The freight bus spat him out at the edge of Meridian City at half past six, and Dante was already moving before the doors finished wheezing shut.One bag. Light. No labels.Anything you carried could be taken. Anything you loved could be taken worse.The depot was half-empty. Cracked plastic benches. A vending machine down to its last two sad options. A transit cop leaning against the far wall, eyes moving in slow arcs that looked lazy and weren't.Dante cut wide around him and stepped outside.Meridian smelled like rain and diesel and salt. Not the clean kind. The working kind. The kind that came from a harbor that had been swallowing things for a hundred years and never quite finishing.He kept his pace unremarkable. Not fast. Not slow. A man with somewhere to be, but no urgency about it. Urgency made people look.He'd studied the city for months from outside it. Maps, permits, property filings, the kind of documents nobody touched until they were losing something. He knew which blo

The camera footage would have been reviewed by morning.Dante knew that, the same way he knew other things, not by feeling, but by logic: live feed, centralized monitoring, and two men who hadn't come home last night. Someone was going to pull the timeline, sit in front of a screen inside that community center, and scroll backward through hours of Asher Street until they found the thirty seconds that mattered.He had maybe a day before they started asking questions.He spent the morning acting like he had nothing to worry about.That was the discipline, not the fighting or the planning. The discipline was in the face you showed the world while your mind was running forty moves ahead. Blackridge had called it composure under compression. Dante called it survival.He helped Harper open the gym, moved equipment, and swept the mat. When Harper looked at him with the particular expression of a man who had questions but respected the architecture of silence, Dante just handed him a broom an

The south pier was the kind of place the city had stopped arguing about.Old dock infrastructure, decommissioned and half-stripped, sat at the industrial edge of the harbor where the water turned black and the lights from the port didn't quite reach. Nobody came here at midnight by accident.Dante arrived twelve minutes early.He took a position behind a steel equipment housing thirty feet from the water and watched the approach for the full twelve minutes. Wind off the harbor. The smell of brine and rust. A freighter moving slowly in the channel, its running lights low and steady.At two minutes before midnight, a figure came down the dock.Lean and loose-limbed, moving with the particular ease of someone who'd spent years being invisible in dark places.Dante stepped out.Rook stopped walking and spread his hands slightly. An old habit between them. See, no weapons. I come in peace. He'd done it as a joke the first hundred times. Now it was just how they said hello."You look terrib

The brick came through Harper's window at three in the morning.Dante was already awake.He heard the glass go and was on his feet before the sound finished, across the room and against the wall beside the window, in two seconds. He looked down at the street, already scanning for who had done it. A dark sedan, moving fast without plates visible. Gone around the corner before he could pull anything useful from it.He went downstairs.Harper was already in the gym, standing in the broken glass in his bare feet with a stillness that was worse than anger. The brick had taken out the lower pane of the front window. It sat in the middle of the mat with a piece of paper rubber-banded around it.Harper looked at the paper without picking it up.Dante did.SELL OR SUFFER.Three words in block letters written with marker on copy paper. The kind of note that didn't need to be sophisticated because the message wasn't in the words. It was in the glass on the floor, and the cold coming through the