The loft was alive with the sound of busy hands and muted tension—each creak of a board, each snick of metal on metal, each sigh of breath a note in their secret symphony. Marco muttered quietly as he counted, stacking hundreds into neat towers, the flick of every bill a metronome for his frantic thoughts. The glow from the lone bulb painted harsh shadows on his face, accentuating the tense set of his jaw.
Across the table, Anya cradled her lockpicks one by one, oiling and wiping each with almost ritual care. She was humming under her breath, the tune indistinct, a private melody drowned by the hum of adrenaline. Lena's gaze swept between them, her eyes never settling for long—always tracking details, always calculating.
Ghost glided near the window, barely visible in the gloom. He moved so quietly that even the dust motes seemed not to notice. When he spoke, his voice was so soft it had to be deliberate—a whisper meant only for those who were paying real attention.
"Street's still clean," Ghost murmured, his tone carved from calm, his eyes tracking reflections in the glass. "But someone's in the alley. Don't move the curtain."
Anya didn't pause in her work, but her fingers stilled. "How many?" she asked.
"Two. Maybe three. Not cops," Ghost replied.
Jax, nursing another drink in a corner, cracked his knuckles with a dangerous grin. "So we have company. That's what I like. Keeps things lively."
Lena shot him a look sharp as a snapped wire. "No improvising, Jax. We move if I say move—until then, quiet."
Jax bristled but didn't argue. Ghost, eyes like ice under the city's wash, faded back into the shadows, his body language unreadable but his intent clear.
Marco glanced up from his meticulous cataloging. "They're early. Are we exposed?"
No answer. Lena was already running scenarios, lips moving as she muttered under her breath. The tension was a living thing, thick as the scent of cordite still hanging in the stale air. The bare bulb flickered, stuttering shadows across loot and faces.
Then, Anya's phone vibrated—a low, urgent buzz on the metal. She snatched it up and read the message. She didn't speak, but Marco saw the color drain from her cheek.
Lena looked sharply. "Well?"
Anya's voice was flat. "Unknown number. It says: 'Enjoy your final act.'"
Jax let out a low whistle. "Somebody's poetic tonight."
Ghost drifted to Lena's side, positioned to see both the window and the door. "This place isn't safe anymore," he whispered. "Loot's not worth dying for."
Lena fixed her gaze on the crew, gathering them with a look. "Bag it all, now. Ghost—lead us out. Marco, only take clean bills. Jax, stay close. Anya, tools first, then cash."
Marco hesitated only a second before moving, a knot of dread tightening in his gut. Outside, staccato footsteps echoed upward, and on the far wall, sirens bled blue and red through the smeared glass.
As they readied to vanish, the mood snapped tight as piano wire—every move packed with meaning, every word weighed by its consequences. In the loft's stark light, the fleeting thrill of their success was overtaken by the certainty: the game wasn't just about what they had stolen. It was about what was coming for them next.
In that splintered moment, Lena's voice was almost gentle: "We're ghosts tonight, all of us. Now move."
No one argued. The loft, spare and impermanent, watched them melt into the shadows, leaving behind only whispers and the echo of lives lived on borrowed time.
Jax's laugh bounced off the brick and came back meaner.
"Urban legend," he echoed, slamming his fist into the table again so the glasses rattled and a few bills slid to the floor. "Damn right. Did you see that guard's face? I swear to God, I thought he was gonna drop dead when I tapped his shoulder. Guy's brain just—" he mimed an explosion with his fingers, grinning. "Didn't even know if he should scream or pray."
"Jax." Lena didn't raise her voice, but it cut clean through his. "Volume."
He threw her a sideways look, grin still hooked on his mouth. "What? We earned a little noise."
"In this city, noise is a report, not a reward," she said. "Keep it down."
Ghost had drifted to the door again, hand hovering near the latch, ear to the thin seam of air. From a distance, he looked like part of the wall—just another shadow. Up close, his stillness was too intentional to mistake.
He was the unseen protector, the one who ensured that their sanctuary remained inviolate.
"Stairwell's quiet," he murmured. "For now."
Marco didn't stop sorting, but he glanced up, eyes flicking between Ghost and Jax.
"'For now' is doing a lot of work in that sentence," Marco said. "Maybe try 'forever' next time."
"Forever doesn't exist," Ghost said. "We rent our minutes."
Jax snorted. "You two should start a podcast. 'Depressed Criminals Anonymous.'"
He refilled his glass, amber sloshing. "Come on, Lena. Even you gotta admit—Sterling was art. Smooth as glass. Lobby swept, cameras blind, alarms asleep, vault purring open like it missed us. That guard… man, I almost felt bad for him."
"You didn't," Anya said dryly, snapping her tool case shut.
"Okay, I didn't," Jax conceded, smirking. "But I could have. That counts, right?"
Lena moved closer to the table, fingers trailing near the bonds without actually touching them. Her eyes stayed on Jax.
"It was smooth because every variable was controlled," she said. "Ghost killed the lobby cameras on a thirty-one-second loop. Marco ghosted the secondary grid before it realized it had glitched. Anya cracked a vault people write boring articles about. You provided a distraction on a staircase we chose, at a time we dictated."
She tapped the money. "This exists because each piece moved exactly where it was supposed to."
Jax lifted his glass in a sloppy salute. "And because I was there to say hello."
"And because you didn't improvise," she countered. "Don't rewrite the job in your head just to make yourself the headline."
He leaned back in his chair, jaw tightening. "What, I'm supposed to sit here and pretend I'm just a piece on your little board?"
"You are a piece on the board," Marco said, not unkindly. "We all are. That's why we're still breathing."
Jax's gaze flicked to him, dangerous. "You calling me replaceable, professor?"
"I'm calling you essential," Marco replied. "Which is exactly why your stories about tapping guards and making them 'shit their pants' don't impress anyone who was busy not letting us die."
Anya chuckled under her breath. "He's right. If you want to brag, brag about the part where you didn't blow anything up for once. Personal growth."
"Funny," Jax muttered. But a reluctant ghost of a smile tugged at his mouth.
Lena let the moment hang just long enough, then moved on, weaving steel back into her tone.
"The job was a statement," she said. "Sterling wasn't just money. It was message. In a city full of amateurs waving guns at cashiers, we walked through the financial heart and left with its blood in our pockets."
"Poetic," Jax said. "Almost as poetic as that text we got."
The air tightened.
Marco's hands stilled over the bonds. Anya's gaze flicked instinctively to the hardcase by his chair—the one that now held something besides paper and numbers.
Lena's eyes narrowed. "We're not repeating that out loud."
"Why not?" Jax asked. "They already know where we sleep."
"Because we don't amplify threats in our safe house," she said. "We analyze them. Quietly."
Ghost shifted near the door, attention slicing between them and whatever lay on the other side of the peeling paint.
"They're already whispering about us," Marco said, as much to himself as to the room. "Back rooms, back alleys. 'Phantom thieves.' 'Ghost crew.' My favorite's the one where we're actually three different teams and nobody's realized it."
"Or the one where we're ex-military black ops," Anya added. "Or dead. That one's popular."
"Good," Lena said. "The more versions there are, the less any of them are true."
Jax grinned, basking in it anyway. "Doesn't change the fact they're scared. Sterling put us on a whole new map. We're the nightmare they warn the banks about."
"No," Lena said, and this time there was something cold under the softness. "Sterling put us on a new list. There's a difference."
"What list?" Jax challenged.
"The one that doesn't end in prison," Marco answered. "It ends in a file folder marked 'classified' and a body nobody admits existed."
For a heartbeat, nobody spoke.
Outside, a siren moaned somewhere distant, then faded. The city's glitter pressed against the glass, smug and uncaring.
"You're all missing the point," Jax said finally, stubborn. "We did it. Clean. Perfect. No one saw us. No one touched us. We're ghosts."
Ghost turned his head just enough for the light to catch his eyes.
"Someone did," he said quietly. "They left us a phone."
The word landed like a dropped wrench.
Lena stepped in before the panic could open its mouth. "We planned Sterling like a war," she said. "We executed like professionals. That's why we get to have this argument instead of having our wrists zip-tied behind our backs."
She nodded toward the scattered loot, the raw, gleaming proof of everything they were.
"But legends," she went on, "don't stay legends because of what they did. They stay legends because they knew when to vanish."
Jax's jaw worked, muscles ticking, the rebel in him wrestling the survivor.
Finally he huffed out a breath. "So what now, general?"
"Now," Lena said, "we stop acting like the story ends at Sterling."
Her gaze slid to Marco, then Ghost, then Anya, pulling them all into the same tight orbit.
"Because someone just turned our urban legend into a hunting season."