Ethan dialed the overseas number.
One ring.
Two.
Three—
Click.
"Mikhail Kovac," The voice was gravelly, frayed by cigarettes and resentment.
Ethan smiled as Luc. "Bonsoir, Monsieur Kovac. You sound tired. Are you getting enough sleep? I hope I didn't keep you up these last few days?"
A beat of silence, then a low, venomous hiss, "You son of a—"
Ethan cut him off, amused. "Temper, temper. I was hoping for something warmer. I didn't think you missed me quite that much."
Mack didn't laugh. In fact, he barely breathed.
"You finally call, you bastard," Mack said, voice thick with loathing. "You appeared a week ago, threatened my family and me, dropped that last-minute job on my desk, and think I'm ready to jump when you whistle?"
Ethan rolled his shoulders back as if settling into a throne. "You will always jump when I whistle, Mikhail."
Mack spat a curse in Russian.
Ethan let it slide off him like water.
"You have my attention," Mack snapped. "Make it quick."
"You will receive a guest today at the safehouse in Canada," Luc said. "A woman. She will be the field leader for the mission I told you about."
Another silence. Mack's tone curdled.
"A woman."
Ethan blinked, amused. "Your prejudice is showing."
"I work with professionals," Mack growled. "Not gangland pretty faces you like to buy."
Ethan's voice went soft and cutting. "Delilah is more professional than anyone you've ever hired. And she kills cleaner than you breathe."
Mack inhaled through his teeth. "So the rumors are true. You pulled a lieutenant out from under the Rose. It was the only thing I could find out about you, you bastard."
"Have you been looking into me, Mikhail. I value my privacy, but I leaked that little tidbit to your information network. Try harder and don't always believe rumors. I mean, the rumors say she's his lieutenant, lover, pet—she'll try to kill you if you say this to her face," Ethan said with velvet cruelty. "Regardless, she belongs to me now. So treat her with respect. An insult to her is an insult to me."
Mack bristled. Ethan could feel it, even through a burner line.
"You want me to hold her hand for some job," Mack muttered.
"No," Ethan corrected. "I want you to do as you're told. Remember, I call the shots."
A long pause.
Then Mack snapped, "You think I'm afraid of you?"
Ethan laughed — quiet, elegant, dismissive, "No. I think you're afraid for someone else."
The silence that followed was marrow-deep.
Mack didn't speak. Didn't breathe.
Ethan continued, tone suddenly intimate, "How is your son doing, Mikhail?"
Mack's voice cracked, "You stay away from him."
Ethan leaned back, crossing his legs, as if discussing the weather. "You hid him well since our last conversation. New papers. New name. Small town. I'm impressed." He paused. "But you left a digital trail when you bought the medical supplies three days ago to mislead me, but I still found him. Rookie mistake."
The sound Mack made was somewhere between fear and hatred, "You bastard."
"Oui," Ethan said pleasantly. "Now that we know who is in charge, let us discuss the assignment."
Mack swallowed. "Say what you need to say. Talking to you makes me angry."
"Then I shall be brief. Have you assembled the team, as I told you?" Ethan said. "Taskmaster, Silver Sable, Domino."
Mack coughed. "You think I can get all three in four days?"
"I know you can," Ethan replied. "Because I have already contacted their handlers through the hidden channels you control. They have already responded, so get them to the location."
He heard the faint scrape of a chair — Mack standing, pacing, furious but helpless.
"Fine… what's the job?" Mack demanded.
"Ah," Ethan said softly. "Now we speak the same language."
He clicked a file open on-screen — blueprints, heat signatures, employee rosters.
"A facility in Revelstoke," Ethan began. "A Weapon X successor program called The Facility; you will have to do your own research to find out what that is. Your objectives are as follows:
"One — rescue a female scientist working at the facility named Dr. Sarah Kinney."
Mack grunted. "A scientist."
"Correct. Objective two — rescue her daughter."
"…daughter?" Mack said slowly.
Ethan smiled darkly," She is… complicated. However, she loves her daughter as much as you love your son."
"Fuck you. And objective three?" Mack asked.
"You will destroy the lab and make it appear that both mother and daughter perished in the explosion."
Mack exhaled. "Makes sense. What about leadership? Do we follow your orders?"
"Delilah commands the field unit as I said," Ethan said. "You will report to her."
Mack laughed — a bitter, broken thing. "She works for you. Not me."
"And you work for me as well, Mikhail," Ethan replied. "Or do you require a demonstration of what disobedience does to people who hide their children?"
Mack went silent.
Finally, "…Who are the kill targets?" His voice had lost all resistance.
Ethan's smile sharpened, "Dr. Martin Sutter and Dr. Zander Rice."
Mack whistled low. "I'm assuming they're heavy hitters. Lab heads. High-clearance. Killing them will destabilize the program, so they'll be well protected."
"That," Ethan purred, "is the point."
Mack's breathing went uneven. "And after?"
"You will extract," Ethan said. "Deliver the mother and child to a location in New York that I will provide when you call after the job is done. And you will all be paid."
"How much?"
Ethan chuckled. "Enough to retire three times."
A muttered curse. Then Mack said, "When do we go in?"
Ethan glanced at the clock. "Arrive on sight in four days. You will then rendezvous with Delilah and execute the mission as she orders."
Mack spat another Russian expletive.
Ethan ignored it.
"When your plan is ready," Ethan concluded, "you will inform me. I will notify our guests that you will be coming to make it easy on you."
Then Ethan ended the call.
Silence swallowed the room once again.
Ethan dropped the burner onto the bed and flexed his fingers. The Luc persona clung to him — that cold, intoxicating superiority — but he pushed it away, pulling himself back into the quiet center of who he actually was.
Or who he pretended to be. He could never really tell at this point. All these identities had traits he exemplified, so he was all of them while being none of them.
He returned to the laptop.
Two more encrypted windows opened.
He hacked into the Weapon X server with surgical precision — a worm disguised as an abandoned Hydra packet, routed through obsolete servers no one monitored anymore. Their entire network was a mausoleum of horrors. Lost footage. Medical files. Behavioral logs.
He found Sarah Kinney's inbox.
Clean, regulated, and monitored as expected.
He bypassed the monitoring.
Then he typed a message in a plain text window. No formatting. No metadata. No trace.
'Do you want to save your daughter? You have 5 minutes to respond.'
He hit SEND.
Four minutes passed.
Nothing.
At the fifth minute, the inbox pinged.
A reply.
'Yes.'
Ethan inhaled sharply through his nose.
Then he typed:
'Very well. We will be in touch. Act normal. When it is time, you will know.'
He pressed SEND.
The entire email chain dissolved. Not deleted — overwritten by randomized binary noise, then scrubbed by a secondary worm that Weapon X security would later blame on a corrupted server.
To Sarah Kinney, it would feel like a dream that decided to answer back.
Ethan closed his laptop. He would have to dispose of it later that day and acquire a new, higher-performing model soon after. Just in case someone managed to trace his hack.
Somewhere in Canada, Sarah Kinney checked her inbox and wondered if God existed.
Somewhere in Europe, the mercenary broker Mikhail Kovac sat sweating through his shirt, dialing a list of the deadliest people in the criminal underworld.
Elsewhere in New York, Delilah boarded a train, her life splitting into before and after.
And Ethan Kane — the boy, the monster, the architect — closed his eyes and whispered, "Phase two begins. Soon, the Exemplars would be coming. God, I hate the Marvel world."