2025-11-29 01:28:55
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Chapter 8: The Dumpling House
Chapter 8: The Dumpling House"Yuki Tanaka," Jerome said, shifting against the warehouse wall. "She runs a gambling operation out of a restaurant in Chinatown. Dumpling house on Grant Avenue.""A gambler is going to help us take down a conspiracy that involves federal agents?""She's not just a gambler. She's an information broker. Criminals, businessmen, politicians—they all pass through her place, and she remembers everything she hears." He paused. "More importantly, she has her own reasons to hate Victoria Harrington."I sat down across from him. "You met her?""Once. During my investigation. She wouldn't help me.""Why not?""Said I had nothing to offer. No leverage, no angle she could use." Jerome looked at me with knowing eyes. "But you might be different.""What makes you think that?""Because you have the USB drive. And because you're clearly not telling me everything." He gestured at my face. "The nosebleeds. The way you stare at nothing sometimes. Something's going on with y
Chapter 7: Ledger Eyes
Chapter 7: Ledger EyesThree days passed in the warehouse, and somewhere along the way I stopped being Marcus West the chef and started being something else entirely.Jerome recovered slowly, sleeping most of the first two days and only managing to stay awake for a few hours at a time by the third. The antibiotics were working—his wound wasn't infected, his fever had broken, and the color was coming back to his face. He wasn't dying anymore, which was about as much as I could ask for given the circumstances.I ventured out for food and supplies, always careful, always watching for surveillance. The stolen SUV was the first thing to go—I drove it to the Mission District and left it in a parking garage with the keys in the ignition, hoping someone would steal it and muddy the trail. After that, I walked everywhere.It was easier than I expected to disappear.San Francisco has invisible populations—the homeless, the day laborers, the addicts and mentally ill who wander the streets withou
Chapter 6: First Debt
Chapter 6: First DebtThe veterinary supply run went exactly as the system predicted, which should have been comforting but honestly just made the whole thing more unsettling.I walked into the store at five-fifteen in the morning, looking like absolute hell—bloodstained shirt, dark circles under my eyes, hands that wouldn't stop shaking. The night clerk was a tired college student with headphones around her neck and a textbook open on the counter, and she barely glanced up when I came through the door. I invented a story about my dog being hit by a car, something about how the vet was closed and I needed to stabilize him until morning, and she just nodded and pointed me toward the medical supplies aisle without asking a single follow-up question.She didn't care. She was probably getting paid minimum wage to sit in an empty store until her shift ended, and some guy's fake dog emergency was not her problem.I grabbed antibiotics, surgical staples, painkillers, gauze, sterilization sup
Chapter 5: The Warehouse
Chapter 5: The WarehouseI nearly crashed three times before my vision cleared enough to see the road again.The first time, I drifted into oncoming traffic and only swerved back when headlights filled my windshield. The second time, I ran a stop sign and missed a parked delivery truck by inches. The third time, I mounted the curb and took out someone's garbage cans, the sound of plastic and metal scraping against the SUV's undercarriage loud enough to wake the whole neighborhood.But somehow, impossibly, I kept driving.The translucent interface didn't disappear. It faded, pulling back to the edges of my perception like an afterimage that refused to die, but it was still there. Waiting. I could feel it hovering at the corners of my vision, patient and impossible and completely insane.I drove to the Bayview warehouse on pure instinct. My hands knew the route even when my brain couldn't focus on the street signs, muscle memory guiding me through roads I had navigated a thousand times
Chapter 4: Muscle Memory
Chapter 4: Muscle MemoryTwo men came through the doorway fast and professional, the kind of entrance that told me everything I needed to know. These weren't cops. Cops announce themselves, follow procedures, hesitate for half a second before committing to a room. These men moved like they had done this a hundred times before and expected it to go exactly the way it always did.They were wrong.The first one through the door caught the lamp directly to his temple. I swung it before I even realized I was moving, sixteen years of working in kitchens translating into something I had never expected. When you spend that long handling knives and hot pans, moving fast in tight spaces, your body learns to react before your brain catches up. I had burned myself exactly once in my career. After that, my hands always knew where the danger was.The man dropped like someone had cut his strings, and I was already turning toward the second one.He was reaching for something at his belt, probably a g
Chapter 3: They Killed Her For It
Chapter 3: They Killed Her For ItI never got an answer to that question. Not from the silence, anyway.But I spent the rest of the night looking for one. By the time gray light started creeping through the cracked window, I had read every single file on that USB drive. My eyes burned and my back ached from hunching over the laptop screen, but I couldn't stop. Every file I opened led to three more questions. Every answer revealed another layer of lies beneath the lies I had already uncovered.My mind was working the way it used to work in the kitchen during a rush. Organizing ingredients. Understanding how elements combined. Seeing the connections between things that seemed unrelated on the surface. Except instead of building a dish, I was mapping out the recipe of my own destruction.David Lowell had introduced me to Victoria Harrington at a fundraiser three months before I signed the lease on Vesper's building. Victoria had recommended the lawyer who drew up my business loan. That l
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