Boars hated waiting in cars. Always had. Something about the stillness of it, the way his own blood seemed to slow down and pool in his legs after the first hour, made him twitchy in a way that four walls and open sky never did. He'd told Jo that once, half-joking, and Jo had just handed him a bag of sunflower seeds and told him to shut up and watch the building. Tonight the building was a parking structure three blocks from Dominic's office tower, gray concrete gone black with exhaust stains, the kind of place that smelled like old rain and hot rubber even when it hadn't rained in a week. Boars sat low in the passenger seat of a sedan two levels up from street traffic, seeds cracking between his molars, watching a service entrance that Dominic's driver used maybe twice a week when he wanted to dodge photographers waiting at the main lobby doors. "Anything?" The voice in his ear belonged to Renn, a wiry kid barely two years out of the Dark Continent who still flinched a little ever

Jimmy's contact inside the Commission worked in records intake, a woman named Petra who'd spent eleven years stamping case numbers on files nobody important ever read twice, and who had, according to Jo's careful vetting three weeks earlier, exactly the kind of resentment that made a person useful. Passed over for promotion four times running. A supervisor who took credit for her filing improvements in front of the board. The particular grievance that didn't need much watering to grow into something a man could use. Nate hadn't met her. He never met the small pieces that moved his larger plans, not directly, not when a single traceable meeting could unravel five layers of careful distance built specifically to keep his name out of rooms like this one. Jimmy had handled the approach. Jo had handled the money, routed through three accounts that led, if anyone ever bothered tracing them all the way back, to a charitable foundation registered in a country that didn't answer subpoenas fr

The holding cell smelled like bleach poured over something older that bleach couldn't quite reach, and Dominic had spent the better part of thirty-one hours learning every variation of that smell thinner near the door, thicker near the drain in the corner, worst of all right after the guards mopped, as if the mopping only stirred up whatever lived underneath the tile instead of getting rid of it. He hadn't slept. Not properly. He'd dozed sitting upright against the wall for stretches he couldn't measure, jerking awake each time a door clanged somewhere down the corridor, certain for one disoriented second that they were coming to move him somewhere worse. They came for him a little after ten in the morning instead, a guard rattling keys against the bars with the bored efficiency of a man who'd done this exact walk a thousand times and felt nothing about doing it a thousand and first. "Alphons. Your bail's posted. Let's go." Dominic stood too fast, head swimming, and had to catch

Jo didn't say anything for almost ten seconds after Jimmy finished. Nate heard the silence through the earpiece the way he heard every silence Jo ever gave him lately not empty, just full of a man doing arithmetic he didn't like the answer to. "Say it," Nate said. He was standing at the kitchen counter, a cutting board in front of him with an apple he hadn't touched, knife resting flat against the wood. "Jimmy's source says the contract's for “the whole operation”, sir. Not you specifically. Everything you've built. Delta, Dark Crimson, all of it." Jo's voice had gone thin, the particular thinness that came when a man was choosing each word like it cost him something to say wrong. "Old money. Patient. Nobody in the underworld's willing to say the name out loud, which tells me more than if they had." "It's him." "I think so, sir. I can't prove it yet. But the shape of it fits everything else we've traced back to Alphons over the last two months." Nate set the knife down properly

Jo called back four hours later, and Nate knew from the first half-second of silence before he spoke that the wait was over. "Sir. I have it." Nate was still at the apartment, jacket off now, sleeves rolled to the forearm, the shell casing sitting on the kitchen table in a small plastic bag Ron had produced from somewhere without being asked. He'd been staring at it on and off for the better part of the afternoon, turning it in the bag without opening it, the way a man turns a key he isn't sure fits the lock he's holding it up to. "Tell me." "Manufacturer stamp matches a batch run eleven years ago, custom order, never sold retail. The kind of ammunition that only exists because somebody paid a specialty manufacturer to produce it exclusively for a private contract." Jo's voice had the flat, careful cadence of a man reading from notes he'd already checked twice because he didn't trust himself to get this part wrong. "I traced the contract. It belongs to a security firm called Ferr