CASSIAN

I moved through the house like a man running out of air. Every room was identical in its emptiness, a hollow shell that made my own boots sound too loud against the floorboards.

I went fast at first, then faster, my shoulders clipping the doorframes as I broke from the hallway into the kitchen, then into the back study.

The place had been torn apart. A heavy oak side table was flipped onto its back, its legs sticking straight up into the air like a dead animal.

Shelves had been cleared with a single, violent sweep, leaving shattered porcelain and broken wine glasses scattered across the rug.

My chest tightened until it felt like the ribs were about to snap, because I knew exactly what that camera had been used for, and I knew who had been holding it.

"Julian!" I shouted.

My voice bounced off the bare walls. The high ceilings took the name and threw it right back to me, completely unchanged, completely unanswered.

There was no echo of footsteps, no small intake of breath from the closets, nothing but the hum of the refrigerator in the corner.

Then I saw the floor near the pantry door.

Another dark, much thicker puddle of blood had pooled on the white tile. I dropped to my knees beside it, my trousers soaking through instantly, though I didn’t feel the coldness of the ceramic.

I reached out, my fingers hovering just a fraction of an inch above the dark red surface.

For a second, I wanted to pull away, to pretend it was wine or oil, to keep the lie alive for just five more seconds. Then I pressed my fingertips straight into it.

It was still wet. It stuck to my skin, warm and thick.

It hadn’t been here long. Five minutes, maybe ten at the most. Which meant they were still in the neighborhood. They were probably still on the same road, the tires of their heavy trucks kicked up with the same gravel I had just driven over.

I was already moving before the thought could finish. I scrambled to my feet, my boots slipping slightly in the wetness, and bolted back through the front door.

The latch clicked shut behind me, a sharp sound in the quiet morning, and I threw myself into the driver’s seat of the sedan.

I tore down the driveway, the stones screaming against the underside of the chassis, and pulled out onto the main asphalt.

With my left hand clamped hard onto the steering wheel, I used my right to fish the mobile phone out of my pocket. I hit the speed dial for Marceli.

It rang once. Twice. Three times.

Nothing.

I cut the line and dialed it again, my thumb smearing a faint streak of Julian’s blood across the glass screen.

The tone started up, that long, robotic buzz that sounded like an insect trapped inside a wall. It kept going until the operator’s automated voice came on, telling me the number could not be reached.

It wasn’t just a missed call. It was that flat, hollow silence that happens when a line has been completely disconnected at the source, or when a man has looked down at his desk, seen your name flashing on the display, and quietly turned the power off.

I tried the next number in my ledger, one of the captains from the north docks. Nothing. I tried the warehouse liaison. Nothing. One by one, every single contact I had built over five years in this family went completely gray.

The whole network, the people who had sworn on bread and iron to back me if the Vincents ever crossed the river, had gone quiet all at once.

It was a coordinated shutdown, a silent signal that had been sent out across the city while I was still driving home, and I had received it far too late to do anything about it.

I slammed the brakes, pulling the sedan over onto the dirt shoulder of the coast road. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

The sea was right below me, a massive, slate-gray weight shifting against the jagged black rocks.

The water didn’t care about the empty house or the wet tile. It just kept moving, rolling in and smashing itself against the cliffs, indifferent to everything happening on the dirt above it.

My hands were shaking against the leather wheel. The phone sat in my lap, its screen dark, reflecting nothing but the gray clouds overhead.

The realization settled over me, cold and absolute.

Marceli knew about this.

The old man hadn’t been surprised by the attack; his silence wasn’t a coincidence, and the dead phone lines weren’t a glitch in the system.

The truce he had negotiated after the docks, the long talk about patience, the promise of *lay low, Cassian, I’ll protect you until the heat dies down—none of it had been real.

It had just been a way to keep me in one place until the Vincents were ready to take the pieces they wanted. I had been a bartering chip the entire time, and Marceli had just handed the marker over to settle his own debts.

I sat with that thought in the quiet car for thirty seconds. I watched the foam rise and fall on the rocks below, counting my own breaths until my lungs stopped burning.

Then the phone in my lap began to buzz.

The screen lit up with a line of zeroes. An unknown number.

I slid the bar and put the receiver to my ear without saying a word. There was only one person in the state who would be calling me from a blocked line right now, and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of hearing me ask who it was.

"You really thought you could just walk away from it, didn’t you, Cassian?"

Emilio’s voice came through the small speaker, thick and slightly distorted.

I could still hear the damage in it, the way his jaw didn’t unhinge properly, the faint click of the metal wires holding his teeth together, the nasal wheeze from where I had smashed his nose into the marble counter four months ago.

But underneath all that ruined bone and cartilage, the same old arrogance was completely intact. He had been saving up this phone call, waiting through every hour of his recovery just to deliver this exact sentence.

"Where is he?" I asked. I didn’t shout. I didn’t let my breath hitch.