Chapter 2

I was still on the floor. The dizziness didn’t fade—it deepened.

My vision flickered with fragments: a short, sharp gunshot in the dark; waves slapping a hull; a deck humming faintly under my boots; the cool edge of a hard unit badge against my chest; and a man’s back in a worn jacket, turning just enough to show half his profile.

I clenched my back teeth and pressed my fingertips into the floor to push myself up, but my hand trembled out of control.

The fragments didn’t scatter. They linked together, as if threaded on a wire, and surged into my head.

Not hallucinations—memories.

My throat tightened. Something squeezed my chest, and my breath hitched for a second.

Then a name rose in my mind, clear as fresh ink bleeding through a wiped page—

I wasn’t Eddie.

I was Jack Reynolds.

The moment that thought formed, something dormant inside me woke up.

The familiar sequence of muscle engagement snapped back into place—shoulders, back, legs—along with an instant inventory of pain: bruised ribs on the right, raw wrists, a banged knee. None of it would slow me down.

Out of the corner of my eye, I scanned the hall. The men dragging the stranger were already headed deeper inside, leaving a dark red smear that trailed toward the end of the corridor.

People around me started laughing again, talking again, like what just happened was nothing more than someone spilling a bucket of trash. Only I knew that whispered line in my ear had yanked me out of a three-year shell.

It was like a gate had opened in my head. The mission’s starting point, the orders, the details—everything came back clean and fast.

Three years ago, I left the Marine Corps under the name “Jack Reynolds” and transferred into the Black Obsidian unit as team leader.

We were built for quiet work: infiltrate, collect proof, grab the key person if possible, and pass everything up the chain so the real takedown could happen outside.

The Grey Wolf Alliance was one of our targets. On paper, they were the “Port Services Group,” a contractor handling dockside cleaning, waste removal, ship supplies, night security, and loading crews. Behind that front, they ran human trafficking transfers, smuggling, money laundering—people logged like cargo, moved, and erased.

My orders had been simple: get inside Grey Wolf, obtain their transfer routes and contact list, confirm which warehouses, which lines, which ships, and then push the evidence out so the outside force could tear the whole chain down in one strike.

The problem was that I looked too much like what I was.

My posture, my gait, my reactions—any experienced guard would smell it.

Harris evaluated me back then and didn’t sugarcoat it: if I walked in as myself, I wouldn’t last a week.

So they used another method.

Memory sealing. Hypnotic infiltration.

After the procedure, I would become someone else—down to a fabricated history.

I would forget who I was, forget my training, forget the mission. I would turn into a dock janitor drowning in debt, named Eddie—timid, compliant, unable to fight back.

That was the only way I could get in alive and stay in without raising suspicion.

The mission window was three months—enough time to embed, earn access, and map the place.

After three months, Harris would send someone in to wake me up.

But now, three years had passed before my memory returned.

I forced my thoughts into order. The details sharpened with every breath. The “stranger” from earlier wasn’t a stranger at all—he was my man, Ben Carter. And the line he’d whispered—“Daybreak. Time to wake up.”—was the trigger phrase to break the hypnosis.

It was three years late.

This wasn’t a delayed plan. It was a broken one.

The recovery protocol hadn’t started, or it had failed, or the person responsible was gone.

Either way, it meant one thing: I’d been forgotten inside Grey Wolf. Outside, they probably thought I was dead.

I braced a hand on the cleaning cart and tried to stand. My foot slid on a puddle.

The instant I caught my balance, a boot drove in hard from the side, right into my ribs.

Pain slammed into bone like a metal bar. My breath was cut off, and I was kicked back to the floor, my shoulder blade smacking the tile with a dull thud.

“Zoning out?” a voice pressed down from above, carrying alcohol and deliberate malice. “Who do you think you are—getting bumped and then playing dead?”

I looked up and saw Roy, wearing that familiar grin he saved for people he wanted to humiliate.

A few men stood behind him with their hands in their pockets, waiting for a show.

He added another kick—hard, but measured. Not enough to knock me out. Enough to make me hurt and obey.

“Get up, Eddie.” He grabbed my collar and hauled me partway up. “Mop it. You turned the hall into this mess. Cargo’s coming in—if the boss sees it, that’s on you.”

I could feel the muscles in my right arm tighten on instinct.

If I lifted my hand—just once—caught his wrist at the right angle, turned, drove an elbow, locked the joint… I could have him on his knees in three seconds.

No one in this hall would stop the first wave.

But I didn’t move.

I slowed my breathing and let my body look like what they expected: a janitor who’d been kicked too many times to stand straight.

I even let my shoulders sag, like soft bone used to being yanked around.

“Sorry,” I said, low and hoarse. “I’ll clean it up.”

Roy gave a satisfied grunt, released my collar, and turned to his men. “Keep an eye on him. This trash loves to slack.”

I pushed myself up slowly, righted the cleaning cart, and picked up the mop again.

The dirty water spread farther. I mopped it cleaner. Not rushed, not angry—deliberately dull, deliberately slow.

Someone walked by and deliberately stepped onto the part I’d just cleaned. I simply mopped it again.

My head stayed down, but my mind ran fast, rebuilding the night’s rhythm: who was on duty, who controlled the doors, how patrol routes rotated every fifteen minutes, where the cameras went blind, when the loading area got loudest, which corridor lights were cut in half after midnight.

Three years of patterns, now reorganized into a usable map.

Ben Carter had thrown himself at me in that hall under full eyes. That meant he knew where I was—and he came in with a purpose.

The direction they dragged him was the holding block.

Grey Wolf wouldn’t leave a half-dead man in the hall. They’d toss him into a cell, squeeze him for information, or let him die.

I had to get Ben out first.

I dragged the last streak of water into a corner, wrung out the mop, and pushed the cart toward the supply room.

At the far end of the corridor, a metal door opened and shut. Faint yelling and laughter leaked through.

That was the holding block.

I didn’t let my eyes linger. I locked the order of operations into place: find where Ben was kept, create a reason to get close, move him during the shift gap, and use the maintenance hatch to get him out through the waste tunnel.

Once he was outside, I’d come back for what I came here for—the transfer routes, the contact list, the spine of Grey Wolf’s network.

I turned the cart into a darker corridor, the lights stretching long shadows across the floor.

The ringing in my ears hadn’t fully faded, but the phrase was no longer an echo. It was a clear instruction—

Daybreak. Time to wake up.