The safehouse was a sterile tomb.
Reinforced concrete walls. No windows. A single steel door with a magnetic lock that required a six-digit code and a biometric scan. The air smelled like filtered nothing, scrubbed clean of any trace of humanity.
Layla... I still couldn't think of her as Aisha, not anymore... moved through the space with practiced efficiency. She'd shed the careful mask of Dimitri's secretary the moment we'd crossed the threshold. Now she was all sharp angles and cold focus, a predator in her natural habitat.
She dropped the data stick onto a metal table in the center of the room and pulled out a laptop from a locked cabinet. Military-grade encryption. Triple-layer firewalls. The kind of tech that cost more than most people made in a year.
