The Hydra ProtocolBOOK 2 of the Ava Sharma SeriesILLUSTRATED NOVEL For a year, Ava Sharma has been a ghost. After dismantling a traitor's plot at the G7 summit, the disgraced MI6 operative vanished, hunting the remnants of the shadowy organization Scylla from the margins of the world. She is a weapon sharpened by betrayal, seeking a quiet war in the dark. But the enemy she hunts is not dead. It has evolved. A synchronized, fourteen-minute "glitch" cripples the world's financial markets, causing global panic and siphoning an untraceable seventy-three billion dollars. To the world, it's a sophisticated cyber-attack. To Ava, it is a chilling, unmistakable signature: the work of Julian Thorne, the brilliant, sociopathic phantom she failed to capture. This was not an attack. It was a demonstration. Pulled back into the fight by a cryptic message from her only ally, Ava discovers that Thorne has forged a new, terrifying alliance with Elena Fedorova, a ruthless and powerful oligarch whose global shipping empire provides the perfect cover for a new kind of army. Thorne is no longer just a spymaster; he is the head of a shadow state, funded by his immense stolen fortune and protected by a corporate fortress that is untouchable by law or force. Outmatched and operating completely alone, Ava is forced to seek help from the one man who ever fought Thorne to a standstill: Mikael Haas, a legendary and cynical ex-Stasi puppet master who lives by a single, brutal creed-to fight a monster, you must become one yourself. Under his tutelage, Ava must abandon her own moral code, learning to use the tools of betrayal and psychological warfare to have any hope of success. Their hunt leads them to the heart of Thorne's new plan, a plot far more audacious than anything he has attempted before: The Hydra Protocol. It's a plan not to disrupt the world, but to physically unplug it, to sever the deep-sea data cables that connect modern civilization and plunge the globe into a new dark age. The only way to stop it is for Ava to infiltrate the protocol's mobile command center: a floating, high-security fortress, a super-yacht sailing into the heart of a storm.Onboard, hunted by Thorne's elite guards and racing against a final, irreversible countdown, Ava must confront the ghosts of her past and the monster she has been forced to become. In a world of shadows, the only way to save the future is to sacrifice a piece of her own humanity. But in a game where the devil makes all the rules, can even she pay the price of victory?
