She wasn’t supposed to exist.
Not in the way normal people did.
She had grown up on the edges of war, buried in places that governments denied existed, raised between shadows where survival didn’t come from luck—it came from calculation.
Her father wasn’t a soldier.
Not in the conventional sense.
He wasn’t enlisted, wasn’t trained under a flag, wasn’t bound by any uniform or rank.
But he was dangerous.
The kind of dangerous that made intelligence agencies nervous.
He slipped between borders, changed identities as easily as most people changed clothes.
Sometimes he was a fixer.
Sometimes a broker, moving information through channels no official agency could trace.
And sometimes, when everything else failed—he was a problem solver.
He had rules.
Lines he wouldn’t cross.
But rules didn’t always mean survival.
And one day, he didn’t come back.
She learned quickly.
There was no room for weakness, no time for childhood, no space for mistakes.
She spent years moving between identities, between countries, between safe houses built for people who weren’t supposed to be tracked.
She adapted.
When someone was looking for her, she became invisible. When someone needed her gone, she disappeared first. When the world pushed her into a corner, she found the cracks and slipped through them.
And for a while, it worked.
Until someone found her.
She wakes up somewhere unfamiliar.
It’s not a prison.
Not yet.
But it’s close enough.
The air smells like old concrete and military-grade disinfectant, the kind that clears evidence before anyone asks questions. She’s restrained—not aggressively, not cruelly, but precisely, like someone has already decided she’s a risk.
She exhales slowly.
Calculates.
Then the door unlocks.
Captain Price steps in first, steady, unreadable, wise enough to know that patience was its own form of interrogation.
Ghost follows, lingering near the doorway, silent and ruthless, a shadow just beyond the reach of the fluorescent light overhead.
Soap leans against the wall, arms crossed, bold enough to demand answers but smart enough to let Price lead.
Gaz watches carefully, scanning every movement, adaptable in the way he reads the room, in the way he waits for something to go wrong.
Roach doesn’t speak, but he doesn’t need to—he’s already read the situation, already assessed the risk.
Krueger stands farther back, posture rigid, predatory. He doesn’t trust her.
Neither does Nikolai, though his interest is different—more opportunistic than cautious, weighing the value of whatever information she might carry.
Farah watches with sharp eyes, tactical, principle-bound, searching for honesty before judgment.
Alex is last to enter, scanning her for injuries, for weaknesses, for answers.
A full room.
A full assessment.
And all of them waiting for the same thing.
Price flips open the file he’s holding, empty pages staring back at her.
“You don’t exist,” he says.
The words linger in the room, heavy but not unexpected.
She exhales quietly.
She already knew that.
Knew her records were wiped, knew her name wasn’t attached to anything real.
That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that they knew that too.
Price sets the file down.
“No one just appears in our crosshairs without a reason.”
He watches her carefully, weighing silence against the truth.
Then, Soap scoffs, pushing off the wall. “So what, you’ve got no name, no past, just waltzed onto our radar like a bloody ghost?”
Ghost shifts slightly at the term but says nothing.
Nikolai tilts his head, amused. “Everyone has a past,” he murmurs. “Some just bury it deeper than others.”
Price ignores them, keeping his focus locked on her.
“You don’t look surprised,” he says finally.
She doesn’t respond.
Doesn’t react.
Because if TF141 found her, that means someone else is looking too.
And she isn’t ready for whoever comes next.