The room was not what any of them had expected.A pianist in a black tailcoat sat at a grand piano against the far wall, eyes half-closed, fingers moving across the keys with the unhurried ease of someone who had long since stopped thinking about the music. The melody drifted through the air, soft and incongruous, filling every corner of the room with something that almost felt civilized.At the center of the space sat a card table the size of a billiard table, its surface covered in stacks of transparent chips and several fanned decks of cards. On one side of the table sat a young man with a sullen, heavy expression, the kind of face that looked like it had been set into a permanent scowl. Across from him sat a small, elderly man with kind eyes and a white beard, smiling with the warmth of someone's grandfather. Between them stood the dealer, a woman in a fitted evening gown, poised and striking, her expression professionally blank as she waited.It looked, on the su

The next morning, with Mark's connections opening the right doors, Hank tracked down a black-market currency broker in the city and converted the remaining bonds into cash. By mid-morning, Soren had Cody and Hank with him on the street, moving toward a gun shop that didn't ask for licenses.The reasoning was straightforward. The plan required clean weapons, ones that had never been seen before and couldn't be traced back to any of them afterward. Every firearm Soren currently carried had already been seen by the wrong people. For what came next, they needed a fresh kit.Sunvale had no shortage of legitimate gun retailers. Private ownership was legal, and the shops were easy enough to find. Most of them required documentation, but a few operated on a more flexible understanding of the rules. No one, as a general principle, turned away a paying customer. Mark, whose years in the private security trade had introduced him to most of the relevant people in Bangkok, had pointed

Cody's early life had never been easy. The year he was born, his family had almost nothing — not enough money to keep the lights on, barely enough food to survive the week. His father, faced with a household he could no longer feed, made a decision that no parent should ever have to make.He sold his daughter.She was still a child when it happened. But luck, or something like it, gave her one small opening: the traffickers looked away for a moment, and she ran. She didn't come back home. There was nothing to come back to. She drifted from place to place, moving through circumstances Cody never fully learned the details of, until she eventually found her footing in Sunvale. She built a life there, quiet and self-contained, and she stayed.But misfortune has a long memory.After all those years, it had finally caught up with her."Stomach cancer," Cody said, his voice barely above a whisper. "Stage four."He pressed both hands into his hair and gri

Back in the car, Cody was the first to speak. "Those men in there," he said, his voice still carrying a residual edge. "They were serious operators.""No question," Soren agreed. "Military background, most likely. Hard to say whether they're active or retired."If they were retired, it was nothing to dwell on. But if they were still active duty — a team of foreign soldiers quietly sourcing weapons in Sunvale — then something significant was being set in motion somewhere, and it had nothing to do with them."Wait, those guys in the shop?" Evan asked, glancing between Soren and Cody with a look of mild confusion."Yes," Cody said. "The moment I walked in and saw them, it was like being in a room with three hungry wolves. I almost drew on them." He paused. "Good thing Soren said something when he did."Howard nodded from the driver's seat. "I noticed too. When I saw your hand go for the gun, I nearly had a heart attack."Evan looked around at t