"Then, just a second."
Emil shut the door with a nervous smile. From behind it, Julius heard a hurried call, "Honey!" Julius’s gaze narrowed as he listened.
——Got him.
The confirmation arrived a mont later. At the back of the house, Klaus Weber had already intercepted Emil, dragging him away from the half-opened rear exit where he had attempted to flee.
They had anticipated it, had planned for it, and just as Julius expected, Emil fell right into the trap.
Julius kicked the front door open. From the corner of his eye, he saw a woman sitting up in bed, clutching the sheets in shock, but he didn’t spare her more than a glance.
His focus was already on the rear exit. Klaus had Emil pinned to the ground.
"W-Who are you people?!" Emil shouted.
Julius walked over and lowered himself to one knee beside him. He grabbed Emil’s chin, forcing his face upward.
"We’re with the Directorate. And we have a few questions for you, Bauer. Specifically about Beißwenger."
"I don’t know! I don’t know any Beißwenger!"
"Then why’d you try to run?"
"...."
The silence that followed was more damning than anything Emil could have said.
Emil had always been an elusive figure. There should have been no trail leading Joachim to him. Yet these n had found him anyway. And as Emil stared into Julius’s cold eyes, he realized it for certain.
He was done for.
* * *
Smack——
"Still not talking?"
"...."
Smack——
Once more, Julius’s fist connected cleanly with Emil’s jaw. The man slumped in the chair as his cheek swelled dark purple. Blood sared across the floor and the front of his shirt.
He grabbed Emil’s hair and forced his head up.
Julius grabbed a fistful of Emil’s hair and forced his head up. Emil winced, eyes squeezing shut before he t Julius’s stare with a tremble.
"Do you even understand why you’re here?" Julius asked.
"...."
"Remind ," Julius continued "how does the Directorate operate?"
Emil didn’t answer, nor did he want to. Because he understood exactly what Julius was implying. The Directorate did not move blindly. They did not stumble onto information by accident.
If Julius had found him, if the Directorate had cornered him in his own ho, then soone close to him had opened their mouth.
Soone who shouldn’t have.
"You really need a better eye on won, Bauer," Julius said. "Is Maria worth all this trouble? Honestly, she looks like a cheap whore to ."
"...."
"But cheap whores have one advantage. They talk."
"...."
"A lot."
Emil’s eyes widened at Julius’s words. Maria was his girlfriend. His real girlfriend. Not the woman in his house, nor the affairs he kept on the side. Maria was the one he trusted, the Bonnie to his Clyde.
She wouldn’t have betrayed him.
She couldn’t have.
"Judging by your silence," Julius said, "I can tell you already figured it out. That’s good. Saves ti."
Emil swallowed hard. "She... she wouldn’t..."
"She did."
Emil leaned back, eyes wide in disbelief.
What Emil didn’t know was that Julius was bluffing. The Directorate hadn’t dug up information on any Maria, nor did Julius didn’t need them to. Everything he needed was already in his head, pulled from mories of a life nobody else rembered.
In that tiline, Julius had hunted Emil for years, long enough to learn every corner of the man’s life, every person he had touched, and every mistake he had made.
The only reason Julius hadn’t arrested him earlier in this life was that Emil had ties to Naless. However, the priority had now shifted. A single na mattered more than a ghost.
Joachim Pascal Beißwenger.
The man whose escape would trigger the Triplet Tower tragedy. The man whose cris would kill thousands. The man who would take Lara, who had yet to be born, from him again if Julius failed to intervene.
And if capturing Emil now ant forfeiting a chance to corner Naless again, then so be it. Preventing that catastrophe ca first.
"So, are you ready to start talking?"
"...."
For a long mont, Emil only stared at the floor. But eventually, he exhaled and sagged back in his chair.
"There’s... a contact," he said. "Soone Joachim paid a ridiculous amount to. At first, I didn’t understand. I thought there was no way so black-market broker could pull off sothing that impossible. Moving a prisoner like him through borders and escaping checkpoints... it shouldn’t have been doable."
Julius’s eyes narrowed. "And?"
"But then I saw it. When everything that shouldn’t have been possible suddenly was... I finally understood."
"Understood what?"
Emil lifted his gaze, terror deep into his expression.
"The devil."
"...."
"He paid the devil."
* * *
Julius stepped out of the interrogation room, wiping the blood from his knuckles with a folded handkerchief. Klaus stood waiting near the wall with his arms crossed, narrowing the mont he saw Julius approach. He pushed off the wall and t him halfway.
"Did you get sothing out of him?"
Julius finished folding the stained handkerchief and threw it into a nearby trash bin.
"Yeah. But this might prove troubleso."
"What did he say?"
"I can’t say it’s confird," Julius said. "But according to him, Joachim has fled to Russia."
"...."
"He said he helped smuggle him across the border. Claims Joachim was extracted through an underground route that bypasses every standard checkpoint. If that’s true, then soone with serious influence pulled strings for him."
"And this soone... did Emil disclose anything else?" Klaus asked.
"No. Only that Joachim paid an obscene amount on the black market for the contact. That’s all he would admit."
"Your eyes tell you know more than you’re saying, Officer Schneider."
Julius held an unfamiliar chill as he t Klaus’s stare directly. "Then tell , sir... would you believe if I said that the one pulling the strings is a ghost?"
"...A ghost?"
"I’ve been chasing one for nearly five months now," Julius said. "Soone whose existence is only ever confird by secondhand accounts. Soone who appears in stray docunts that contradict each other. And every ti you try to follow a trail, you hit a wall of information that simply does not make sense."
"...."
"Soone who, on paper, doesn’t exist."
Julius was certain.
"Tell what you know."
It was undoubtedly Naless.
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