The Eleventh day

CHAPTER 3

For three days, he stayed clear of the Reyes Holdings building.

That choice was on purpose, born out of a cold, tight patience that kept his gut instincts on a short leash. That building sat at the center of Nathaniel’s whole world, wired with cameras that covered every inch of the polished lobby, a front desk that logged every visitor on a screen, and a private security crew that Nathaniel would’ve briefed the moment Dalton’s deployment ended without word of a body coming home. Walking through that glass entrance would be like lighting a flare in a dark sky; it would announce him to everyone. Dalton wasn’t ready to be seen just yet.

So instead, he walked the edges. He moved through the streets nearby in the early morning fog, switching up his path and wearing different plain coats each time, blending into the crowd of commuters like just another shadow among many. He traced the staff entrances tucked in the back alleys, noted when delivery trucks came and went, and kept track of the steady rhythm of who showed up and when.

Every time his eyes landed on the dark blue shine of the upper windows, a sharp, metallic taste rose up his throat. It took real effort to keep his jaw loose and his hands relaxed in his pockets. He picked out two people at the building who’d worked there back when Walter Reyes still ran things… an older assistant who arrived every day at exactly 7:43 in the morning through the east staff door, shoulders drawn in against the damp air, and a gray-haired maintenance man who ate lunch on a bench in the small concrete park across the street every single day, rain or shine.

He held off approaching either one. He made himself stay back, stay detached. He watched from a distance, feeling the hollow ache of a ghost looking in on a world that had kept moving without him. He let the building settle into something ordinary in his head before he let it turn into a target he had to take apart.

On the fourth day, the sky above the safehouse turned the color of wet slate, thick with rain that wouldn’t fall. Petra came back carrying the first real piece of the legal setup.

She dropped her damp coat over the back of the lone chair and laid a thin yellow folder on the small table. Her face was tight, her dark eyes carrying that quiet intensity that always showed up when she’d struck something true.

“The doctor who signed off on the unfit ruling was a Dr. Renata Voss,” Petra said, her voice dropping into a slow, even rhythm. “She runs a small mental health practice on the north side of town. Her clinic’s been open eleven years.”

Dalton leaned forward, elbows on his knees, eyes fixed on the folder. “And her name? Clean?”

“Clean on paper. Spotless, even,” Petra said, leaning back against the window frame. “The kind of record that looks perfectly normal until you stop checking cases one by one and start looking for a shape across all of them.” She flipped the folder open and pointed to a short list of court case numbers. “Two other rulings like yours. Different people, different years. But both tied to business fights that touched Reyes Holdings somewhere along the line. And both filed inside the exact same eighteen-month stretch as yours.”

Dalton scanned the names printed on the court papers. A strange, cold chill ran down his back. He didn’t know either name. “What happened to them?”

“One took a settlement, walked away from his shares, and disappeared into some quiet suburb,” Petra said, her voice flat. “The other left the state completely, six months after his ruling went through. No appeals, no follow-up. Both rulings still stand on record today.”

Dalton pulled his notebook close, flipped it open, and wrote Renata’s name beneath Nathaniel’s in tight, heavy strokes. He pressed the pen down hard enough that the ink bled slightly into the page. Something grim settled in his chest… disgust, mixed with a dark kind of satisfaction at finally having a thread worth pulling.

“She’s not someone who slipped up once,” Dalton said quietly. “She’s running a service.”

“Which means either Nathaniel’s holding something over her, or she’s getting something big out of working with him,” Petra said, watching him closely. “Maybe both.”

“It’s always both,” Dalton said. He looked up from the page, his expression hard now. “In a city built on favors and quiet deals, nobody gambles their license on a single threat alone. She got paid first, and then he locked her in with leverage so she could never back out later. Find out which one came first.”

Petra gave one firm nod, her jaw set tight. “Already pulling her billing history and her property records. If she took money, it landed somewhere on paper.”

She gathered up her coat, shot him a quick, unreadable look, and stepped out of the room. The deadbolt clicked shut behind her, leaving Dalton alone with the low hum of the old radiator.

He set the notebook down on the bed and walked to the window, staring out at the late afternoon skyline of Ridgefield City. Rain had finally started to streak the glass, smearing the dark towers four blocks north into soft grey shapes.

Somewhere on the twelfth floor of that tower, sitting behind their father’s old mahogany desk, Nathaniel was spending their father’s money, putting their father’s company name on fresh city deals, and living inside a life he’d taken with a handful of forged papers.

Dalton thought about those eleven days. He pictured his brother sitting in an office chair, pen in hand, watching the clock until a military plane cleared the runway before tearing a life apart. The cold anger in his chest didn’t flare up hot; it turned hard, sharp, and permanent, like something set in stone.

He walked back to the bed, picked his notebook back up, and turned to a clean, empty page.