[CHARLES]
The holding cell smelled like bleach trying very hard to cover up something it could never quite beat. Charles sat on the metal bench, his scarf still wrapped around his bruised elbow, replaying the sound of the explosion over and over in his head. The flash. The tremor under his feet. The way the officer's flashlight had trembled, just slightly, before he'd composed himself and remembered he had a lawyer to arrest.
A different officer now stood at the cell door, keys jingling like loose change.
"Chance." He said it like he was reading it off a grocery list. "You're free to go."
"That was fast." Charles stood, his back protesting the metal bench it had spent the last several hours acquainting itself with. "I thought I was getting the full tour. Mugshot, fingerprints, a phone call I don't get to make."
"No red carpet for you Mr. Chance. Desk sergeant pulled your file. Seems your bar card checked out, and the owner of the stand..." he glanced at a slip of paper in his hand, "...a Vinny Goma, confirmed by phone that you're his attorney of record and had his permission to access the premises."
"Did he now."
"Don't sound so surprised, counsellor, it's your good luck."
"I'm a lawyer. Good luck makes me suspicious." Charles followed him out of the cell, his shoes scuffing against the concrete. "Though I imagine the explosion a couple blocks over helped clear some space on your night, too."
The officer didn't answer that. He led Charles down a corridor lined with bulletin boards thick with wanted posters and outdated softball schedules, the precinct humming with a kind of charged, irritable energy that Charles recognized from every cop shop he'd ever set foot in after something had gone very wrong nearby.
At the front desk, a tired-looking woman slid a tray across the counter. "Sign here."
Charles signed. She returned his belongings one item at a time, reciting them like a grocery list of her own. "One wallet. One watch. One set of keys. One..." she paused, picking up a small evidence bag, "...broken pocket flashlight, which you apparently used to break a window."
He brushed against his bruised elbow. "Something like that, but in my defense, it was for a noble cause."
"Sure it was." She didn't smile, but something close to it tugged at the corner of her mouth before she caught herself. "You're lucky the owner vouched for you, Mr. Chance. Else you'd be filling out a different kind of paperwork tonight."
"Believe me, I'm aware." He pocketed his things, rubbing at his wrist where the cuffs then bent down to tuck in his lace that had come undone. As he did, his fingers brushed against something tucked inside his sock—a small, folded square of paper, soft at the edges from being handled too many times before he'd shoved it down there in the half-second between hearing footsteps behind him in the stand and the flashlight finding his face. He hadn't even fully registered doing it. Instinct, maybe. Or two years of watching Sam's particular brand of "creative evidence handling" finally rubbing off on him.
He said nothing. He simply nodded his thanks to the woman at the desk, and walked towards the exit with the calm, unhurried gait of a man who had absolutely nothing concealed about his person.
Outside, the night had the washed, scrubbed feeling that always followed rain, even though Charles couldn't recall when exactly it had stopped. Somewhere in the distance, sirens still wailed, fainter now, chasing whatever was left of the chaos at the train station. He took a breath, deep and grateful, the kind only available to men who had recently avoided spending the night in a cell.
He'd made it about ten feet from the precinct steps when a voice called out behind him.
"Mr. Chance!"
Charles turned, his hand instinctively tightening around the strap of his bag. A man stood beside a sleek black sedan parked just along the curb, one hand resting casually on the open rear door, the other tucked into the pocket of a coat that had clearly never been within a hundred miles of a department store.
"Do I know you?" Charles asked, taking a single step back towards the precinct, just in case.
"Not yet." The man smiled, easy and practiced, the kind of smile that had been worn into shape over a great many handshakes. "Name's Davidson Wren. I work with Pricewaters & Clarke."
"Pricewaters & Clarke don't usually send couriers to police stations at this hour."
"No," Wren agreed. "But then, you don't usually get arrested for breaking and entering at this hour either, and yet here we both are."
Charles allowed himself the smallest huff of something almost like a laugh, though his guard didn't lower. "How did you even know I was here?"
"We make it our business to know where promising people are. Especially the ones the entire city's currently talking about." Wren gestured loosely towards the car. "Can I offer you a ride? It's late, the cabs around here are unreliable on a good night, and after the evening you've apparently had..." his eyes flicked, briefly, to the faint outline of dried blood on Charles's scarf, "...I imagine you'd rather not be standing on a street corner in Riverside's general direction."
Charles hesitated. Every instinct honed over two years of defending people who very much deserved to be hesitant told him not to get into unmarked cars with men who already knew his name before introductions.
Wren must have read it on his face, because his smile softened, turned almost apologetic. "I promise you, Mr. Chance, this isn't an abduction. I'm not nearly interesting enough for that kind of drama. I just want to talk. Five minutes. You can have the driver let you out wherever you like the moment you decide you've had enough of me."
"And if I say no?"
"Then I wish you a pleasant walk home, and we try again Monday, properly, through your office, like civilized people." Wren shrugged. "But it's been my experience that men who've just spent the better part of an evening as a guest of the state usually appreciate a free ride more than they let on."
Charles studied him a moment longer—the suit, the car, the easy confidence of a man who had never once in his life had to wonder where his next paycheck was coming from—and found, despite himself, that the offer was not entirely unwelcome. His feet hurt. His elbow hurt more. And somewhere in his sock was a piece of paper that might be the only thing standing between Vinny Goma and a cell on death row, and right now, more than anything, he wanted to sit down somewhere quiet and think.
"Five minutes," Charles said, walking towards the car.
"Five minutes," Wren agreed, holding the door open for him.
As Charles ducked inside, he caught, just for a second, his own reflection in the car window—tired, bruised, decidedly unglamorous for a man two prestigious law firms apparently wanted a piece of—and allowed himself a single, private thought.
Let's see what you actually want, Mr. Wren.
The door shut behind him with a soft, expensive click.
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[MARCUS]
Riverside at night had a rhythm to it, if you knew how to listen. The bars closed in waves, the brothels never closed at all, and somewhere between the two, in the cracks the city tried hardest to pretend didn't exist, men like Tondo went to ground.
Marcus moved through it like smoke finding the gaps in a closed door.
He started at The Painted Hen, a card room two floors above a laundromat that hadn't done an honest wash in years. The dealer there owed him a favour from a job that had gone sideways the previous spring, the kind of favour that didn't require explanation, only collection.
"Tondo hasn't shown his face here in three days." The dealer didn't look up from shuffling, the cards a blur between his fingers. "Word is, after what happened at the warehouse, even his own boys are starting to wonder if he's bad luck."
"Anyone still backing him?"
"The Bianchis, last I heard. Or what's left of them backing anyone these days." He set the deck down, finally meeting Marcus's eyes. "You're not the only one looking for him, you know. Heard there's at least three other faces in town tonight, all asking the same question you are."
"Chen's people?"
"Some. Not all." The dealer's expression flattened into something careful. "Some of them, Marcus, I didn't recognize. And in this business, that's usually the part that should worry you."
Marcus left two bills on the table and didn't ask what he meant. He already had a guess, and guesses about Riverside rarely improved with more detail.
The night carried on like that. A brothel on Wexford where the madam knew everyone's secrets and sold them only to people she liked, who told him Tondo's usual girl hadn't seen him in a week and was starting to take new clients out of spite. A back-alley dice game where a man with a busted lip swore on his mother that Tondo had fled the city entirely, then immediately asked Marcus for money to keep that information to himself. An opium den below a defunct print shop, thick with sweet smoke and the low murmur of men who had stopped caring what city they were even in, where nobody said anything useful at all, but where Marcus noticed, tucked into a corner booth, two men in clean, unremarkable suits, watching the door with a stillness that didn't belong in a place built entirely on forgetting.
He didn't approach them. Some doors, you only knock on once you're sure you want what's behind them.
By the time he reached the fourth joint—a dim, half-empty pool hall that smelled of chalk dust and spilled beer—the pattern had started to needle at him. Too many people looking, not enough people finding. Tondo had gone quiet in a way that didn't track with a man simply running scared. Scared men made noise. Scared men made mistakes. This felt practiced. Disciplined, even, for a man who'd spent half the night Marcus first met him laughing too loud over a winning hand of poker.
A girl behind the counter, no older than nineteen, took one look at his face and the mask folded into his coat pocket and decided, wisely, not to ask any questions.
"You looking for someone?" she asked anyway, because curiosity, it seemed, outlived caution in the young.
"A man. Scar over his left brow. Loud, probably."
She considered this for a moment, wiping down a glass that didn't need wiping. "There was a guy like that in here two nights ago. Real twitchy. Kept checking the door every five minutes like he was waiting on someone who wasn't gonna show."
"He say anything?"
"Not to me. But he was on the payphone out back for a good twenty minutes. I only caught the end of it, on account of I was taking out the trash." She set the glass down, lowering her voice slightly, the universal signal of someone about to share something they probably shouldn't. "He said something about needing 'eyes on the desert route.' Then something about how he wasn't about to 'wait around for Chen to finish what the explosion started.'"
Marcus kept his expression carefully blank. "Anything else?"
"That's it. Then he left a tip bigger than the bill and never came back."
He thanked her with more cash than the information probably warranted and stepped back out into the night, the rain having long since dried into a memory on the pavement.
The desert route. Not the train, not anymore—not after what Marcus himself had left smouldering at the station. Which meant Tondo had a second way south, one he hadn't planned on needing until tonight, and one that would need to move fast, before the city's other interested parties caught the same scent Marcus just had.
He thought of Benicio's warning, the way the bartender's expression had shifted when he mentioned La Orolica. Tread lightly, my friend.
Marcus allowed himself the smallest smile, the kind with no humour in it whatsoever.
He had absolutely no intention of doing that.
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[LUKA]
Darkness, then movement. Then darkness again.
There was a hum beneath her, low and mechanical, vibrating up through whatever surface she was lying on. A floor. Metal, maybe. Cold enough to seep through her blazer and settle into her spine like an old ache.
She tried to open her eyes and found the world arrived in pieces—first as light, blurred and swimming, then as shapes that refused to hold still long enough to be named. A ceiling, low and unfamiliar. The murmur of voices somewhere close, speaking too quietly for her to catch the words, or perhaps simply too far away for her mind, fogged and slow, to translate them into anything that made sense.
Wyatt.
She turned her head, or thought she did, searching for him in the haze. Nothing. Only the hum, and the cold floor, and the distant ache behind her eyes that throbbed in time with her pulse.
The smell came back to her first—sweet, chemical, clinging to the inside of her throat. She tried to swallow against it and felt her stomach lurch in protest. Somewhere beyond the haze, she registered the sensation of being lifted, hands beneath her arms, dragging more than carrying, her feet trailing uselessly against a surface that scraped and shifted beneath her—gravel, maybe, or loose dirt.
"—not supposed to wake till we're inside—"
A voice. Male. Close. Then further away, swallowed by the hum, which had grown louder now, more insistent, less like an engine and more like wind. Outside air, brushing cold against her face before a door—heavy, metal, groaning on a hinge that hadn't seen oil in years—swallowed the sound whole.
She fought to hold onto something. Anything. A detail. A direction. The way her training had drilled into her a hundred times over—note the exits, note the time, note anything that might matter later—but her body wouldn't cooperate, her thoughts sliding away from her the moment she reached for them, like trying to hold water in a closed fist.
A flicker of something sharper cut through the fog—fear, distant and muted, the way pain feels through a thick layer of gauze. She was being taken somewhere. Somewhere with high ceilings, judging by the way her own breathing seemed to echo back at her in fragments. Somewhere that smelled of rust and old concrete, and beneath that, faintly, of motor oil.
She thought she heard a second set of footsteps drag past her, heavier, less willing.
Wyatt.
She tried to say his name and wasn't sure if it left her mouth at all, or if it simply dissolved, the way everything else had, into the dark closing in around the edges of her vision.
The last thing she registered, before the darkness took her fully under once more, was a door sliding shut behind her with a heavy, final sound, like something being sealed.
Then, nothing at all.
ns216.73.216.176da2
and then Add to home screen.