Sean noticed the pattern before he had a word for it, the way a man notices a fever before he thinks to take his own temperature a low, steady wrongness sitting under everything, present in every report that crossed his desk without ever announcing itself loudly enough to name. It started with a shipment two weeks after the Ferris Regional acquisition had finally closed, a routine delivery of Delta Snack's newest product line to eleven grocery chains across the northern province, the exact kind of run Ferris's drivers had made a thousand times without incident under the old ownership. This time the truck broke down forty minutes outside the depot, a transmission failure the mechanic swore was mechanical rather than tampered with, though Sean noticed, reading the repair invoice twice, that the part which failed had been replaced only six months earlier and shouldn't have needed replacing again for years. He filed it under bad luck. Machines failed. That was simply the cost of runnin

The car was there again on the third morning, and this time Luna let herself look at it properly instead of pretending she hadn't noticed. She stood at her kitchen window with a mug of tea going lukewarm in her hands, the steam long since stopped rising, and watched the same dark sedan idle across the street in the exact spot it had idled the last two mornings nose pointed toward the corner, engine running, nobody visibly doing anything inside it except sitting. Her building's super parked his truck in that spot most days. He hadn't parked there since Tuesday, off doing a job two streets over, and something about the sedan settling into the gap he'd left behind felt less like coincidence and more like a man filling a hole because the hole was convenient, not because he needed the spot. She'd learned, a long time ago, to trust that particular unease before she trusted any explanation that came along to talk her out of it. “Alphons paranoia,” she told herself anyway, because telling

Boars had kicked in a lot of doors in his life, and this one hadn't needed kicking at all, which was somehow worse. The lock sat intact in its frame, deadbolt thrown back neat, no scorch mark, no splintered wood. Somebody had let themselves in the way a man lets himself into his own house, quiet, unhurried, certain nobody would interrupt. He stood in the doorway a second longer than he needed to, taking in the shape of the room before he let himself move through it old instinct, the kind that had kept him breathing on Grimace Island long enough to become somebody worth fearing there. Drawers pulled out and left hanging. A lamp knocked sideways on the side table, not broken, just tipped, the particular carelessness of men who didn't care what they disturbed because they weren't planning to come back and clean it up. A single shoe lying on its side near the kitchen doorway, the mate to it nowhere he could see. "Renn. Clear the bedroom," he said, already moving toward the kitchen tabl

Nate didn't leave the apartment that night. He sat at the kitchen table with the lights off, the city's glow bleeding thin through the window enough to see by, and let the hours pass without once trying to fill them with anything useful, because nothing useful had presented itself yet, and pretending otherwise felt like a lie he didn't have the strength to tell himself. The letter had arrived by courier a little after nine that morning proper letterhead, a lawyer's careful, bloodless phrasing, the same terms the note had already laid out except dressed now in language that could survive a judge's reading without ever once admitting to the thing it actually was. “Withdraw the petition. Announce the closure. Confirm both publicly within seventy-two hours.” He'd read it standing in his own kitchen with his coffee going cold, and something in the formality of it had unsettled him worse than the note itself had, because a note scrawled quick and left on a ransacked table felt like panic,

"Change of plan," Nate said, already moving back toward the van, boots crunching gravel in the dark. "We stop pretending stealth still matters. Jo, where's that truck going." "I don't know yet, sir. I'm working on it." Jo's fingers flew over the keyboard, pulling up every traffic camera within a five-mile radius of the facility, the particular fast, desperate typing of a man who understood exactly how little time separated a plan from a corpse. "There's only two roads out of that property. One heads back toward the city, the other cuts through farmland toward the coastal highway. If they're moving her somewhere Fredric's already prepared, my money's on the highway route faster, fewer checkpoints, easier to lose a tail." "Get eyes on both roads." "Already pulling the feeds." Boars and Wilton were already back at the van, weapons still drawn, both of them reading the shift in the air the way men who'd survived worse than this always read it no questions, just motion, boots and hand