UPSIDE DOWN

~ 45 ~

Sylvie 

We'd rehearsed Plan E the same way we rehearsed everything: until the muscles remembered the motions and our words felt like armor. 

When Part Two slipped through our fingers, Angelo scrawled new lines across the map and told us to breathe, to move, to be smaller and smarter. We switched tactics, less glitter, more grip, choke points tightened, legal teams repositioned, every safe-house route cross-checked twice more.

"Viktor's arrogance is his tether," Angelo said, voice low. "If he thinks we're panicking, he'll lash out. Stay cold. Stay precise."

We went to work.

Phase Three — Attempt Two

This time the bait was subtler. We seeded a false meeting: a courier who supposedly carried a small dossier that would "prove" the final chain of Viktor's supply. It was a breadcrumb for his lieutenants, not a billboard. We planned for a short snatch-and-grab, immediate legal handoff, evidence uploaded in real time. 

The window, forty minutes. The perimeter closed; Aurelio's men were in position, Nico's feeds had three redundant verifications. Luca's grip on my hand was steady. I told myself to breathe like that was an instruction, not a plea.

It started well. The courier appeared where we expected. A black sedan rolled into the lot. A low-level lieutenant, not Viktor himself, stepped out to meet the contact. The exchange was clean and quick. We were almost smiling when the first problem popped up.

"Unit five's down," Nico said in my ear. "Signal loss at the eastern vent. Rebooting now."

Three seconds. Again. Tiny, obscene seconds.

"Cover the east vent," Aurelio snapped. "Matteo, take point."

We tightened. The snatch was supposed to be surgical, a legal team steps in, papers are stamped, the courier is secured under witness protocol. Instead, men in the lot broke into chaos: two of Viktor's guys showed up faster than expected, and then another car cut across our planned exit.

Andrea's command was a whip. "Hold. Don't escalate. Legal teams, you go now. Officers, move in with paperwork only. Do it clean."

But Viktor had learned. He'd anticipated a snatch like this and he had brought an improvisation of his own: a decoy van, a panic diversion, and a man we hadn't expected, someone who stepped out of a third vehicle and moved with the intimate casualness of someone who knew the smells of our operations.

He smiled at the courier in a way that made my stomach drop. "Nice try," he said. "But you're cutting the wrong thread."

Then he looked up. Right at our van. Right into the camera where, just an hour before, we'd placed a silhouette of me as bait. His eyes flicked, lightning quick, and he laughed, a small, private sound that meant he'd expected this exact choreography.

"Abort!" Andrea barked.

We did. The legal teams pulled back. The courier was bundled into an official vehicle, which should have been safe, but Viktor's men surged and a scuffle broke out. Aurelio's team collided with them in the alley; honks and shouts filled the air as civilian cars were shoved aside. It felt like the plan was disintegrating under our feet.

Then something stranger happened. A voice I knew, the one that had made my chest ache with something that wasn't quite trust anymore, came over my earpiece.

"Sylvie," Oscar said, low and calm. "Now would be a bad time to improvise."

My blood went cold. Oscar, our friend, the one who brought me coffee and jokes and a ridiculous tenderness the family tolerated, was not supposed to be on any channel. He wasn't part of this. He was a civilian, a family friend. He had no business in the net.