Chapter Text
Month 0: Taipei
The neon glow of the Eastern Slav Republic was a distant, bloody memory, but the chill of that underground garage seemed to have settled permanently into Ada’s bones.
In a safehouse high above the rain-slicked streets of Taipei, the atmosphere was sterile, quiet, and entirely under her control. It was a stark contrast to the chaotic battlefields she usually frequented. Yet, as Ada stood in the minimalist bathroom, the silence felt deafening. She leaned against the marble sink, her eyes fixed on the small plastic casing resting on the counter.
Ada Wong did not panic. Panic was an amateur’s emotion, a flaw in a system that required absolute precision. But as she stared at the two distinct, unforgiving pink lines running down the center of the window, she felt a rare, cold jolt of genuine shock.
Positive.
She let out a slow, quiet breath, her fingers tracing the edge of the sink. Her mind, usually a hyper-efficient computer calculating risks and exit strategies, stalled for a fraction of a second. It drifted back to Eastern Slav. To the damp, shadowed concrete of that parking structure. She remembered the heavy weight of Leon’s body as they collided, the desperate, brief reprieve from a warzone, and the raw, unspoken friction that had finally snapped after years of cat-and-mouse. It had been reckless. A momentary surrender to the fact that they were both alive, against all odds.
And now, the consequences of that recklessness were ticking away inside her.
"Well," she murmured to the empty room, her voice a low, dry whisper. "This wasn't in the contract."
Ada picked up the test, tossing it into a small metal wastebasket, before walking into the main living space. She sat down at her desk, the glow of her dual-encrypted laptop illuminating the sharp angles of her face. Instinct told her to run the numbers.
The Clients: If the organizations she contracted for found out she was compromised, she’d go from an asset to a liability overnight.
The Mission: Pregnancy meant a ticking clock on her physical peak. In her line of work, losing half a second of reaction time was a death sentence. At four weeks, she was fast approaching the absolute threshold where the physical realities of her condition would clash with the brutal, high-impact demands of her career. Her window for a clean getaway was closing fast.
The Father: Leon.
She opened a secure, encrypted messaging terminal. Her cursor hovered over a blank field. She could route a message through three different proxy servers in Zurich and Reykjavik, delivering a cryptic note directly to his personal PDA. 'You're going to be a father, cowboy.'
No. She closed the window.
Leon was a good man—too good. If he knew, he would throw away his badge, his mission, and his life to protect her and a child he didn’t even know yet. He would make himself a target, and in doing so, make the child a target. The global bio-weapons market would love nothing more than to have leverage over the US government's top agent and the underworld's most elusive mercenary.
For the first time in her life, Ada placed a hand flat against her stomach. It was still perfectly flat, concealed beneath her silk robe.
"You're going to be a very expensive secret," she whispered to the quiet room.
She began to type, her fingers flying across the keyboard with renewed, cold purpose. She needed to liquidate her assets, secure a series of deep-cover safehouses in countries without extradition treaties, and completely erase her digital footprint. Ada Wong was going dark. And this time, she wasn't leaving a trail of red scarves for anyone to follow.
The transition was systematic. For a woman who didn't officially exist, disappearing entirely was surprisingly difficult. It required dismantling a web of aliases, dummy corporations, and offshore accounts she had spent a decade weaving. Over the next seventy-two hours, Ada didn’t sleep. She sat in the dim light of her Taipei apartment, watching lines of code execute on her screens.
The Funds: She routed three million dollars from a Swiss account through a dozen shell companies in Panama, finally depositing the clean cash into a completely untraceable, newly minted identity: Elena Vance.
The Gear: She packed light. No tactical gear, no grapple gun, no customized signature weapons. Those belonged to Ada Wong. Elena Vance only carried a standard, unregistered 9mm handgun, a passport with a flawless biometric chip, and a single suitcase of civilian clothes.
The Destination: A quiet, coastal town in New Zealand. No political significance, no umbrella of interest for any bioterror organization, and miles away from the jurisdiction of the Division of Security Operations. It would give her five quiet, uninterrupted months to build her secure haven and prepare for what was coming.
When she finally shut down her primary terminal, she initiated a self-destruct sequence on the hard drives. A faint hiss of thermite eating through silicon echoed from the closet.
Ada stood by the window, watching the rain wash over the neon signs of the city below. She took a slow, deep breath, feeling a strange, hollow sensation in her chest. She was officially a ghost.
She picked up her burner phone—the one with a single, highly encrypted channel that she used only for him. She didn't type a message. She didn't call. Instead, she stared at the screen, her thumb hovering over the delete key.
Goodbye, Leon, she thought.
With a decisive click, she dropped the phone onto the kitchen counter, walked out of the apartment, and let the lock click shut behind her.
Month 7: Washington, D.C. — DSO Headquarters
Leon S. Kennedy stared at the satellite imagery on his monitor until his eyes burned.
"Nothing, Hunnigan?" he asked, his voice rougher than usual. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, leaning back in his leather chair. The desk around him was cluttered with half-empty coffee cups and classified files on the Eastern Slav aftermath.
"Not a bite, Leon," Ingrid Hunnigan’s voice came through his earpiece, sounding tired but sympathetic. "It’s like she vaporized. The signature cipher we usually use to track her black-market deals has been completely dead since she left Taipei seven months ago. No chatter, no transactions, no sightings. Even the major players in the bio-weapon trade are looking for her. They think she's dead."
Leon clenched his jaw. He didn't believe that for a second. Ada Wong didn't just die. She was too smart, too fast, too stubborn.
But a cold, seven-month void was entirely unprecedented. Usually, she left a breadcrumb. A tease. A subtle hint to let him know she was still playing the game. This time, there was absolutely nothing. The encrypted Taipei transaction from nearly thirty weeks ago remained the final, unyielding dead end.
"She’s out there," Leon muttered, his hand unconsciously drifting to the silver ring he kept in his pocket—a habit he’d picked up since Eastern Slav, a reminder of a night that had felt entirely too real to be just another assignment. "She wouldn't just walk away from the game for seven months unless..."
"Unless what?" Hunnigan asked.
Leon stared at the empty screen, the reality of his own upcoming schedule weighing on him. In just a few short weeks, his life was slated to shift gears entirely, and the silence from her end felt heavier by the day.
"Unless the stakes have changed."