Page 107 of The ARC Unit: Breach

I looked at the blurred outline of his shoulders, then slowly dropped my eyes lower before common sense caught up and forced my attention back to my own clothes.

“Well you don’t have to stand in there like a hostage,” I said.

“I’m wet.”

“Excellent point.”

“Finish getting dressed.”

I did, at a pace that was still faster than normal but no longer likely to turn Bear’s mild strain into a lecture. Once my shirt was on and the waistband of my pants sat where it belonged, I gathered the wet towel and shower bag.

“I’m dressed.”

Wolf stayed behind the curtain.

“Goodnight, Mercer.”

I looked at the clock above the door. “It’s 5:40.”

“Then have an excellent evening.”

The laugh escaped before I could swallow it. “Asshole.”

“Door’s behind you.”

I left him there with the mask still on the bench and his face still reduced to a shape I could not quite see.

The tension in that bathroom still could not erase what had happened in my room. My shoulder still reminded me if I reached too high, and the last traces around my wrists had only just stopped advertising the webbing. Wolf staying behind the curtain until I was dressed mattered because of that history, not in spite of it, and I carried the thought downstairs without deciding what it meant.

◆

Downstairs, Raven had found the part of Haus Eberhardt that made the entire day turn cold again.

A holding company behind the property had paid twenty-six separate document fees over nine months. The descriptions were bland enough to disappear inside legitimate accounting, split between relocation administration and identity support, with several more buried under residency processing and document services. The amounts matched forged document costs from older Cerberus cases closely enough that the pattern now made sense.

The payments left the headcount open, yet the repeated purchases made one thing clear enough to act on: somebody connected to the property was buying new identities again and again.

I sat beside Raven with damp hair soaking through the back of my shirt and started matching the dates.

Two payments occurred within days of women disappearing in Austria. Another followed a missing-person report from Brno. Several lined up with cross-border movements under names that later collapsed under verification. The numbers became people when we reopened the photographs.

Lenka Horvat was nineteen. Her last verified location was outside a Salzburg club at 1:18 in the morning, and the family statement said she had texted her older cousin that she was walking toward a taxi rank. No taxi record ever showed her getting into a car.

Nazanin Haddad had answered a hospitality job listing in Vienna. She called her sister afterward and said the interview had gone well enough that she might start the following Monday. Her phone moved east two days later, then disappeared. Amalia Ionescu’s device came back to life three weeks after she vanished and touched a tower sector that covered Haus Eberhardt before going dark again.

Raven added another file to the screen. “This one is older.”

A woman had surfaced at a hospital under a false identity with two fractured ribs and a broken wrist. She told staff she had fallen down the stairs. Before police arrived, she was gone and less than forty-eight hours later, every system we could access had lost her again. A Cerberus ledger seized months afterward listed a charge for “behavior correction” during the same week.

I stared at the phrase until it blurred.

“Behavior correction,” I repeated. “They billed somebody for beating her.”

Raven’s jaw tightened. “Looks that way.”

Another internal Cerberus message described a victim who repeatedly tried to contact home as “inventory creating noise.”

The word inventory finally broke through whatever professional distance I had managed to keep. “Inventory,” I said. “They call women inventory, then charge each other when the inventory screams too much.”