1. The Envelope
Oliver
Valletta, Apartment 3B, 5:32 a.m.
“Jamie!”
The name tore from his throat before he even realized where he was standing.
Flames clawed up the walls of the warehouse out of the corner of his eye. They looked like they were trying to escape. The steel rafters above him screamed, popping and bending inward from the intense heat. Each breath he took coated his lungs with acrid soot as he staggered forward through the choking dark.
Oliver couldn’t tell where he was going, but his instincts pushed him forward through the rising fire.
The smell was both like burning plastic and the singed ends of something organic. Perhaps wood. His boots crunched over shattered glass. The concrete was soaked in ash. Smoke curled through the beams of orange light like dancing phantoms.
“Oliver!”
He turned at the sound of that voice.
“Jamie!” he called again, desperation cracking through the name.
There was no response—just the crackle of cinder and the rhythmic coughing of something dying.
The sound of his brother dying.
With a burst of courage, Oliver waded past the flames that painfully lapped at his skin. His heart drummed in his chest. That was the only sound he could hear.
He covered his nose with his shirt, squinting through the smoke. Unknown shapes writhed in the haze, and no matter how much he blinked, all he could make out were shadows that might have been mannequins. Somewhere above, something metallic groaned and snapped, but he didn’t flinch.
He pressed on.
Stumbling past a melted chair, he quickly reached out to balance himself against the wall but immediately flinched from the heat. His palm burned red, and he cursed under his breath.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a photo pinned to the wall—two kids in front of a rundown car, both grinning like the world had not yet taught them to be cautious.
His throat tightened.
I need to keep moving…
He found a trail of boot prints in the ash after searching relentlessly, leading toward a door hanging off its hinges.
He stumbled through it tiredly and—
There.
Midst the swirling haze of smoke and licking tongues of flame, a solitary figure was at the far end of the warehouse. It was silhouetted against the angry glow of the fire, slumped wearily against the wall. Head hung low, obscuring his features, while his shoulders rose and fell slowly. Each breath appeared labored and shallow, as if the weight of the world rested heavily upon him.
The scent of burning debris filled his chest, mingling with the heat that radiated from the flames.
“Jamie?” Oliver called while coughing loudly.
The figure stirred.
He looked up at him exhaustedly but remained relatively motionless. Mop of chestnut brown hair plastered to his forehead, streaked with soot and sweat.
It was Jamie.
There was a mix of disbelief and relief in his expression. Like he couldn’t believe Oliver was here.
Flames roared around them like a beast, swallowing steel and timber alike. Smoke coiled thick as rope through the rafters, and somewhere in the chaos, a pipe burst with a hiss, steam searing into the air like a scream.
Oliver squinted through the choking haze, coughing so hard his ribs threatened to crack.
His voice cracked over the sound of the inferno. “Jamie, do you think you could get over here?”
Jamie lifted his head from where he slumped against the blackened wall and shook it slowly, wincing in pain at the movement.
“No,” he rasped, his voice barely audible. “I’m pinned.”
Oliver glanced down.
A wooden beam had collapsed across his right leg, splintered at the edges. Beneath it, he spotted blood seeping in wet pulses. His shin was bent at an angle no human bone should ever follow, white slivers pushing up through torn flesh as if trying to escape his skin.
His heart clawed at his throat. “Alright, alright… hold on a second. I’ll find a way over to you.”
Between them, the floor dipped into a gaping rupture. It looked like a black pit of collapsing supports.
Pursing his lips together with determination, Oliver took a step back and then two. He gauged the distance. Fire danced along the edges as if daring him to try. After inhaling deeply, lungs hitching on ash, he sprinted forward before he could even think about it.
But as he reached the edge, his body locked.
His feet stopped.
Just stopped.
Like gravity had tripled, cementing him into the floor.
“What the—” he growled at himself, knitting his brows together in confusion. “Come on!”
Nothing.
Why were his feet not following his command?
“Jamie, I don’t think I can get to you,” Oliver yelled past the heat.
He glanced up when the beam overhead shifted with a groan, sparks raining down.
“Do you think you could shift the beam off your leg?”
Jamie’s mouth moved but the words were mostly lost to the firestorm.
Oliver noticed how he was merely watching him with an unsettling blank look in his eyes. His eyes weren’t pleading. He was just… waiting as if he knew the ending already.
“Jamie, you hear me, man? I need you to move, now!”
But Jamie merely gazed at him with a hollow sadness in his hazel eyes. His expression revealed no fear or resentment. Only aching sorrow, as if he had come to terms with a harsh reality.
Oliver could feel his panic surging.
“Jamie, don’t you fucking dare!”
“You need to go, Ollie,” he said pleadingly, “before it’s too late.”
“No,” Oliver refuted vehemently, his eyes burning from his tears. “Don’t fucking give up on me, okay? Get up!”
The beam ahead continued to crack warningly.
Jamie flinched at the sound.
Then he smiled at him resignedly, a tear dropping down his cheek. “I love you, little brother.”
Before Oliver could plead with him, the beam above snapped and the ceiling came down.
A scream sounded in the air—whose, he could not tell.
With a roar and a hiss and a plume of white flame, the rafters collapsed between them and the wall buckled. A blinding flash forced Oliver back as debris surged up in a furious gust of smoke and light.
Lying on the floor, he groaned in pain, pushing himself up on his hands. When he looked up again, blinking past the smoke, his eyes widened when he noticed that the wall was gone.
And so was Jamie.
Only the flames remained, eating everything.
Oliver shook his head, refusing to look away even as the heat burned his vision white.
He choked on his tears.
Then he jolted upright.
Body drenched in a cold sweat, his heart raced violently against his ribcage. His wide eyes darted across the shadowy corners of his apartment, chest heaving with each breath. The room felt unusually dark, but his familiar surroundings were transformed by the dim glow of the pulsing router light near his cluttered desk and the amber of a streetlamp filtering through his window.
There was no fire.
There was no Jamie.
Only the haunting memory of that impossible face lingered defiantly in his mind, a ghost that burned behind his closed eyelids. Sweat clung to his back, the dampness sticking his shirt to his skin, amplifying his discomfort.
He pinched his eyes shut tighter, rubbing his forehead vigorously in a futile attempt to push the damp strands of hair away as he struggled to shake off the remnants of his vivid nightmare. A gentle drizzle tapped softly outside on the glass, a soothing lullaby attempting to calm the storm brewing within him.
Then, the intercom buzzed.
His eyes blinked rapidly, drawn reluctantly out of the hangover of sleep. After letting out an irritable groan, he swallowed and swung his legs off the couch.
According to the cracked screen of his watch on the coffee table, it was only five in the morning. Too fucking early for visitors.
Who could be buzzing his apartment at this time?
He crossed the room barefoot with his shirt rumpled and sweatpants low on his hips. He hit the intercom.
No one spoke.
He waited a beat, brow furrowed. Silence hummed on the other end and it almost sounded as if the city itself was holding its breath.
“Who is it?” he asked.
Nothing.
He clicked the lock release anyway.
Low and silent as he crept to his front door, he pulled the pistol from beneath the stack of mail on the side table. Somewhere below, he heard the door to the building groan. Chances was it was some junkie mistaking the buzzer for an invitation. Still his body moved on instinct.
When he opened the front door with his gun behind his back, his brows knitted together at the empty hallway.
The silence was punctuated only by the rhythmic patter of raindrops cascading against the stairwell window.
He lingered at the entrance of his apartment.
Was it perhaps one of his neighbors or a delivery person who had mistakenly rung his buzzer? After a moment of contemplation, he shrugged off the thought and reached to close the door.
As he was turning back into his apartment, something in his periphery caught his eye—a single envelope laid perfectly flat on his welcome mat.
What is that?
Cautiously, he crouched down to retrieve it, his fingertips brushing against the firm cardboard paper. It felt surprisingly weighty, much heavier than an average letter requesting his services should be.
Flipping it around in his hand, he also discovered it was unmarked with no return address.
His brow furrowed in confusion.
Poking his head out further, he looked around, expecting someone to emerge from the shadows. The hallway remained devoid of life.
Who had left this mysterious package at his doorstep?
After clicking the door shut, he carefully opened the envelope and shuffled the items across the glass coffee table. A cheap burner phone and a black flashdrive scratched around the edges clattered out. Along with a note typed on waxy parchment.
Picking up the note, he read what stood on it.
Want to find out how your brother actually died?
Oliver stared down at that question for a really long moment.
Even though his heart was on the verge of beating out of his chest, he still managed to remain outwardly calm.
His breath slowed and he glanced around as he contemplated what this meant.
It had been a while since he’d felt this pain in his chest, not since the night they declared Jamie dead. Since the scent of gasoline on a borrowed jacket. Since the grief of losing his brother became a habit.
Something about this felt… peculiar.
Unlike the typical assignments he had encountered as a private investigator, this one carried a more ambiguous weight.
It was nothing like the thousands of warnings delivered by an old foe from his past either. He had racked up a sizable collection of enemies over the years, each one harboring a grudge from his days as a detective. A handful had even escalated their hostility to death threats.
This was not exactly that.
This note was purposefully vague.
It felt more like a bait.
Something to entice him into a trap.
Who would know the details concerning the death of his brother?
Probably the people he was investigating before the…
Quickly, he threw on the first coat he could find and jogged to the stairwell, skipping the elevator altogether.
The foyer of the building was bathed in flickering fluorescent light from the rain. The smell of mildew was faint from the ceiling leak dripping water into a lone bucket. The other scent that never fully left was old coffee and radiators covered in dust, no matter how many tenants filtered in and out.
Behind the desk sat the landlord, wedged between a rack of mailboxes and a dying potted fern.
The newspaper in his hand rustled slowly.
Why did old people still insist on paperbacks?
“Did anyone come in just now?” Oliver asked in a clipped tone, leaning across the battered laminate as if that might speed up his response. “Like five or ten minutes ago?”
The old man looked up with exaggerated languor. His glasses sat low on his pudgy nose, gray eyebrows raised as if Oliver had just interrupted a deeply personal meditation.
“You owe rent,” he said flatly, not missing a beat.
Oliver stared. “What?”
“Rent,” he repeated, folding the corner of his newspaper. “You know the thing you pay in exchange for shelter?”
“Yeah, I know what rent is.”
“Yours was due three days ago.”
“What does my rent have to do with what I just asked you?” Oliver bit out irritably.
Ahmed exhaled through his nose as if he had just been asked something unreasonably burdensome. He turned another page of his paper in a way that made Oliver want to impatiently strangle him.
“I sent multiple notices,” the old man muttered. “You never respond.”
Oliver pinched his eyes shut, inhaling deeply to keep his composure. “Maybe don’t slide them under my door at like four in the morning.”
“I’ve always delivered messages that way.” Ahmed didn’t even look up. “The only tenants who complain about my methods are the same ones I evict for not paying their rent on time.”
Oliver leveled him with a stare, biting back frustration. “I’m not here to debate you, Mr. Attard. I just need to know if anyone came in the past couple of minutes. Did someone drop something off for me?”
Ahmed finally lowered the newspaper, his brown eyes sharp behind the glasses. “Maybe I did see someone.”
Oliver’s pulse kicked. “When?”
“Maybe ten minutes ago. It could’ve been five. It could’ve been an hour. Time is fluid when you’re reading about the political climate of our country. I swear, we’re run by criminals in fancy suits.”
Oliver leaned forward. “Why didn’t you stop them?”
“I’m a seventy year old man, Mr. Mercer. I barely stop myself from taking afternoon naps.”
“Whoever that was, they left something for me upstairs. I need to know who it was.”
“Then maybe you should pay your rent.” Ahmed finally looked up at him, the frown lines on his forehead showing from his scowl. “People tend to be more helpful when you’re not a month behind.”
Oliver let out a long breath through his teeth. “Fine, I’ll pay my rent soon.”
“Soon?”
“This afternoon.”
Ahmed nodded, satisfied. “Then yes, a young man whom I’ve never seen before came in.”
“A young man?”
“Probably in his twenties.”
“What did he look like?”
“He had his hood up so I could barely see his features. I think he had black hair.”
“Was he from around here?”
“He looked like he belonged in a worse neighborhood. Maybe Floriana or Paceville. When he first walked in here, I thought he was going to stick me up but he was surprisingly polite.”
“What did he say to you?”
“Barely said a word. Just asked me to deliver an envelope to your front door at about five in the morning. I caught some ink on the inside of his wrist.”
“Five?” Oliver glanced over at the clock on the wall. “That was forty minutes ago.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Someone buzzed my intercom five minutes ago.”
Ahmed simply shrugged, back to reading his newspaper. “That sounds like a you problem, Mr. Mercer.”
Well, this was a complete waste of time.
Oliver pushed off the desk, turning to leave.
“Let me guess,” Ahmed called after him, voice rising with triumph, “this has something to do with your dead brother.”
That stopped Oliver in his tracks for a breath, the muscle in his jaw twitching.
“He used to get visitors like that all the time,” he continued.
Without responding, Oliver quickly jogged back upstairs.
Returning to his apartment slightly more irritated than when he left, he hastily grabbed the items off the coffee table and strolled to his bedroom.
After sitting down at his desk, he turned his lamp on to cast a muted gold ring over the keyboard of his computer. Staring at the flashdrive pinched between his fingers curiously, he prayed to god it wouldn’t give him a virus.
Hesitantly, he slid it into the port with a click. His monitor screen blinked to life, prompting him for his password. A string of code he used since… Jamie.
There was only one folder with no title.
Before he could talk himself out of it, he clicked on it.
A few images flickered on his screen.
Surveillance—a still taken from a high angle three nights ago according to the timestamp in the bottom right corner. The front entrance of a club in Sliema. Artem Volkov stepped through its threshold, phone in hand and head slightly bowed. Two bodyguards flanked him like sentinels.
His breathing slowed as he leaned in.
It wasn’t the presence of Volkov that unsettled him; it was the quality of the shots. Whoever took these had a line of sight the press could never dream of. There was no reflection or blur. This wasn’t stolen by chance.
He flicked through more frames.
Artem crossing the street, coat catching in the wind.
Artem pausing beside his bodyguard, snapping open a gold lighter and cupping the flame for him.
Artem glancing to his right and reaching out to shake hands with someone slightly out of frame.
Something in that last image made his hand still on the mousepad. He blinked and zoomed in to try and see the other man, but he was just out of center so there would be no clean facial identification, barely a jawline in the light.
Their handshake was not a casual brush of hands either.
Oliver leaned in.
The other man was gripping Artem’s hand with an edge of caution.
Zooming in even further, his eyes narrowed.
Looking closer, he caught a small tattoo on the wrist of the other man. It looked a bit like a bird in a cage. Was that a gang affiliation tattoo? Were they exchanging something? Drugs? The way Artem nodded a fraction and how the other man curled his left thumb inward, brushing his own palm…
Something about it reeked of distrust.
He sat back, pulse throbbing through his wrist.
Whoever sent this envelope to him was not offering information out of the kindness of their hearts.
What did they want him to do with this?
He didn’t even realize he was holding his breath until the burner came alive on the desk with a flat blue glow. It vibrated loudly.
He reached for it cautiously.
It stuttered once before settling as if remembering how to operate.
A single text arrived.
Unknown: Pantograph, 10 p.m.
His brows furrowed curiously.
Oliver: Who are you?
No response.
The Pantograph.
From what little he knew about the club, it was a private lounge for people both in high society and the criminal underworld. It was well beyond the reach of tourists but never far from rumors. It was also owned by the biggest crime lord in Sliema, Artem himself. He had only heard its name from Jamie in the context of transactions that didn’t leave paper trails. The only way to get into that place was to get an invite.
Was this perhaps Emil’s doing?
Would he send him an unmarked envelope without informing him?
Oliver set the burner down carefully and grabbed his own phone from the cluttered bedside table. After unlocking it, he immediately dialed the number of the only person he could count on when he felt like he was in over his head.
No answer.
Just the familiar loop of a jazz trumpet. Code for being off the grid. Waiting a few minutes to see if he would come online, he gnawed on his bottom lip anxiously. But after five minutes had gone by listening to the same loop over and over, he cursed under his breath and hung up.
Just as he was about to put his phone away, it vibrated in his hand.
He glanced down, the screen flashing Unknown Caller.
But Oliver knew.
“Emil,” he answered on instinct.
“Talk.” He gave him no greeting, just a single word to slice through any pleasantries that might waste his time.
“Someone dropped of an envelope at my front door forty minutes ago.”
For a moment, silence was his only response.
“Did you just call me to waste my time, Mercer?” Emil mused with a hint of sarcasm. “Don’t you receive job requests through envelopes all the time?”
After rolling his eyes, he clarified, “No, this isn’t like usual.”
“How come?”
“It was unmarked. No address, no name. Just a burner phone, a flashdrive, and a note.”
Silence stretched on the other end.
“And?” Emil mused impatiently.
“I plugged in the drive. There were surveillance images of Artem outside the club he owns in Sliema.”
Emil was quietly processing his words, and he could almost hear him blink. “And you’re telling me this because…”
“Because I thought it came from you.”
“That’s flattering,” Emil muttered, “but no. I didn’t send you some spy kit through the mail. Who would even have the guts to show themselves after what happened to—”
“I don’t know,” Oliver cut him off before he could complete his sentence. “That’s why I called.”
A beat passed.
“What else was in the envelope?”
“Just the drive, the burner, the note.”
“What did the note say?”
Oliver swallowed past the lump growing in his throat.
He hated being reminded of his brother. Even though, he still heard his voice from time to time. In the voicemail recordings he often listened to. That dry laugh echoing down the hallway. Always just out of reach, like the tail end of a dream he could not quite hang onto.
“It was asking if I wanted to know how… Jamie died.”
The line hissed faintly from his background.
He could imagine the kid sitting hunched over in his dimly lit room with a cup of coffee, fingers dancing across the keys of his mechanical keyboard. An array of six glowing monitors with the distorted faces of his next targets in a pursuit of vengeance for besting him in a shooters.
Emil was no ordinary person; he was a paranoid genius. Oliver often found the kid inscrutable. Always two steps ahead.
“Sounds like a lure.”
“I know.”
“This is exactly how Jamie vanished,” Emil said warningly. “He foolishly followed a lead into a place that usually doesn’t spit you out, and when it does, usually you wind up… well, dead.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“So now that I’ve confirmed this didn’t come from me, you’re gonna let it go, right?”
Oliver remained quiet.
“Oliver?”
“He was my brother, Emil,” Oliver said again, quieter this time.
“And he was my friend,” Emil replied bluntly but even through the line, he could hear the edge to his voice.
That was different.
Jamie had always been a constant in his life. The boy behind him in every family photo. The kid who shared his room, fought with him over cereal, covered for him the night they sneaked out to a protest in high school. He was the reason Oliver joined the police instead of running from it. The reason he believed in law before he learned how thin justice wore in certain precincts.
Oliver opened his mouth and then closed it. There was no use explaining that kind of loss to someone who had not felt it live in their bones.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Emil was still talking. “You’re gonna go after this lead even with the risk of death looming over your head. And what, hope you find something that spits his name back at you?”
“You know me that well?”
“I know Jamie would’ve done the same and you tend to mirror his every move.”
That stopped him cold because Emil was right.
Jamie would’ve gone after this lead… which was exactly why he never came back.
“You sure you wanna get involved in whatever this is?”
“I don’t have a choice,” Oliver replied, too quickly.
“You do,” Emil snapped. “You always do. You could take this to Elias, let him kick it upstairs. Let people with actual resources deal with it.”
Oliver almost laughed. “Elias left that life behind. He won’t take the bait.”
“Then burn it all,” Emil insisted. “Go radio silent. I’ll immediately purge your data traces if the flash was somehow used to hack your computer. You can pretend this never happened.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Why?”
Oliver closed his eyes. “Because if there’s a chance I could… find out what happened to him, I’ll take it. Even if it ends with me dying.”
On the other end, Emil sighed heavily. “You’re such an idiot.”
“Probably.”
Emil sighed exasperatedly. “Send me what you’ve got.”
“What?”
“Send me what you got so I can dig through it on my end.”
“You’re not gonna talk me out of it?”
“I spent six months doing that with your brother,” he said. “Turns out all my efforts lost me valuable time.”
Oliver could hear the frustration in his tone.
“If you wanna rush headfirst into the lion’s den, be my fucking guest. But we do it my way. That’s the only way you’re gonna have a chance at getting out of his circle without dying. You might be completely suicidal but I would be a little… upset if you died.”
“I’ll be careful.” Oliver chuckled, a breath of relief escaping along with the tension. “You know me.”
“I do.” Emil sighed with a tinge of irritation. “Which is why I also know you’re gonna need me to comb through fifteen terabytes of Malta’s digital refuse for a way to get in that club without an invitation from someone already in the circle.”
Oliver paused. “Can you?”
“You’re actually insufferable.” Emil immediately clicked into motion, his keyboard tapping sounding faintly in the background. “Give me ten minutes.”
“Thank you,” he muttered.
“Don’t thank me yet,” Emil said. “The last time we followed Volkov, a warehouse got torched and I lost a VPN node that took me months to set up.”
He licked his lips nervously.
“Also, you need to buy me a ton of snacks for the all-nighter I’ll be pulling for you. The imported kind.”
“Is that all you care about?”
“Excuse me but who’s the genius taking time out of his day to save your ass again?”
“You?”
“What do you think I need to keep myself refueled?”
“But why does it have to be imported?”
“I’d appreciate it if you just let me work my magic without questioning my methods, Mercer.”
“Okay.”
“You also need to get the fuck out of that apartment since they already know where you live. Get to a safehouse immediately. Use a burner route so you don’t get tailed. And keep me updated. You don’t sneeze without telling me.”
Then Emil muttered something in German before abruptly hanging up.
Oliver stared at the dark screen for a second before releasing a deep breath.
This kid…
He leaned back in his chair, looking outside at the sky. It had started turning into an orange hue from the sun peeking through the gray clouds.
Jamie didn’t come back from chasing this man. Whoever sent this to him knew Oliver would not be able to resist a chance to burn the man responsible for his death. Even though it could be a lure to tie up any loose ends with Jamie.
He let out a measured breath and looked down at the burner.
Still, this was not a lead he was willing to forgo.
It was a chance to make sure that Jamie didn’t die for nothing.
