Chapter 89: Dark Web
The lock clicked open with a heavy metallic clack.
Ryan pushed the door to his apartment open. He stepped inside and stopped.
The space was completely, utterly silent.
The folding chairs were stacked neatly against the wall. The whiteboards had been wiped clean, leaving only faint grey streaks of marker dust. The tangle of extension cords and charging bricks that had choked the kitchen island was gone.
The team had packed up. They had cleaned the entire space, erasing almost every trace of the chaotic, high-pressure startup that had occupied his living room.
The only thing left behind was a faint, lingering smell of stale coffee.
Ryan dropped his keys into the ceramic bowl by the door. The sound echoed off the bare walls.
It felt strange. The aggressive, chaotic energy of Mike, Danny, and Iralis had become a constant, vibrating background noise. Now, standing alone in the center of the room, the silence felt odd.
He walked into the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, and cracked the plastic seal. He downed half of it in three seconds.
He walked over to his small dining table, pulled out the chair, and opened his personal laptop.
The screen flared to life, casting a harsh, pale glow over his features.
He didn’t open his email. He didn’t check the company Slack channel.
Instead, he reached for his phone and dialed Zara.
They had fallen into a rhythm over the past week. A phone call every night, usually late, bridging the gap between her chaotic shooting schedules and his frantic development sprints.
It rang twice before she picked up.
"I see you’ve had a busy afternoon," Zara said. Her voice was smooth, velvety, carrying that distinct, unhurried cadence that always managed to lower his blood pressure by a fraction.
"I have," Ryan said, setting the phone on speaker and dropping it onto the table beside his laptop. He cracked his knuckles, resting his fingers over the keyboard. "I’m assuming you saw the photo."
"Hard to miss it when my publicist sends it to me in all caps," Zara replied. The faint sound of a lighter flicking echoed through the speaker, followed by a slow exhale. "A mystery girl. Midtown high-rise. She looked very... engaged."
Ryan’s fingers hovered over the keys. He pulled up a specialized, encrypted browser he hadn’t used since his college days, back when he and Danny used to poke around corners of the internet they had no business visiting.
"She’s my lead designer," Ryan said, keeping his tone perfectly even. "We were touring the new commercial office space for the company. The paparazzi caught a bad angle."
"A bad angle," Zara repeated, the skepticism dripping off the vowels.
"An incredibly bad angle," Ryan confirmed. He typed a string of commands into the terminal, routing his connection through a proxy server in Switzerland, then bouncing it through two more nodes in Iceland and Panama.
"Are you apologizing, Ryan?"
"I’m explaining," he corrected, his eyes tracking the scrolling lines of code on his screen. "I told you from the beginning I wouldn’t lie to you. The company is expanding. She works for me. That’s the reality of the picture."
A long pause hung on the line.
Ryan waited, his thumb tracing the edge of his spacebar. He knew she was testing the boundary, feeling out the structural integrity of his answer.
"Mmm," Zara finally said, the tension bleeding out of her voice, replaced by a softer, more intimate tone. "Your PR strategy is terrible."
"I’m firing my publicist tomorrow," Ryan deadpanned.
He didn’t have a publicist.
Zara laughed. It was a genuine, melodic sound that briefly cut through the cold, dark reality of the terminal window glowing on his screen.
"Are we still on for Friday?" Ryan asked. The browser finally locked in, confirming a secure, untraceable connection.
"We are," Zara said. "Wouldn’t miss it. I’m already mentally prepared to get beer spilled on my shoes in thos damn nosebleed seats."
"You won’t have to worry about the shoes," Ryan said, navigating away from the standard search engines. He typed in a complex, multi-layered Onion routing address he had memorized years ago. "I secured a private suite."
"A private suite," Zara murmured, clearly impressed. "You really are pulling out all the stops, Mr. Russo."
"I told you I was prepared to do most things to close the gap."
"I’ll hold you to that. Pick me up at six."
"Count on it. Goodnight, Zara."
"Goodnight, Ryan."
The call clicked off. The apartment plunged back into absolute silence.
Ryan picked up the phone, turned it completely off, and shoved it away from the laptop.
He leaned closer to the screen.
The regular internet dropped away. The sterile, polished graphics of social media and banking portals vanished, replaced by the stark, brutalist architecture of the dark web.
The text was jagged, the interfaces archaic, built purely for function over form.
He bypassed the narcotic markets. He ignored the stolen credential dumps.
He navigated toward the encrypted forums dealing in private military contracting, corporate espionage, and unregulated physical retrieval.
The screen illuminated his face, casting deep, harsh shadows under his eyes.
He needed specialists. Men who didn’t exist on paper. Professionals who could breach a reinforced steel door, wouldn’t flinch at guns, crack a biometric safe, and extract a physical flash drive without leaving a digital footprint.
He opened a secure, anonymous messaging board.
He created a burner alias.
Target: Heavily armed likely Mafia outpost, NYC local.
Objective: Physical retrieval of a locked steel briefcase. No digital copies exist. Destruction of all onsite resistance authorized.
Budget: Unlimited.
Ryan stared at the glowing white text against the black screen.
He was crossing a threshold. Paying a designer a hundred grand was business. Fucking a venture capitalist in her office was leverage.
Buying a hit squad to battle a mafia crew was a point of no return.
His jaw tightened. He thought of the heavy, Italian accent and the video file holding Diana’s career, Zara’s reputation, and his own life hostage.
Ryan’s finger dropped onto the enter key.
The request vanished into the dark, swallowed by the criminal underground.
He sat back in his chair, staring at the empty terminal window, waiting for the monsters to answer his call.