Chapter 14 Shadow List

The metropolitan police were long gone by the time Van's fingers brushed against the smooth surface of the object hidden inside the compartment. It wasn't a weapon or a passport to flee the country.

It was a ledger.

The leather cover was worn with age, and stamped with a faint emblem.

The insignia of Task Force Nexus.

Van pulled the book free from the wall.

It felt heavy in his hand, carrying a pull that seemed to anchor him to the violent corners of his past. He had buried this book, sealing it away in the dark when he chose the quiet life of a mechanic over the blood-soaked existence of a General.

He carried the notebook to his workbench, pushing aside the remnants of the burnt objects and the scattered tools left behind by the police. He adjusted the ring light, angling the beam directly onto the leather cover.

With a deliberate motion, Van opened the stiff book, its pages crackling like they might crumble. The pages were yellowed at the edges from years of storage, and filled with handwritten columns.

Van leaned forward and began to read. His hand traced the text like it was braille.

The entries were written in blue ink, organized with all I's dotted and t's crossed.

It was a catalog of names, dates, and coordinates.

Van’s eyes traced down the first page. He recognized the first name immediately. It belonged to a highly decorated military contractor who had controlled a large portion of the nation's defense budget during the Continental Wars. The second name belonged to a prominent judge who had sat on the capital's supreme court. The third was a billionaire logistics magnate who owned the most profitable shipping port on the coastline. They were not ordinary citizens. They were the architects of the nation, the untouchable elite who turned the wheels of power in Valoris.

Something was disturbing about the book as Van turned the pages.

Almost every name in the ledger had lines drawn through it with red ink, a deliberate strikethrough pressed so hard into the paper that it had nearly torn the page beneath the pen. Page after page, column after column, the names of the powerful and the untouchable elites were crossed out.

Van stopped turning the pages. He looked back at the first name on the page. Official state records claimed the man had died in a tragic, unforeseen helicopter crash during a routine inspection tour eight years ago. He looked at the judge. She had supposedly died from radioactive poisoning. The shipping magnate had fallen from the balcony of his penthouse suite. It was ruled as a suicide.

The red lines were kill confirmations.

Van was holding Black Crown’s master operational ledger. It was a shadow list, a history of every single assassination the clandestine organization had orchestrated to seize total control of Valoris over the last decade.

They had systematically removed anyone who stood in their way. Names of untraceable murders. The truth was in Van's hand, bound in leather and written in permanent ink.

He had stolen the book to use as leverage in case his past came back knocking.

But it didn't come knocking. It came crashing down like a collapsed dam.

His fingers trembled slightly against the paper betraying him.

Van began to turn the pages again, moving faster now, his eyes skipping past the older entries.

He moved toward the back of the book.

He reached the final page of the ledger.

He slowed down. The dates were still ahead, entries for a future not yet written. The names weren't crossed.

Van expected to see his own name on the list. He expected to see his true identity, General Van Zero, written out in perfect calligraphy. Or perhaps he expected to see Kyrian's name. He even braced himself to see Gabbie Muller’s.

All absent.

But then, his eyes went on the bottom of the page and his face became white as snow.

The ambient hum of the garage faded into a void. It felt as though the solid concrete floor had vanished beneath his feet, leaving him in a terrifying, bottomless freefall.

It wasn't his name. It wasn't his old friend's name. It wasn't a high-value military target, a corrupt local politician, or a CEO.

It was a civilian. A gentle school teacher who loved jasmine perfume, who baked uneven birthday cakes, and who had kissed him goodbye on the phone just moments before her entire world was consumed by fire.

Written perfectly in the bottom of the final page, completely alone, without a single line drawn through it, was her name.

Laura Tillman

Tillman, her maiden name before she married him and changed it to Zero.

Laura had been marked for death long before she married him. Her death date was written exactly the day it had happened.