The power flickered in the city that night.
Not everywhere — just in pulses. One district after another.
Brief. Untraceable. Enough to spike fear, to trip alarms, to remind everyone that nothing was as secure as they thought.
It wasn’t random.
Eve was turning the lights off.
Nathan dropped the flash drive in Harper’s office.
No name. No fingerprints. No signature.
But inside:
A full dossier on Nova Trade’s laundering ring.
Photos of Krane.
The false ledgers Vasha had planted.
Whistleblower testimony from a very recently disappeared accountant.
All of it untraceable back to Eve.
All of it leading to a public scandal.
He didn’t say why he did it.
But Harper thought he was finally “committed.”
He let her believe it.
She didn’t see the second drive Nathan kept — the one with names from the task force itself. “The ones who didn’t want the organization dismantled — just owned.”
That drive stayed in his coat pocket.
A secret.
A choice.
Not yet made.
Marco moved on the first of the five names.
Not to kill.
To watch.
A man named Cole — a broker who’d once funneled cartel money through synthetic fronts. Now playing clean, quiet, “rehabilitated.”
Marco tailed him through four neighborhoods, three meetings, one charity fundraiser.
Didn’t touch him.
Just left a photo in the man’s glovebox:
An open grave. Fresh earth. No name.
Just a single white daisy laid at the edge — the mark everyone knew to fear.
Message clear: She knows where you buried your sins. She can bury you, too.
Vasha found the envelope where she’d been told it would be — taped beneath a pew in a long-abandoned church, its stained glass boarded, its altar stripped bare.
No name on the envelope. But she knew the handwriting.
Inside, a single note, penned in sharp black ink:
“Phase Two begins. Deliver in person. No middlemen.”
No signature. None needed.
She read the second slip tucked inside — and felt the weight of what it meant. Her breath caught.
This would start a war.
Somewhere across the city, Eve would be waiting. Watching.
And Vasha, folding the note back in place, whispered to no one:
“And if Nathan chooses wrong?”
No answer came.
But she already knew what it would be.
He’s not the man she thought he was.
That night, Nathan broke into a secured evidence archive.
He wore no gloves. Made no effort to hide.
He didn’t take weapons. Didn’t touch drugs.
He took one file.
Case #R-3147
Closed five years ago.
A double homicide, staged to look like an internal cartel dispute.
Buried deep in archives no one was supposed to check.
But in the margin of the file, scribbled in faded ink:
A daisy. Just a sketch. Simple. But unmistakable.
The symbol that had surfaced like a ghost across old scenes — on walls, on notes, on bodies.
The one no one could trace to a face.
Not officially.
Nathan didn’t steal the file.
He rewrote it.
Removed the flower. Reclassified the case as non-organized. Flagged it for deletion in the next system purge.
Then he walked out, file closed, trail buried.
A janitor saw him as he passed. Paused mid-sweep.
“Detective?”
Nathan glanced back and smiled — the polite kind that left no trace.
“Sorry. Thought I left something behind.”
Then he stepped into the dark.
Elsewhere, Cole opened his car. Saw the photo Marco had left.
He didn’t scream. He didn’t call anyone.
He simply got in, turned on the engine, and drove to a closed bank three hours north.
He opened a lockbox, pulled a burner, and made a call.
The man who answered didn’t speak.
Cole only said three words.
“She’s moving again.”
Then he hung up.
Far below the city, in an old bomb shelter Eve had retrofitted into a war room, a red light blinked on a map.
It marked the call.
The city’s elite — the ones who wore suits and owned prisons and called themselves “respectable” — had heard the whisper.
Eve was no longer hiding.
She was hunting.
Baawa Unfiltered 