the fractured oath

(Book 3 of The Ambush Files Saga)

Chapter 2: The Safehouse Divide

The Bosphorus had left Jack Rourke feeling like a drowned rat, but he found the pain of the bullet graze perversely clarifying. In the safehouse’s sickly fluorescent light, he sat hunched over a plastic folding table, scrubbing blood from his ribs with cotton pads and the disinfectant Sarah had found in a corner market. Every pass over the wound made his vision flick at the edges, but Jack worked with mechanical precision, slicing through the pain with the same discipline that had gotten him off a lot of roofs and out of a lot of markets.

Sarah had been pacing for nearly fifteen minutes, her footfalls producing a ceaseless, syncopated tap that traveled from his spinal cord up into his temples. The safehouse was little more than a glorified utility closet: one sagging bed, the table and chairs, a fridge so loud you could hear it from the stairwell, and a kitchenette with a single working burner. The peeling walls let in the drone of evening traffic, Turkish pop music, and occasionally the static chirp of police scanners in the next apartment.

Jack didn’t mind the closeness; it was the pacing that threatened to push him over the edge. He grunted, pressed a gauze pad hard against the worst of the torn flesh, and waited for Sarah to either sit or speak.

She did both at once, finally. Her body folded into one of the battered metal chairs with the unceremonious collapse of a person who’d given up on dignity for the day. The momentum swung her elbows onto the table, her face nearly level with the wound.

“You know,” she said, “I read somewhere that pain tolerance in men is a function of suppressed childhood trauma.” Jack bit the tape and tore it. “Then maybe you ought to stop pacing and let me get my quota in before midnight.”

Her lip curled at that. “Funny. I was under the impression we were running for our lives, not trying to win an endurance contest.” Jack’s hands didn’t stop, wrapping the tape tighter, a little too tight. “Could’ve fooled me. Your cover wasn’t exactly subtle at the market.”

A glimmer of green in her eyes caught the overhead light. “I wasn’t the one who threw a chair at a woman with a Glock. Or blew our only exit by upending a fruit cart. I thought you taught me that chaos only buys you so much time before it bites you in the ass?”

He wanted to tell her that in that moment chaos was all he had, that planning had been a privilege, back when they still believed in a plan. But Sarah had never liked that answer, not when she’d worked the analyst desk, not now.

He set the tape aside, flexed his side, and forced himself to meet her gaze. “We got away, didn’t we?” She rolled her eyes. “Barely. You left enough blood in the alley for a Red Cross drive.” He waited for her to keep going. When she didn’t, the silence pooled between them, as thick as the disinfectant smell.

Jack was the one to break it this time. “Any word from the outside?” She exhaled, the breath shallow, ribcage tight. “No pings on your burner, and the encrypted relay’s dead quiet. Istanbul PD have a manhunt on, but the local feeds make it sound like a drug shootout, nothing state-level. If Phoenix is still tracking, they’re not using any of our old channels.”

Jack countered, “They’re not Phoenix. Not anymore.” Sarah’s jaw set, the muscle twitching. “What, then? You think Black Phoenix is just a cover for some new faction? The Oath people?”

He considered the bandage work, not meeting her eyes now. “Doesn’t matter. They’re hunting like old Phoenix, but their command structure’s off. You saw how they boxed us in at the tram, too careful, too… compartmentalized. And those shooters? Americans, at least two of them.”

She held up a hand, cutting him off. “Fine. Let’s say you’re right. What do you want to do? You can’t keep running Istanbul rooftops on adrenaline and gum wrappers. You need a doctor. We need a real safehouse.”

Jack leaned back, wiped the sweat from his brow. “We need to know who’s giving the orders. Everything else is noise.”

She snorted, a brittle sound. “Right. We’ll just put on disguises, hack their mainframe, and walk out with the org chart.” Her sarcasm was a forcefield, but it flickered at the edges. “They have the resources to run a net on us in a city of fifteen million, and you’re bleeding out on a discount IKEA table.”

He shrugged. “I’ve had worse.” “Have you?” Her voice dropped, almost a whisper. “I’m not sure anymore.”

The fridge cycled on with a shudder. The fluorescent bulb buzzed in sympathy. Jack watched the pale blue veins on his wrist as the throbbing settled. “Look,” he said, “they’ve been two steps ahead since we got off the plane. They burned our contacts, mapped our safe routes. You saw how they used the crowd at the market, didn’t even care about collateral, just funneled us where they wanted. That’s not regular Phoenix playbook. That’s… ”

“Obsessive.” Sarah finished it for him, her voice suddenly soft. He nodded. “Yeah. And there’s only one name in the world who obsesses like that.” She blinked, the analyst resurfacing behind the fear. “Briggs?”

Jack exhaled. “Every whisper I’ve intercepted, every Oath reference, it’s always Ethan’s crew. Even the trigger phrases, they all line up to his old signals.” Sarah’s mouth pressed to a line. She stood, paced again. “I thought he was dead.” “Me too,” Jack said. “Until they started hunting like him.”

She stood at the kitchenette, back to him, arms crossed and rigid. He watched her shoulder blades, the tension in them so familiar it hurt more than the bullet wound. “I don’t want to start chasing ghosts, Jack,” she said, facing the window and the endless city beyond. “I want to disappear. I want us to live.”

He could have lied. He could have said he wanted the same. Instead he wrapped another layer of tape, watched his knuckles turn white. “I can’t.”

“Why?” She turned on him, anger bleeding through the fatigue. “So we die in Istanbul instead of Warsaw or Mexico City or wherever the hell you drag us next? I’m done playing chess with your dead friends.”

Jack bit the words off before they left his tongue. He stood, letting the pain force him upright. “If you want out, go now. I won’t stop you.” She laughed, harsh and bright. “Sure. I’ll just stroll past the men with rifles, with my American accent and your blood on my clothes. I’d last an hour.” He almost smiled at that, the gallows humor of two people whose lives had become nothing but statistics and odds. “You’d last longer than most.”

“Not the point.” Her fists unclenched, her breath finally letting go. “I’m just… tired, Jack. I don’t want to lose you to this obsession. Not like last time.”

He looked at the window, watched headlights sweep across the torn plastic blinds, shadows dancing over Sarah’s silhouette. “It’s not an obsession. It’s the only thing that keeps us ahead.” She shook her head. “It’s the thing that’ll get us killed.”

Jack sat again, slower this time, and opened his phone, checking the relay for pings he already knew weren’t there. “Not tonight,” he said, and realized how thin it sounded. She came back to the table, sat close enough for their knees to touch, but kept her hands folded tight. “Promise me something.”

He waited.

“When this is over, if we survive, you’ll let it go. You’ll let them be ghosts.” Jack looked at her, saw the hollow in her eyes, the well of fear and loyalty and anger that made Sarah who she was. He thought about the Oath, about Ethan Briggs, about the bone-deep certainty that none of them were free until every shadow in the world had a name.

But he nodded anyway. “Promise.” She rested her head in her hands, and for a moment, neither of them said anything. The city’s pulse thudded through the walls, louder and louder, until it was all Jack could hear.

Somewhere out there, Briggs was alive. And Jack would tear the city down to prove it.

By the time the muezzin’s call rolled in from the street, the walls of the safehouse felt even closer. Night in Istanbul was a different animal: cooler, more alert, a thousand pairs of eyes tracing every window and alley. The din of the city shifted from horns and vendors to the lower, predatory register of engine revs and distant sirens.

Jack moved the folding table away from the window and spread his cache of contraband across its pitted surface. USB drives with their rubber skins bitten off, notepads filled with blocky, cryptic scrawl, printouts of intercepted texts with the metadata lines circled and underlined. Even wounded, Jack handled the evidence like a blackjack dealer, his hands alive with the same energy Sarah remembered from the first days of the manhunt.

He called her over with a look, not a word. Sarah made a show of checking the deadbolt and wedging a kitchen chair under the doorknob before she joined him at the table. She hovered, arms folded across her ribs, body language so closed he could’ve bounced a signal off her and it would’ve come back garbled.

Jack’s finger traced a line through the mass of pages. “Start here,” he said. “This is the first confirmed Oath phrase, two days after Phoenix blacked out their Istanbul cell.”

Sarah didn’t sit. She leaned in, scanned the highlighted section: MARKET BLUE, TIMESTAMP 0913: CLIENT PREPARED, WAITING FOR SIGNAL. “That could mean anything.”

He shuffled the next sheet. “Not when you cross-reference the sender with Ethan’s old cover. See?” He tapped a line, his fingertip reddened with a smudge of dried blood. “That’s his cadence. Always the color before the action. He started it in Bucharest.”

Sarah remembered the Bucharest files, the pile of redacted reports and surveillance footage. Her teeth met with a click as she parsed the printouts. “It’s a stretch. Could be a copycat, or a plant. They know you’re hunting them, feeding you what you want to see isn’t exactly rocket science.”

Jack’s lips twitched, a flicker of something like amusement. “So the fact that every Oath hit in the last six months uses his pattern is just… coincidence?”

She felt the spike of anger, brief and hot. “Confirmation bias. You see Briggs in every ghost that crosses your wire.” Her hand hovered above the table, finger poised to jab at the next sheet, but she caught herself. “We have nothing actionable, Jack. No faces, no names. You’re willing to burn our last safehouse on a hunch?”

He drew a breath, let it out slow. “It’s not a hunch. I know him.” Sarah shook her head. “You used to. The man we’re up against now is… ” “Desperate,” Jack cut in. “Which makes him predictable.”

“Which makes him dangerous,” she said, voice tight. “Look around. We don’t have an army anymore. We don’t even have a side.” She let the silence thicken, then pressed her advantage. “Even if you’re right, even if Briggs is behind every Oath trigger, you said it yourself, they’re running a new playbook. They’re faster, smarter, meaner. If we take a shot and miss, there’s no coming back.”

Jack leaned forward, the shadows under his eyes deepening. “If we don’t take a shot, we die in this room.” His hand closed over the papers. “At least this way we get to choose how.” “Or who dies with us,” Sarah shot back. “You think that’s heroism? It’s suicide.” He didn’t flinch. “You want to walk? Door’s not locked.”

Sarah’s mouth worked for a second before she managed, “What?” Jack pushed his chair back, the motion slow but absolute. “I won’t force you to stay. You want to be clear of the blast radius? Go.”

For a moment she was stone, unmoving, caught between the fight and the flight. The words stung more than they should have, and for the first time she wondered if he actually wanted her to leave.

She backed away from the table, retreating to the window. She parted the curtain two fingers’ width, enough to see the sodium lights flicker over a city with no sleep and no conscience. The old anxiety, something feral, deep in the gut, spiked as she scanned the street for the sign of a tail, a glint off glass, anything. She didn’t find it.

She stayed there, breathing in the burnt plastic and city sweat, trying to slow her pulse. When she turned back, Jack hadn’t moved. He just sat in the shadowed edge of the light, watching her with an expression that was almost calm.

“I’m staying,” she said finally. “But not because I think you’re right.” He blinked. “No?” Sarah shook her head, a half-smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “I’m staying because you’ll get yourself killed if I don’t.”

Jack’s face softened, just for a heartbeat. He gave her a shallow nod, the closest he’d ever get to saying thank you.

They stayed like that for a while, Jack hunched over his puzzle of codes, Sarah pacing the perimeter, testing every lock and blind spot, checking the burner phones twice for activity that never came. On the third pass around the kitchenette, she muttered, “You know this is insane, right?”

Jack didn’t look up from the pages. “All the best plans are.” She almost laughed. Almost.

Outside, the city had gone from predatory to electric, every surface humming with the possibility of violence or flight. Inside, the safehouse hummed too, a little war room with its own logic, its own truce. The enemy was everywhere, and maybe nowhere. But tonight, at least, Jack and Sarah were a team again.

A haunted, broken, maybe-doomed team. But a team… together.