Jo hadn't left the basement in thirty-one hours, and the rain that had started over the warehouse district the night before had followed him here too, somehow, drumming steady against the grate above the alley window until the sound of it had worked its way so deep into his skull that he'd stopped hearing it as rain at all and started hearing it as just another kind of static underneath everything else. He'd pulled every recruitment file from the post-tournament expansion twice now. Forty-three names, give or take, men and women brought into Dark Crimson's Vienna operation in the six weeks after Nate's public war with Xavier had first started drawing real attention, when Boars and Ron had needed bodies faster than the usual careful vetting process could produce them. Forty-three names, and Jo had run background checks on all of them the first time through, quick ones, surface-level, the kind that caught outstanding warrants and obvious gang affiliations but wouldn't have caught much

They took the furniture first. Xavier stood in what used to be his own foyer and watched two men in gray coveralls carry out the console table Ira had picked from a showroom in the capital, the one with the inlaid mother-of-pearl she'd been so proud of, and he didn't say anything at all, because there was nothing left to say that would make either of them stop. The bank's representative stood near the door with a clipboard, a young woman who kept her eyes down and her voice flat and professional, reading off line items from a repossession order that covered furniture, artwork, two vehicles still parked in the garage, and the house itself, effective at the end of the month. "You have thirty days to arrange alternate accommodations, Mr. Lucius," she said, not quite meeting his eyes. "I'm sorry." He didn't believe she was sorry. He'd stopped believing anyone was sorry about anything weeks ago, somewhere around the third supplier who'd walked away from a contract without so much as a

The address came through two hours later, delivered the same way the call had arrived clean, anonymous, no name attached, just coordinates for a private dining room on the top floor of a restaurant Mark had never once set foot in, tucked into a converted townhouse on the quiet end of the financial district where old money still went to eat without being photographed doing it. Mark stood outside it a long moment before going in, his driver already dismissed for the evening on his own instruction, no security trailing him the way security always trailed him now, because whoever had called him had been specific about that too. “Come alone. If I see anyone with you, I'll assume the conversation isn't worth having, and I'll be right.” He'd debated ignoring the instruction. He'd debated it for the better part of an hour, pacing his study with the phone in his hand, running through every version of the ambush this could be Xavier's enemies finishing what the mercenaries couldn't, some riv

The folder had grown thick enough that it no longer closed flush, a fat wedge of paper straining against the elastic band Fredric's own hands had wrapped around it three months ago, back when it had been thin enough to hold shut with two fingers. He sat with it open across his knees in the study's single lamp light, cypress trees standing their long black rows outside a window gone fully dark now, the estate around him quiet in the particular way it only ever got past midnight, when even the household staff had learned to stop moving through the halls. Halvard had brought the final section himself an hour earlier, walked it up from the car personally rather than sending it through the usual channel, which told Fredric something about its weight before he'd read a single page of it. He read it twice through before he let himself react to any of it. The first pass was structural dates, filings, the careful architecture of shell companies and holding trusts that Jimmy's counterpart o

l The accountant's office smelled like carpet cleaner and burnt coffee, a narrow room on the second floor of a strip mall bank branch that Sicilia would never, a year ago, have set foot inside. She sat now with her knees pressed together and her hands folded in her lap, watching a woman named Petra Doss slide a folder across the desk with the particular gentleness people used when they were about to say something that would ruin your afternoon. "I want to be clear before you look at this," Doss said. "I'm not the one who requested the audit. It came through Mr. Alphons's legal office, attached to a formal request from Dominic's family accountant. My job today is just to walk you through the findings." "Findings." Sicilia's voice came out steadier than she felt. "That makes it sound like I did something." Doss didn't answer that directly. She opened the folder herself, turned it so the pages faced Sicilia, and tapped a column of figures with one blunt, unpainted nail. "These are c