Novels by Bode Alao

The building had been called Voss Tower once, though not officially..It had never had a sign. But people in the city's financial district had called it that, the way they named things that belonged to someone without any ceremony about it. Lucian Voss's building. Lucian Voss's offices. Lucian Voss's name on the eighteenth-floor directory in brushed steel letters that his seven-year-old son had once traced with one finger while waiting for the elevator.It was called The Calder Residences now.Luxury condominiums. Fourteen floors of them. The lobby had been redesigned to erase the previous identity of the building, the way money always erased things, completely.Dante had studied the renovation permits for three weeks before coming back to Meridian. He knew the layout changes floor by floor. He knew which structural elements had been preserved and which had been gutted. He knew the basement had been converted to resident parking.What the permits didn't tell him was whether they'd fou

The brick came through Harper's window at three in the morning.Dante was already awake.He heard the glass go and was on his feet before the sound finished, across the room and against the wall beside the window, in two seconds. He looked down at the street, already scanning for who had done it. A dark sedan, moving fast without plates visible. Gone around the corner before he could pull anything useful from it.He went downstairs.Harper was already in the gym, standing in the broken glass in his bare feet with a stillness that was worse than anger. The brick had taken out the lower pane of the front window. It sat in the middle of the mat with a piece of paper rubber-banded around it.Harper looked at the paper without picking it up.Dante did.SELL OR SUFFER.Three words in block letters written with marker on copy paper. The kind of note that didn't need to be sophisticated because the message wasn't in the words. It was in the glass on the floor, and the cold coming through the

Mira Jackson didn't want to hire him.That was clear from the first thirty seconds of the conversation, the way she sat across from him at the back table of the church hall the morning after the pier and looked at him like a woman who'd been handed too many things that looked like help and turned out to be something else."Security consultant," she said. It wasn't a question but an evaluation."Freelance," Dante said. "I've been working the Eastside. Harper can vouch for me.""Harper likes you," Mira said. "Harper also liked a city councilman named Rourke for six years before Rourke voted to rezone the waterfront. His judgment isn't perfect.""No," Dante said. "Neither is mine. But the Civic Hall presentation is tomorrow, and you need someone in that room who knows how to read a crowd without being the story."Mira looked at him for a long moment. She had the eyes of someone who calculated risk for a living, not because she wanted to, but because the alternative was worse."You observ

The south pier was the kind of place the city had stopped arguing about.Old dock infrastructure, decommissioned and half-stripped, sat at the industrial edge of the harbor where the water turned black and the lights from the port didn't quite reach. Nobody came here at midnight by accident.Dante arrived twelve minutes early.He took a position behind a steel equipment housing thirty feet from the water and watched the approach for the full twelve minutes. Wind off the harbor. The smell of brine and rust. A freighter moving slowly in the channel, its running lights low and steady.At two minutes before midnight, a figure came down the dock.Lean and loose-limbed, moving with the particular ease of someone who'd spent years being invisible in dark places.Dante stepped out.Rook stopped walking and spread his hands slightly. An old habit between them. See, no weapons. I come in peace. He'd done it as a joke the first hundred times. Now it was just how they said hello."You look terrib

He told the front desk his name was Daniel Morrow.Nephew, he said, visiting his aunt. He'd called ahead, he said. He smiled in a way that was warm enough to be believed and forgettable enough not to matter.The woman at the desk checked her screen, checked it again, and handed him a visitor badge.Greymere Psychiatric Facility sat twenty minutes north of the Eastside on a hill that managed to feel both removed from the city and owned by it. Clean grounds. Maintained paths. The kind of institutional care that cost real money and came with no questions about where the money came from.Marius Valdren had been paying for it for twelve years.Dante had known that before he came. He'd told himself it wouldn't matter.He was wrong about that.A nurse led him down a corridor through a set of double doors. Past a common room where three residents watched a television that nobody was really watching."She doesn't have many visitors," the nurse said, not unkindly but just as a fact. "She's been

The camera footage would have been reviewed by morning.Dante knew that, the same way he knew other things, not by feeling, but by logic: live feed, centralized monitoring, and two men who hadn't come home last night. Someone was going to pull the timeline, sit in front of a screen inside that community center, and scroll backward through hours of Asher Street until they found the thirty seconds that mattered.He had maybe a day before they started asking questions.He spent the morning acting like he had nothing to worry about.That was the discipline, not the fighting or the planning. The discipline was in the face you showed the world while your mind was running forty moves ahead. Blackridge had called it composure under compression. Dante called it survival.He helped Harper open the gym, moved equipment, and swept the mat. When Harper looked at him with the particular expression of a man who had questions but respected the architecture of silence, Dante just handed him a broom an