Still no one spoke. The only sound was the hum of the cold storage units and the distant drip of something from one of the workstations at the far end of the room.Brother James's eyes moved slowly across the faces of the men standing in front of him, and whatever he saw there did not satisfy him, because the line of his mouth went even thinner."Sales are down." He said it simply. "Not a little down. Down. And last month last month when we had half the operation running last month was better than this. Last month's numbers beat what you people have produced this month, and I need someone to explain to me how that is possible. I need someone to stand here and tell me how, with a full warehouse, with a full team, with everything in place —" his voice climbed again — "how you managed to do worse."Nobody answered. Nobody was going to."Orders have dropped. Delivery is behind. The response time on pickups is behind. Everything that should be moving is moving slow, and I am standing here

He paused, and in that pause he seemed to be deciding something deciding how much to say, or perhaps deciding how to say the part that was clearly sitting heaviest on him, the part that had nothing to do with the physical damage and everything to do with something that could not be iced or bandaged."Everybody saw it." His voice dropped slightly when he said that. Not from weakness from the particular discomfort of a man who had been made to look small in front of people who were supposed to look at him with fear. "The bar owners, the restaurant owners they were right there. Some of them came outside when they heard what was happening. Some of them were already outside. And they stood there and they watched. They watched our men go down. They watched us get dealt with in the street like we were nobody, like the name meant nothing, like we had walked up to them wearing nothing at all." He stopped for a breath. "And the way they were looking at us afterward, Brother James I have been

He let that sit for exactly one second.Then something changed in him."How dare them." The words came out harder now, the measured quiet cracking at the edges, giving way to something that had been sitting underneath it the whole time the man on the floor was talking — something hot and controlled but unmistakably real. "How dare him. How dare any person — any single person — come at the Beer Brotherhood and think that is something they can do. Does he know what this name stands for?" His voice was climbing now, not to the shouting place yet, but moving toward it with the steady, unstoppable momentum of something that had been held back long enough. "Does he understand what the Beer Brotherhood is? What it has taken to make this name mean what it means in this city? We are the strongest group on the south side. The strongest. There is no debate about that, there is no conversation about that — that is simply what we are, and has been what we are for long enough that a man should know

Brother James was ex-military.Not the kind of ex-military that a man put on a resume and exaggerated over drinks. The real kind. The kind that went in young and came out different changed in a way that the body remembered even when the mind tried to move past it. His training had not just made him capable of fighting. It had made him exceptional at it, and the difference between those two things was not small.Matthew had heard the stories. Everyone inside the Beer Brotherhood had heard the stories, told them to the newer men the way you told stories about something worth being afraid of, worth respecting, worth not testing under any circumstances. Brother James, ten men, one location, no backup. That was the version most people told. Ten men at once, and Brother James had walked out of it looking like he had done something mildly inconvenient rather than something that should by any physical logic have ended differently. Effortless was the word that kept appearing in those stories,

And now he was looking at a man who had apparently walked up to it from the outside and put it on the floor.The thought arrived in Brother James's mind and he looked at it for exactly one second before he dismissed it. Pushed it out. Deleted it the way you deleted something you did not want taking up space, something that created more problems than it solved, something that pointed toward a conclusion that did not fit inside the framework of what was possible.One person could not do that. One person could not have done that. There had to be something wrong with the installation some weakness in the frame that had gone unnoticed, some fault in the mounting that had been there all along and had simply chosen today to reveal itself. Perhaps the hinges. Perhaps the concrete around the frame had weakened over time. Perhaps there was something wrong with the structure that had nothing to do with the man currently standing in the space where the door used to be.Perhaps.Brother James held