Marshall slammed his palm flat onto the coffee table. The ashtray jumped. "Shut your mouth. Look at how put together your cousin Joel is. Real degree, real skills. You couldn't even scrape into a community college, and you think you belong inside a Fortune-500 firm? On what merit? You'd walk in there with nothing to offer. You'd embarrass your uncle. You'd embarrass me." He took a long, ugly drag on his cigarette, smoke curling around the lines etched deep into his face. "I don't care what you think about it. In a few days, you're packing your things and reporting to Joel's company. He's already promised to put in a good word. He's getting you on as a security guard at the gate." He said it the way another man might announce a Christmas gift. Pleased. Magnanimous. As if the conversation were already over. "A security guard." Sam actually laughed. The sound came out thin, almost amused. "Wow." He had nothing against the job itself. People worked honest hours, they put food on tabl

Joel's voice carried that snide and sarcastic edge that always lived two inches behind a smile. The mockery wasn't even subtle. Sam's father chimed in next, voice clipped with disgust. "Don't even get me started," Marshall typed, then dropped a voice note. "Sam picked a fight with me earlier, going on about how that office job was supposed to be his. Pathetic. He couldn't even crack into a college, and now he wants a desk? Let him dream about it." The reply chain lit up with laughter from a dozen relatives Sam had barely seen in years. Joel rolled in right behind to twist the knife. "Uncle, you nailed it," Joel said, voice oily. "Sam doesn't even have a real job, and now he turns his nose up at the security position I lined up for him. I really did try to do him a favor, and look at the thanks I get." The group, which had been dead quiet for weeks, suddenly came alive. Aunts and uncles Sam could barely place by face piled on one after another, each comment dressed up as concern, ea

Sam very nearly lost his footing. Beside him, Alex stood with his eyes wide open, staring at the paper house as if it had personally insulted him. A house made of paper, painted curtains and all, going for five hundred fifty dollars."That much?" Sam said. "What's the delivery address, heaven?""Naturally," the shopkeeper said, unfazed. "Our trade handles the final dignity. Don't let the paper fool you. This unit comes fully appointed, central air, wifi, even a mahjong table tucked into the back room. Five hundred fifty buys you peace of mind, top to bottom. You won't find a better value anywhere."The pitch came out so polished it sounded rehearsed. Sam felt the corner of his mouth twitch into a flat line. Buying it was the only way to actually feel cheated.He let his eyes wander across the shelves. Paper sports cars, paper villas, even a row of paper pets, every single tag started in the high three digits."This trade has obscene margins," he muttered. "A

Watching the gift icons keep blooming across the top of the feed, Sam felt a giddy little surge in his chest. This, right here, was the road to real money.Alex had simply stopped processing. He filled his off hours with other people's livestreams the same way most people scrolled videos, so he knew exactly how much each of those animations cost the senders. What gutted him was the timing. Sam had been live for barely ten minutes and the gifts were already stacking up like firewood. If Alex had tried this himself, he wouldn't even have made it through his first delivery run before the room emptied.He was still chewing on the unfairness of it when the rusted iron gate groaned as Sam pushed it inward, the hinges letting out a long thin scream of metal that scraped right across the chat's spine. Inside, the thin pale fog drifting along the ground curled higher around their ankles, swallowing the gravel path and lending the whole Derelict Cemetery an even more uncertain look.

Across town, inside the Ravenport PD, Ella Rogers stretched at her desk and let out a sigh long enough to have its own zip code."I was supposed to be off tonight," she muttered to no one in particular. "I was going to visit my aunt. And here I am."Her face had settled into that flat, pre-coffee expression of someone who had clearly drawn the worst shift on the rotation. Every time her thoughts drifted, they stumbled right back to that ridiculous afternoon on the corner where she had first met the boy with the runaway scooter."What kind of luck does that kid have," she muttered. "Slamming into a Class-A Most Wanted by accident."Anyone else would already be sitting in the Detention Center sipping bad tea while detectives took turns asking the same questions. Not him. He had walked away clean, and somehow walked away with a four thousand dollar bounty in his pocket."A delivery rider doing thirty over the limit," she said under her breath. "I should have wr