"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 moment 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 men 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 smeared 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 met Julius’s stare with a tremble.

"Do you even understand why you’re here?" Julius asked.

"...."

"Remind me," 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 home, then someone close to him had opened their mouth.

Someone who shouldn’t have.

"You really need a better eye on women, Bauer," Julius said. "Is Maria worth all this trouble? Honestly, she looks like a cheap whore to me."

"...."

"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 me time."

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 memories of a life nobody else remembered.

In that timeline, 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 Nameless. However, the priority had now shifted. A single name mattered more than a ghost.

Joachim Pascal Beißwenger.

The man whose escape would trigger the Triplet Tower tragedy. The man whose crimes 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 meant forfeiting a chance to corner Nameless again, then so be it. Preventing that catastrophe came first.

"So, are you ready to start talking?"

"...."

For a long moment, Emil only stared at the floor. But eventually, he exhaled and sagged back in his chair.

"There’s... a contact," he said. "Someone Joachim paid a ridiculous amount to. At first, I didn’t understand. I thought there was no way some black-market broker could pull off something 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 moment he saw Julius approach. He pushed off the wall and met him halfway.

"Did you get something out of him?"

Julius finished folding the stained handkerchief and threw it into a nearby trash bin.

"Yeah. But this might prove troublesome."

"What did he say?"

"I can’t say it’s confirmed," 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 someone with serious influence pulled strings for him."

"And this someone... 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 me you know more than you’re saying, Officer Schneider."

Julius held an unfamiliar chill as he met Klaus’s stare directly. "Then tell me, sir... would you believe me 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. "Someone whose existence is only ever confirmed by secondhand accounts. Someone who appears in stray documents that contradict each other. And every time you try to follow a trail, you hit a wall of information that simply does not make sense."

"...."

"Someone who, on paper, doesn’t exist."

Julius was certain.

"Tell me what you know."

It was undoubtedly Nameless.