The air in the Italian hangar was thick with the scent of jet fuel and sea salt. As the hangar doors creaked open, the Positano sun hit us like a physical blow—too bright, too honest for the shadows we carried.
Yuri didn't waste a second. He moved with a focused, surgical intensity, tossing a lightweight tactical vest toward me. "Put it on. Under the jacket. I don't care how hot it is."
"I told you, Yuri. I'm not playing the part of the porcelain doll anymore," I said, catching the vest. I adjusted the straps, the weight of it grounding me.
"Good. Because the 'doll' wouldn't survive the first three minutes of this," he replied, his eyes scanning the perimeter. Miller and three other men were already loading matte-black SUVs. The efficiency was chilling. These men weren't just security; they were the remnants of a private army that no longer had a country to defend.
The drive up the winding coastal roads was a blur of vertiginous cliffs and pastel houses. To anyone else, it was paradise. To me, it was a tactical map. I watched the shadows of the lemon trees, looking for the glint of a lens or the unnatural stillness of a sniper.
"Look at the third balcony of the villa," Yuri murmured, handing me a pair of high-powered binoculars.
I adjusted the focus. The villa was a sprawling stone fortress perched precariously over the Mediterranean. On the terrace, I saw a flash of white hair. My mother. She was sitting in a wicker chair, staring out at the sea. She looked peaceful—too peaceful. Beside her stood a man in a sharp, grey suit. He wasn't a Volkov guard. He held a tablet, his eyes alternating between the screen and the woman beside him.
"That's him," Yuri said, his voice dropping to a lethal octave. "Dr. Aris. The UNI's lead on the Phoenix Protocol. He isn't just watching her, Jessy. He's monitoring her vitals. They've linked her heart rate to the local server. If her pulse spikes too high—or if it stops—the server triggers a remote wipe of the extraction data they've managed to scrape from your father's old logins."
The cruelty of it made my stomach flip. They had turned my mother's heartbeat into a dead-man's switch.
"They want me to see her," I realized, the binoculars shaking in my hands. "They want the biometric surge they'll get when I reach her. My joy, my fear... it's the final sequence of the code."
"Exactly," Yuri said. He checked his watch. "Mikhail is inside, likely drinking my father's vintage scotch and waiting for the UNI to hand him the keys to the world. He thinks I'm coming to negotiate. He thinks I still care about the Ledger."
"He doesn't know I burned it."
"He'll find out when the fire starts." Yuri turned to me, his hand hovering over mine but not quite touching it. "I'm going in through the wine cellar. Miller's team will hit the front gates to draw the UNI tactical unit. You... you're the only one who can get to her without triggering the alarm. You have to be the ghost, Jessy. You have to get to that terrace and sever her link to Aris before I take Mikhail's head."
I looked at the villa, the beautiful, sun-drenched tomb. "And if I can't?"
Yuri's expression didn't flicker. "Then we don't leave this mountain."