearing her head slightly. She hailed a yellow cab to take her back to the Upper East Side.
Sitting in the back of the cab, Jordan closed her eyes. But instead of sleep, her mind kept flashing back to the dark, bottomless look in Blake Berry's eyes at the precinct.
The cab pulled up smoothly to her luxury penthouse building next to Central Park. She paid the driver and stepped out, unaware of the new problem waiting for her upstairs.
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