Rebecca was the kind of woman who could handle both fieldwork and strategy—decisive, competent, and fully capable of operating independently. She was already one of the Brotherhood's most valuable members, more than qualified to lead a regional cell. The thought had crossed her mind more than once, but she wanted to hear Bella's take first.
Bella's expression remained composed. "No need to tip them off. We follow behind them and let their operation give us extra cover. Rebecca—can you tell what they're after inside the prison?"
"Let me check..." The young hacker dug through the prison's control system, tracing the intruders' search history. She pulled up a photo from the internal database.
A white man. Around thirty. Five-foot-seven. Handsome face. The name listed was Sergei—an alias, apparently—unmistakably Russian.
Bella felt a flicker of recognition but couldn't pin it down. She snapped a photo with her phone and sent it to Natasha.
Confirm this man's real identity for me.
Two minutes later, Natasha called back on an encrypted line.
"Very little on file—high security clearance. All I can see is a name: Ethan Hunt. He's attached to a CIA field unit. Official records list him as missing in action, but there's no confirmed death."
Natasha relayed what she'd found, and Bella listened in silence.
At the end, Natasha let out an amused laugh. "I'm a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, you know. At this rate, you've basically made me your personal intelligence officer."
Bella stepped away from the group and lowered her voice. "You've always been mine. You won't get away from me—not in this lifetime."
It was bold and completely unsubtle, but Natasha ate it up. Her voice turned syrupy: "If I get fired over this, you'd better support me."
"Sure, we'll go panhandle together on the street— just kidding, just kidding. I can definitely afford to keep you. There's this place I know with incredible Mexican tacos..."
The conversation drifted well off topic. They wrapped it up quickly.
Bella refocused. Ethan Hunt. Well, that was interesting.
She turned to the others and spoke with quiet authority. "That's a CIA agent. Don't engage. Their team is in the north wing—we're going to the west wing. No overlap. We move after they do."
"Got it."
"Understood."
"Copy."
The Lubyanka Prison looked no different than any other evening. A few guards were playing cards in front of the monitor bank when one of them thought he saw the screens flicker black for half a second. He looked up—nothing wrong. He figured he was seeing things.
In that moment of distraction, they lost administrative access to the prison's control system entirely.
Outside, parked in a power company repair van, IMF operative Benji Dunn—attached to a CIA field unit, dressed head to toe in a utility worker uniform—was busy making life difficult for everyone inside. With a few keystrokes, the doors to several cells swung open. Within seconds, inmates and guards were tangled in a full-scale brawl.
This is Russia. Every inmate in there looked like he could wrestle a bear, and the guards were no slouches either. The two sides went at each other with pure, ugly conviction.
"Perfect!" Benji snapped his fingers. Whether the Russian inmates actually escaped wasn't remotely his concern—that was their problem. He just needed to get his teammate out.
He popped open the right cell door and led his partner through the corridors, navigating toward the ventilation tunnels where their extraction team was waiting.
The plan was running smoothly—until Benji's eyes drifted to another monitor and landed on something that made him do a double take.
Two people who should not be there.
"Who the—" He leaned in. Two women. Black tactical gear. Black long coats. Dark sunglasses. Beyond that, he couldn't tell much—he was still too green for that level of assessment.
Bella and Galina moved through the west wing like they owned the place. Benji tried triggering cell doors to disrupt them, but every inmate who stepped into their path got dropped by Galina with ease. The Russian assassin moved like a panther—fluid, precise, lethal. Bella didn't even need to intervene.
Bella hadn't thrown a single punch yet, and Galina had already cleared their path.
That said, as the sole survivor of the Russian Brotherhood's experimental Animus prototype, Galina's bleeding effect was severe. The boundary between her ancestors' memories and present reality blurred constantly, and sometimes the fog rolled in without warning. Mid-fight, her gaze sharpened with the kind of focused hostility that had nothing to do with prison guards.
Bella caught her wrist. "Remember Bayek's creed," she said, barely above a whisper.
Galina took a slow breath and forced herself back to the present. "Don't harm the innocent," she recited under her breath.
For the rest of the fight, she dialed back her force with conscious effort—precise enough to neutralize, careful enough not to kill.
Bella stepped in occasionally, scattering guards and inmates alike with mechanical efficiency.
When she grabbed one inmate by the arm, executed a forward flip, and snapped his arm with a single, clean motion, Benji's jaw dropped.
"Whoa—is she doing Matrix moves?!"
As a sci-fi nerd, he'd seen The Matrix more than once. What he couldn't possibly know was that the author of that franchise was standing right in front of him.
Bella noticed the camera had been tracking her. She was getting annoyed—one look is fine, two is fine, but staring? She pulled a Post-it note from her pocket, scrawled CIA / IMF in block letters, and slapped it over the lens.
Then she made a fist, the message unmistakable: Keep watching, and I'll come find you.
"OK, OK!" Benji threw up his hands at the monitor, conceding defeat even though he knew she couldn't hear him. He swiveled the camera to the opposite wall and got back to his own mission.
Bella and Galina pressed on.
Ivan Vanko was housed in the standard cell block. They popped open the door and found him—muscle-stacked, barrel-chested, the kind of man who looked like he could drop a bear with one punch—peering out from the doorway.
He wore glasses, but the danger behind them was unmistakable.
Broad-shouldered, dark-skinned, with thick, powerful arms—this was a man who made an impression.
"Ivan Vanko?" Bella confirmed in Russian. "Come with us. We're getting your father out." She was already moving deeper into the prison before he'd finished processing the words.