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LAST TRAIN TO BUDAPEST
TABLE OF CONTENT:
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 1: Vienna in Spring
Chapter 2: The Wake-Up Call
Chapter 3: Blood on Marble Floors
Chapter 4: Stand Down or Die
Chapter 5: Cargo with a Pulse
Chapter 6: Kill Switch
Chapter 7: The Devil’s Waiting Room
Chapter 8: Blood in the Marble House
Chapter 9: Ashes and Echoes
Chapter 10: 1st Phase
Chapter 11: Arrival in Hell
Chapter 12: Lenkov’s Reach
Chapter 13: The Ghost of Warsaw
Chapter 14: Black Market Saints
Chapter 15: The Girls of Vladivostok
Chapter 16: Wolf of Moscow
Chapter 17: Vladivostok Freight Tower
Chapter 18: The Blood Port
Chapter 19: Istanbul Firestorm
Chapter 20: The Black Court
Chapter 21: Smoke at the Border
Chapter 22: Kappa Awakened
Chapter 23: City of Graves
Chapter 24: Thirty Floors Below
Chapter 25: The World Burns Clean
Chapter 26: Ghost Protocol
Chapter 27: The Facilitator
Chapter 28: Lagos Nights
Chapter 29: The London Protocol
Chapter 30: Bloodline
Introduction
When off-duty detective Sophia Blake takes a long-overdue vacation with her best friend Ashley in Vienna, a brutal ambush in a shopping mall changes everything. Sophia is knocked unconscious. Ashley is kidnapped. The local authorities blame a powerful transnational crime syndicate — a shadow empire backed by corrupt police, street gangs, and even rogue Interpol agents. And their specialty? Trafficking blonde women like Ashley into the darkest corners of the global flesh trade.
Told to stand down, Sophia does the opposite.
From Vienna’s sewers to Prague’s underworld, from firefights in Berlin to a showdown aboard the Last Train to Budapest, Sophia cuts a vengeful path across Europe. Bodies fall. Syndicate strongholds collapse. But nothing prepares her for the truth — the network is larger, deeper, and older than she ever imagined.
But she vowed to make them all realize that they had kidnapped the wrong girl.
Sophia’s hunt for truth and justice starts with a ride on the last train to Budapest. The train ride is a trap. There, they all wait for her.
But they are all just about to find out how suicidal their plan was!
Prologue
Budapest – 2:47 AM
Rain hissed against the cracked cobblestones like a whisper from hell. The Danube River ran dark and fast behind the old rail yard, hiding secrets like the city itself—cold, brutal, and sleepless.
Sophia Blake stood still in the shadows, trench coat soaked through, Glock 19 clutched in one gloved hand, a bloodied switchblade in the other. Her breath came out in sharp, steaming clouds, and her knuckles were raw, skin split from the last two fights. She didn’t care. Pain was temporary. Justice was absolute.
Ahead, the train waited.
The final one.
Budapest to nowhere. Or maybe straight to the devil.
She could feel eyes watching from the shadows, more than a dozen bodies onboard—gunmen, enforcers, dealers in flesh. And worse. Interpol agents turned mercenaries. Ex-cops who sold their badge for blood money. Some of them used to wear the same uniform she did. Used to call themselves protectors.
She lit a cigarette, letting it burn between her fingers.
"They think I’m walking into a trap."
Her lips curled into a smile.
"Good. Let 'em think that."
The wind howled like a wounded animal, rattling loose metal and trash across the yard. A black van pulled up behind the train. She watched two of the syndicate’s soldiers drag a girl out—blonde, tied, face covered in bruises.
Her name wasn’t Ashley.
But she might as well have been.
Sophia closed her eyes for one second. One heartbeat. One flash of memory: Ashley screaming in the mall. Blood. Gunshots. The last time she saw her friend being dragged away into darkness.
Now, Sophia opened her eyes. Cold steel in them.
Tonight wasn’t about survival. It wasn’t about arrests or diplomacy. This wasn’t a police op. There were no backup units, no jurisdiction. No rules.
This was vengeance.
And this train, this steel coffin crawling toward dawn, was going to be the scene of a massacre.
Sophia took one last drag on the cigarette, tossed it to the ground, and crushed it under her boot.
Then she stepped forward, toward the open carriage door, and onto the Last Train to Budapest.
Chapter 1: Vienna in Spring
Vienna was beautiful in the way polished glass could be beautiful—clean, cold, and hiding something sharp beneath its surface.
Detective Sophia Blake had never been one for vacations. Her therapist back in New York had practically begged her to take this one. “Get out of the country. Heal,” she’d said. “Rest.”
Rest. What a joke.
Now Sophia stood on a balcony overlooking Stephansplatz, the grand cathedral rising in the golden morning light, her Glock locked in a suitcase under the bed inside the hotel room. She wore jeans, a leather jacket, and a look of mild suspicion. The air smelled of coffee and baked bread. Too calm.
Ashley bounded out behind her with a smile so bright it almost made Sophia squint. Blonde, bubbly, and utterly trusting—the type the world ate alive.
“Come on,” Ashley said, twirling her sunglasses. “We didn’t come all the way from New York to brood on a balcony. I wanna shop. Eat something ridiculously overpriced. Be normal.”
Sophia smirked. “Normal’s a myth. But alright. Let’s go.”
The mall was a high-end cathedral to capitalism.
Four floors of marble, chandeliers, and soft jazz. Every surface glistened. Tourists wandered like prey, pockets full of euros, eyes full of wonder.
Ashley was already bouncing between stores. She giggled at a pair of boots, then vanished into a changing room with a handful of dresses.
Sophia stayed outside, scanning.
Old habits. One too many stings gone bad. One too many ops that didn’t end clean.
Her cop’s instinct twitched. There—two men at the escalator. Heavy coats in warm weather. One with a cauliflower ear and bulge under the shoulder.
Sophia’s pulse tightened.
Then—
Crack!
Glass shattered. Screams erupted.
And all hell broke loose.
They came in fast and brutal.
Five of them. Maybe more. Moving like they’d trained for this exact scenario. Guns hidden under coats. Not robbery. Not random.
Targeted.
Sophia turned, reaching for her waistband—empty. Her gun was in the hotel.
Too late.
A fist cracked across her jaw. Then another. Someone slammed her head into a railing. The world spun.
From the floor, she saw Ashley scream, arms flailing as two men grabbed her and dragged her through the chaos.
Sophia tried to rise.
Another blow landed.
Darkness closed in fast and vicious.
She was out cold before she hit the floor.
And when she woke, her best friend was gone.
Chapter 2: The Wake-Up Call
Sophia’s eyes opened to pain. Not a gentle ache. Something jagged and mean, like a bottle broken across her skull. Her mouth tasted of blood and the air reeked of antiseptic.
White lights. Beeping machines. Hospital.
She blinked, vision swimming. Her ribs hurt. Her head throbbed. But one name clawed through the haze.
Ashley.
She jerked upright.
“Miss Blake, please—”
A hand pushed her gently back. A man in uniform. Austrian police. Square-jawed. Too polished. Too calm.
“Where is she?” Sophia’s voice was cracked glass. “Ashley—where the hell is my friend?”
The officer glanced at the nurse, then back at Sophia. “Please. Breathe. You were injured. There was an attack—”
“I know,” she spat. “I was there. Blonde girl. American. Early twenties. Where is she?”
The cop hesitated. Just a blink. But it was enough. Sophia had seen that look a thousand times on the NYPD homicide squad. It meant the worst.
“She was taken,” the officer admitted. “From the scene. Witnesses said—”
“By who?”
Another pause. Then a name she hadn’t heard in a long time.
“Die Streicher.”
The Austrian Crime Syndicate. A name whispered in Interpol corridors, always behind locked doors. Sophia had read the files, back when she was working a human trafficking case out of Paris. A snake with too many heads—Eastern European mobs, biker gangs, rogue police, even rumors of high-level Interpol agents playing both sides.
They didn’t just traffic girls. They specialized in blondes. A market niche, built on horror.
Ashley had fit their type perfectly.
Sophia’s heart went cold.
“What have you done to get her back?” she asked.
“We’ve launched an investigation,” the officer said. “Interpol has been notified. You are advised to stay under supervision and let our agencies—”
Sophia’s laugh was hollow. “You think I’m sitting this out?”
The officer stiffened. “This is beyond your jurisdiction. You're a tourist here. You're not—”
“I’m not what?” she snapped. “Not your problem? Not going to shut up and let Ashley disappear into some hellhole while you file paperwork and pretend you’re looking? You know what happens to the girls they take.”
He looked away. Silence was an answer.
Sophia swung her legs off the bed. Her side screamed. Didn’t matter.
“I’m going after them.”
The cop stepped forward. “If you interfere—”
“You gonna arrest me?” She was on her feet now, blood staining the bandages on her temple. “Try it.”
The room went quiet.
She grabbed her coat, one boot on, then the other. And with a final glare, Sophia walked out of the hospital, into the storm that was waiting for her on the streets of Vienna.
She had no badge. No backup.
Just fury. And a very particular set of skills.
And she was about to make every son of a bitch in Europe regret ever touching Ashley.
Chapter 3: Blood on Marble Floors
The first place she went wasn’t the police station.
It was the hotel.
Room 413. A modest suite with a city view, half-packed bags on the bed, two espresso cups still sitting on the nightstand from that morning when Ashley had giggled over an overpriced croissant.
Sophia stood there, silent.
Then she opened the minibar, poured two fingers of whiskey, and drank it raw.
She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled the lockbox from her suitcase.
Inside: a Glock 19, two spare mags, a folding knife, and a burner phone.
Her vacation had officially ended.
Two hours later, she walked into the belly of the beast.
The club was called Eisen, tucked behind a train depot on the edge of Vienna. It wasn’t listed on any tourist map. But Sophia knew how to find places like this. You listened to the whispers. You followed the money. You looked for shadows thick with body heat and too much cologne.
The bouncer clocked her before she reached the door—broad, neck like a tire, Czech tattoos.
“No tourists,” he growled in German-accented English.
Sophia didn’t answer. She just jammed her thumb into the soft nerve cluster beneath his chin and drove her knee up into his groin. The big man went down like
Impressum
Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 07.07.2025
ISBN: 978-3-7554-8097-6
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