Agent 17 Red Rose Hot- File

Vasily spun around, his hand diving for a panic button. He never reached it.

The safehouse smelled of stale coffee and ozone. Agent 17, known in seventeen classified files as “Red Rose,” pressed a fresh clip into her sidearm with a soft, decisive click. Her codename wasn’t poetic; it was a warning. A red rose meant beauty with thorns. The “HOT” appended to her file stood for High-Value Objective Termination.

Her target tonight: Vasily Krovopuskov, an ex-SVR asset gone freelance, peddling a quantum decryption algorithm to the highest bidder. He was hiding in a decommissioned thermal plant on the edge of the Black Sea. The heat was literal. Steam hissed from ruptured pipes, and the infrared overlay on her goggles painted the world in shades of angry orange and deep, dangerous red. Agent 17 Red Rose HOT-

“Package intercepted. The thorn has been applied. I need a clean-up crew at the old thermal plant.”

She didn’t look back. Her hand snapped out, and a single, thin throwing knife—forged to look like a rose’s stem—buried itself in his throat. He made a wet, gurgling sound and collapsed. Vasily spun around, his hand diving for a panic button

She released his wrist, and he slumped forward, sobbing with relief. As she turned to leave, he lunged for a hidden derringer taped under the console.

He talked. They always did.

She smiled. It was a cold, beautiful thing. “Then you’d better give me the location, or I’ll make those twenty minutes feel like a lifetime.”