Ghost learned she was alive from an enemy’s mistake.

It started as noise—an intercepted transmission that shouldn’t have mattered. A throwaway line about a woman who wouldn’t break. A prisoner who kept fighting even when the chains cut skin. No name. No face. Just a detail that lodged itself under his ribs and refused to move.

He lost his mind quietly at first.

He tore through intel with a precision that scared the analysts. Sleepless, ruthless, surgical. He rewound footage until his eyes burned, froze frames that showed nothing, convinced himself meaning hid between pixels. He stopped eating. Stopped joking. Stopped pretending this was just another war.

Then the confirmation came.

Enemy markings. Black-site coordinates. A transfer log scrubbed too clean to be innocent. And a single word used in three separate reports by three different captors who never compared notes:

Problem.

Ghost snapped.

He didn’t ask for permission. He didn’t brief command. He turned safe houses into planning rooms and allies into weapons. Interrogations became brutal, efficient, final. Men talked because he made silence unbearable. He dismantled a network cell by cell, not to win—but to get closer.

Every hour she stayed in enemy hands rewrote him.

He imagined her hurt. Starved. Laughing through blood just to spite them. The thought hollowed him out and filled him with something feral. He stopped caring who noticed. The mask no longer hid calm—it hid restraint.

By the time he reached the desert facility, there was nothing left to negotiate.

He burned it down to the sand.

And when he finally saw her—alive, chained to a wall wearing nothing but a blood dried shirt that hang loose over her frame, standing, eyes dull yet still sharp despite everything—his knees almost gave. Relief hit him like a bullet, followed immediately by rage so violent it made his hands shake.

She had survived them.

But Ghost knew one thing with brutal clarity:

They would never survive what he had become while she was gone.