"You're in the wrong part of town, friend."The dockhand said it without looking up from his crate, the way a man warns a stranger off a step that isn't there anymore. I almost smiled. Ten years and Ironport still smelled the same, salt and diesel and the particular rot that clings to a city built on money nobody asks questions about.I wasn't the wrong man in the wrong part of town. I was exactly where I needed to be."I used to live here," I said.He glanced up then, took in my coat, my boots, the calm on my face that I've spent a decade learning to wear like armor. Something in his eyes shifted, uncertain, like he was recalculating whether I was worth the warning at all. Smart instinct. Wrong reason."Used to," he said, and went back to his crate. "Nobody comes back to Ironport on purpose."I did.I walked the last stretch to the cemetery alone, sent Cross and Wren ahead to the safehouse with instructions not to follow. This part I needed to do without an audience, even the two peo

Nobody moved.Wren's hand drifted to the drawer beside her desk, slow, unhurried, the way a person reaches for something they hope they won't need. Cross was already at the window, angled so the streetlight wouldn't outline him, watching whoever stood outside without being seen himself."One man," he said quietly. "Not police. Wrong posture for it. He's just standing there."I crossed to the window, kept myself in the shadow beside Cross, and looked down at the street.The man on the sidewalk wasn't looking at our building the way a threat would, scanning for weakness, counting exits. He was looking up at it the way a person looks at a house they used to live in. Older, maybe sixty, a coat too thin for the harbor wind, hands shoved deep in his pockets.Something about the shape of him tugged at a memory I couldn't place."I know him," I said, before I understood why I'd said it.Wren was beside me a second later, her tablet already pulling facial recognition against the local database

The lighthouse fire happened when I was sixteen, half a world away already, clawing my way up through work I don't like remembering in detail. I heard about it secondhand, a single line in a message from a contact who thought I'd want to know Ironport news, and I hadn't thought about it since.Now it sat in my chest like a stone."The lighthouse burned two years after she died," I said. "If she hid something there, it's gone.""Maybe." Feld didn't look convinced, and something about his uncertainty steadied me more than false comfort would have. "Or maybe someone burned it down because they found out the same thing I just told you, and wanted to make sure nobody else ever went looking. Fires like that don't happen by accident in a city run by men who profit from making inconvenient things disappear."Wren was already typing, fast, methodical. "Pulling the original fire report now. If it was arson dressed up as an accident, there'll be inconsistencies buried in the investigation, same

Hallow Ridge sat behind a wall of manicured hedges that did nothing to disguise the razor wire threaded along the top, the kind of security dressed up in enough landscaping that visiting families never asked why a psychiatric facility needed fencing built for a prison.I watched it from across the street for three mornings before I ever set foot near the gate, memorizing shift changes, delivery schedules, the particular rhythm of a place that wanted to look peaceful and was anything but.On the fourth morning, I saw her.Sienna Voss came through the staff entrance at seven fifteen exactly, coffee in one hand, badge already out in the other, moving with the tired efficiency of someone who'd been doing this long enough to stop noticing how heavy the gate felt when it closed behind her. Wren's photograph hadn't done her justice. There was something in the set of her shoulders, a tension she carried that didn't match the calm on her face, like she was holding two different versions of her

"How do you have this number." My voice came out steadier than I felt, the careful calm I'd built over ten years of negotiating with men who'd kill me without blinking, slamming into place like armor."I've had eyes on you longer than you'd believe, Kade." Daniel's voice hadn't changed, still warm, still familiar, and that familiarity was somehow worse than if he'd sounded like a stranger. "Meridian Group isn't as invisible as you think. Not to someone who's spent a decade making sure he never lost track of the one person who might actually be able to finish what your mother started."Wren was already at my shoulder, silently mouthing trace it, her fingers flying across her tablet trying to pin down the signal before he hung up."You disappeared," I said. "Ten years, Daniel. Nobody heard from you. My sister needed family and you vanished.""I didn't vanish. I ran." Something in his voice cracked, just slightly, enough that I couldn't tell if it was performance or genuine. "Because thr