thanh.nguyenhoang.1403@gmail.com
Stories
14
Chapters
126
Words
171.5 K
Comments
0
Reading
14 h, 17 m
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Endrit Pride is a luxury exclusively reserved for the warm. My frozen fingers fumble with the heavy, waterlogged zipper of my tactical jacket. The metal teeth are crusted with ice and refuse to budge. I grit my teeth, a feral, desperate sound escaping my throat as I wrench the tab downward. The wet fabric peels away from my chest with a sickening squelch, taking whatever fragile, lingering body heat I had left with it. I shed the layers one by one, tossing them onto the frost-slicked floorboards. The…-
13.0 K • Completed
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Endrit The heavy, silver Zippo lighter sits on the frost-slicked floorboards, catching the dying, amber light of the hearth. It does not look like a death warrant, but it is. I stare at the engraved crest, the familiar scratches on the polished metal. Dardan. The man who found me bleeding in a lightless alleyway in Tirana when I was fourteen. The man who taught me how to read people, how to pick a Medeco lock, how to slice through a corporate firewall. He used to tell me that trust was the only currency…
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13.0 K • Completed
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Besnik Consciousness returns with the precise, mechanical clarity of a rifle bolt snapping into place. I do not open my eyes immediately. I run a systems check on my environment, evaluating the sensory data. The ambient temperature in the cabin has plummeted well below freezing. The wind outside is a continuous, deafening roar against the reinforced timber. And there is a heavy, living weight draped entirely over my chest. My eyes snap open. In the pitch-black gloom of the windowless cabin, I feel the…
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13.0 K • Completed
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Besnik The freezing floorboards press hard against my spine, but the chill does not register. The only metric of reality left in the suffocating dark of the cabin is the frantic, hammering pulse vibrating through the thighs clamping my ribs, and the ragged breathing of the man straddling my chest. Endrit’s hands are still twisted into the heavy fabric of my tactical vest. His chest heaves, his pale eyes burning with a wild, desperate defiance. He believes he has seized the tactical advantage. He…
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13.0 K • Completed
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Besnik The mechanical scream of the heavy transport helicopter vibrating against the roof of the cabin is a death knell. I know the operational parameters of Dardan’s purge teams. They do not negotiate. They do not breach to capture. They breach to eliminate all biological signatures within the structure. "Put your boots on," I repeat, my voice cutting through the deafening roar of the twin turbines. Endrit scrambles across the floorboards, his bare hands shaking as he jams his feet into his…
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13.0 K • Completed
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Besnik Pain is usually a sharp, localized metric. It tells you exactly what is broken, what is bleeding, and how much time you have before the system completely fails. But the agony radiating from my shattered collarbone is a blinding, white-hot static that threatens to drag me entirely under. I force my eyes open, dragging oxygen into my lungs in a shallow, jagged rasp. The air tastes of sulfur, copper, and the undeniable stench of death. My vision slowly sharpens. The cabin is a slaughterhouse, the…
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13.0 K • Completed
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Endrit — Two Hours Before the Whiteout The first rule of stealing from Dardan Krasniqi is never take what he expects you to want. Cash is counted. Diamonds are tagged. Guns carry histories in their barrels. Secrets are different. Powerful men collect so many that they eventually forget which one can kill them. I slide the black memory wafer from Dardan’s private console and tuck it beneath my tongue just as the lights in the mountain villa go red. No alarm sounds. Dardan considers sirens vulgar.…
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13.0 K • Completed
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Forty-Seven Minutes Before the Extraction Abeni Ola had killed fourteen people in rooms exactly like this one. Concrete walls sweating rust. One industrial lamp. A drain cut into the lowest point of the floor. The men who built interrogation rooms always imagined blood was the hardest thing to remove. It was trust. Trust soaked into foundations. It waited behind patched bullet holes and beneath fresh coats of paint. It made a soldier believe the locked door at her back was protection instead of a clean…-
10.6 K • Completed
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The smell of iron and damp concrete was a comfort. It was the scent of the underground, the scent of survival, and most importantly, the scent of a cage that belonged entirely to Abeni. She stood perfectly still in the darkest corner of the abandoned pump room, her breathing shallow and measured. The erratic hum of a failing generator a floor above vibrated through the soles of her combat boots. Ten feet away, bathed in the sickly yellow glow of a single caged bulb, sat her assignment. Folasade…
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10.6 K • Completed
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The word EXPENDABLE burned itself onto the retinas of Abeni’s mind. Folasade’s whispered realization shifted the gravity in the damp, claustrophobic bunker. For a fraction of a second, the heavy, suffocating weight of betrayal threatened to drag Abeni under. She remembered the fire. She remembered the absolute loyalty she had bled out for Babatunde, only to be reduced to a red stamp on a manila folder. But Abeni did not panic. Her mind, forged in the brutal architecture of the underworld, immediately…
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10.6 K • Completed
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