Episode 35: "The Safe House"
Marked to Vanish – Part II
They reached the third floor, and the girl unlocked a door with three different keys. The hallway was thick with mildew and old pipe rot, the kind of place the police didn’t enter unless someone had already died. She pushed open the door with her shoulder and nodded him inside.
The apartment was stripped bare — a table, two folding chairs, and a mattress on the floor. But what caught Alex’s attention was the wall: covered floor to ceiling with photographs, notes, maps, and lines of thread connecting it all like a detective’s fever dream.
She tossed him a towel. “Wipe your face. You're bleeding.”
He didn’t realize until then that he had a cut across his cheekbone. Probably from the shattered glass outside the burning car.
“You still haven’t told me your name,” he said, watching her as she pulled a laptop from beneath the mattress.
She smirked. “No, I haven’t.”
The laptop screen flickered to life. Encrypted folders. Surveillance footage. Excel spreadsheets labelled in code.
“This is what they don’t want found,” she said. “Money laundering through shell foundations. Real estate covers operations in Eixample. Human movement is hidden inside construction logistics.”
Alex scanned the files. One folder had his photo — and not just recent. Shots from years ago. Streets he didn’t recognize. One of him speaking at a bar in Poble-sec.
“You were being watched,” she said, confirming what he feared. “Before you even knew anything.”
He sat down slowly. “Why?”
“Because you were asking the wrong question. The one that always gets people killed.”
She leaned against the doorframe.
“What question is that?” he asked.
She stared at him. “What connects all of this.”
Outside, the sirens faded. But inside, the city’s secrets were laid bare across the walls, and Alex understood: that this wasn’t a puzzle to solve. It was a bomb with a slow-burning fuse, and it had already reached the lock.
Continue reading tomorrow…