Chapter 1: The Angel's Share
Vince
20 Berkeley Street wasn’t a target. It was an autopsy.
In Cambridge, silence is never empty. It’s heavy, saturated with the weight of old libraries and the arrogance of ancient stone.
But here, behind Ada Sterling’s linen curtains, the air felt different. Static electricity prickled my forearms.
I hadn’t just broken in. I had cracked her privacy open like a ribcage.
For ten years, we hunted each other through the darkest folds of the Darknet.
She was Onyx. The architect of the void.She didn’t just write viruses; she built mathematical dead ends. Labyrinths of code where data entered and never returned.
I was Phalanx. The shield of Aegis Dynamics.
We weren’t rivals. We were two sides of the same pathology. Ten years of brushing against each other through proxies, reading between the command lines.
We injected Trojans like a necessary venom. The binary world was our only womb.
Seeing her life embodied in a grand piano and polished woodwork felt obscene.Like finding a pagan goddess sitting in a corporate cafeteria.
I spent two hours in her shadows before she returned.I wasn’t looking for documents. I was looking for the crack in the veneer.
I opened her cabinets. Counted her aspirin.I brushed my fingers against her silk dresses to see if they still held her heat.
The Aegis report said: “MIT Professor.”My gut screamed otherwise. This apartment reeked of a programmed absence.
And that scent… black vanilla. Rancid, oily.It stuck to the back of my throat like a velvet hand trying to choke me.
I sank into her leather armchair. Total darkness. I didn’t need to see.I reached for the side console and gripped the bottle.
Macallan 25.A nectar of old wood and kept secrets.
The cork groaned as it gave way, releasing a smoky peat followed by the treacherous sweetness of burnt caramel and orange peel.I poured the amber liquid into heavy crystal.
The first sip scorched my tongue with surgical precision.A liquid fire leaving a trail of tanned leather and cold tobacco.
It tasted like patience. It tasted like her.
I stared at my fingerprints on the glass. A useless marking of territory.You can’t mark a ghost.
The click of the lock didn’t break the silence. It finished it.
She entered without turning on the lights.She didn’t need light to inhabit her own void.
She glided across the room with a non-human economy of movement.A fluid silhouette cut by pale moonlight on the hardwood floor.
When she pulled off her sweater, the friction of the fabric against her skin echoed in my skull like a scream.
I didn’t expect her to yell. Fear is for the profane. Onyx was anything but.She stopped ten feet away.
Her scent hit me—a wave of organic heat in the freezing room.She stared at the window. At my reflection in the glass.Her eyes searched for mine through the cold pane.
“You moved the bottle three millimeters, Vince. And you drank the angel’s share.”
Her voice wasn’t human.It was a whisper of wet silk that turned my blood to ice.
Hearing my name—my real name—come from a mouth I’d never seen felt like a taser to the heart.
“You breathe with the regularity of a man trying to reassure himself he exists,” she said, still facing the glass. “It’s almost touching.”
She knew my Marine record. My career at Aegis.Probably the color of my first medical file.
The shock wasn’t being caught.The shock was realizing the door hadn’t been forced.
She had let me in.
“It took you three days to trace the signal from Nevada,” she added. A half-smile floated on the glass reflection. “I almost got bored.”
The monster inside me shivered.For ten years, I thought I was the hunter.
In the gloom of this Cambridge parlor, I realized I was just a sample.A specimen she had finally decided to put under the microscope.
We were the Yin and Yang of the same darkness.And for the first time, the Yang realized the Yin was always one step ahead.
NHi everyone! This is the first chapter of Protocol 2. I’m a French author bringing this series to the English-speaking world. Did the tension reach you? I’d love to hear your thoughts on Vince and Onyx’s first ‘physical’ encounter. Drop a comment and let me know if you want the next chapter!
